what a fucking Shock

Video game branding and in fact the fundamentals of branding have shifted further away from the ideals of my childhood, or at least the claimed but truly not attended to ideals of my childhood.

I want to say that marketing people were more creative in those by gone lost halcyon days but a deeper resentful thought occurs to me that whenever people refer to eras we can barely recall they are entirely full of shit. One I'm fond of is "Gamers these days are dumber" and "has to be dumbed down for the console crowd!"

I'm old as gamers go but I really don't think there was an era where game and intelligence were some sort of ubiquitous marriage. People like to say this but in which era exactly? The mainstream when I was very young was ... Mario. I didn't really enjoy Mario so much as a kid, preferring Sonic through into my teens (and then getting out of console gaming when Sonic should have too) but either or you really can't make an argument for Mario being an especially harder to play game than say, Call of Duty. Have you ever played a fucking FPS on a console? It's quite a bit more difficult than Mario's beep boop run jump gameplay, at least from a mechanical perspective. You could sort of argue that RTS games require 'more' out of the player than either, but RTS games never "Dumbed down" or "dumbed up" anyone. They're just there and they're pretty much the same. There is perhaps some progression of titles that "would have been" for the PC slipping onto the Xbox or what have you, but I'm A) not entirely sure those titles would have existed at all without consoles B) actually any stupider. More RPGs which aren't dumbed down are actually just really irritating and filled with tedium, which in case you haven't solved all the fucking mysteries sherlock, are not actually on any level an interaction with your potential or lack thereof intellect.

So I think that's a load of shit and I think waxing nostalgia about a past era were marketing departments didn't fuck rape the sequel engine is probably intellectually dishonest as well. Still it's hard to really look at Bioshock Infinite and not seriously wonder at least a little bit about the stillborn progression as it goes. I was re-watching some Yahtzee videos (Zero Punctuation) to see how he felt about stuff I'd recently played and watched Bioshock 2's review. I agreed pretty much totally in regards to this one, the game largely did not need to exist and wasn't very good. It was good enough to finish, but not really better than say reinstalling the first game and just replaying it again.

This is a snapshot of Bioshock Infinite's wikipedia page at the time of this review, whenever the fuck that is. The problem here, if one is not certain, is that the game isn't on speaking terms with actually being FUCKING OUT, OR PLAYABLE. There is more detail here than most games I've played or will ever play, in spite of the fact none of these people have to my knowledge played it. Maybe they have, at which point ... Should wikipedia seriously be hosting what is essentially an internally review product shot? (Maybe there's something here to be discussed regarding the natural progression of media outlets arriving and eroding until they become 'mainstream journalism' but cyclical shit is JUST THAT)

But still I digress - the part of this game that I truly well and hate is that it's named "Bioshock" in the first place. Bioshock itself is billed as the spiritual sequel to "System shock" a series I've never played but have been told I'm a bad person for not playing. Tough but fair. The name Bioshock comes from the impact of genetic engineering techniques either on your person, or on a society, at least on a general level. The SHOCK of BIOtechnology. Har, dee har, har... har... I mean maybe it's actually named for two programmers eating too much Domino's pizza and brewing up some truly shocking biology. Maybe. The SHOCK of colon BIOlogy?

What exactly is Bioshock about this one? It appears to grope the same "We're nouveau artists of the sublime video realms" tree as Bioshock -or at least the same low hanging branches- in that this giant paragraph here seems to talk about nazism, but beyond that I'm at a loss. Does it have the same characters? No. Same mechanics? Other than guns in general it sounds like no. Some connection to the story? Coy answers from the marketing department who haven't determined the first fucking thing about their game. Fire all marketing departments.

So they could have called it "something"Shock and most likely it would have fit fine. I would say 'Skyshock' is the easiest from what the game seems to be about, which sounds like Bioshock and I think 99% of the population would get it. I'm not really suggesting that name, since that name is sort of mopey.

But they literally think we're so unbelievably stupid we can't assemble the publisher, the developer, the lead programmer, the genre, the word shock and successfully deduce that this is the successor to Bioshock. It's a real fucking mystery is what it is, and there just can't ever be enough clues! Just never enough FUCKING CLUES! Need INFINITE CLUES! So instead they re-use the same name and then tack on Infinite, as if to reinforce we're infinitely stupid and can't solve the mystery of the missing Bio.

Infinite fuck yous, Bioshock. Not buying you til you're $5 anyway cuz I still haven't beaten ALL THESE GAMES.

Oh and on a side note if you're one of those arrogant and self-congratulating plebs who like to talk about how 'people these days are so gosh darn stupid look at blah blah' you should really ground yourself in a deeper understanding of the material at least insofar as human history. Not only do basic statistics technically argue otherwise, but the most basic points just don't make any sense.

I mean the most ironically parroted one is the bit about how only idiots breed with idiots nowadays, which sounds like good logic if you're a nazi and you think eugenics is proven to work but ... It just doesn't add up. Have you looked at your ancestors? I mean really looked at our pool of ancestors? There's several generations who engaged in gun warfare where they lined up shoulder to shoulder and shot at each other. Before that they were peasants in the dark ages, or busy fucking goats in rome. It's a wonder we don't have goat genome in our blood stream somehow. Or thought the sky was made of Magic. When were our ancestors brighter? Maybe there's a couple glorious civilizations, like say ancient China, but those people turned around and starved to death because they decided to just stop farming.

And sure, you can point to popular culture. Go for it. Thirty years ago was the eighties mother fuckers. Reality TV ain't got shit on this! Bright neon rollerblades and rapping Turtles!

Get your hands on your wand

I didn't like Magicka. I tell you that because if you did like it, don't go int othis trying to defend it. You're not going to argue out of this one: I didn't like it, and I'm not going to like it.

I bought it for three dollars. I might have bought some DLC with it. The game is relentless in terms of DLC, I think they released like 17 different piles of shit to throw onto the turd furnace and it just boils with fecal rage. I don't generally like DLC, because it usually just makes me wait even longer to buy games I'm not even going to play.

So maybe I should like DLC for doing me the favour? Thanks DLC!

Anyway - Magicka. The single player campaign is all I have strong memories of. I tried playing multiplayer and it was just a clusterfuck. I know, you're going to say "That's part of its charm" and I'm going to respond I don't care. Diablo 2 multiplayer was a clustfuck with explosions and blizzards, barbarians yelling and other wacky shit. That game was released like a hundred years ago and it looked better, played better and was on every level better than this shit piece of a game. Though it actually comes with its own set of excuses, it doesn't have the issue of "I'm not even sure which character is mine and I no longer even care". That is a problem I actually had with this game in multiplayer - the controls are so sluggish and horrible that I wasn't sure which dope in a robe I was actually playing for a minute or two. I played MP for a couple minutes. I eventually got bored and just went AFK; the game continued without my input, or maybe it didn't, but I didn't really care. I think they might have been mad at me for leaving, but then I was mad for being told to buy and/or play this fucking awful game.

The title screen looks like garbage and the opening screens all look like garbage. I would say the game looks like garbage, but I actually dig the art style of everything that isn't a focus for the player. Which is to say; I liked the backgrounds! It's slow and clunky to get to whatever it is you want to do, which is always a good sign.

so then you get to single player, which appears to be ... I don't know, it looks like it's trying to be cute and funny, but it's a complete failure in that regard. I just found the accents and dialogue to be a rather weak, dull attempt at lightening the mood to help make up for just not having any idea how to make an interesting anything. It feels like a clown at a funeral. I was doing the single player for an achievement, which was irritating and forced me to play for an hour when I'd already realized from my earlier multiplayer that the game was stupid and not worth my time.

Maybe my patience is not at its strongest when I feel like I'm being forced to play the game. I mean yeah you don't have to do the coal thing and who cares, but I already owned it so I felt like I should go through with it, get it done.

The main character looks stupid as fuck, but again, the game is trying to be cute and funny so ... Yeah? I guess? Is that really much of an excuse or something? Crap looks like shit because it's supposed to be so LIKE IT?

The tutorial is terribly boring, but it does manage to explain the basics of the system. After being buggy and not working for a bit mind you. Not really sure how you code a tutorial that instructs you to do something and then you can't do it? After getting that to work it explains the element thing.

This is where the game breaks down. The game is essentially, as best I can tell in my two hours of hating my life edit playing it, structured around mixing elements in two fashions. Actually mixing them on your bar and then mixing then on enemies. So you make enemies 'wet' then you 'freeze' them, and then you smash them. You can mix the elements to make like, water and freeze bombs, and then maybe some other shit I never bothered to figure out because...

The game is a clunky mess. Combos take several clicks to activate, then to charge up, all while dodging around various enemies. The controls are sluggish and you get debuffed often, then enemies jump on you, then I'm just really tired of playing this shitty game. You're not really punished, most of the time, but it adds this constant layer of tedium and annoyance to doing even the simplest thing.

The combo system is an amazing idea on paper as well as in execution and in the embrace of a better game would be stellar. I mean it is stellar and really cool, but in this game I feel like I'm repeatedly entering my pin code at the grocery store while the cashier talks to me. I don't know how else to express the feeling of awkward mixed with annoying. I'm buying cottage cheese and spinach and the cashier is looking at me funny. Oh, she forgot to ring up my jalapenos.

That is the feeling I get playing this game. This creeping dull ache that lodges itself right between my eyes, that's the feeling I get.

I felt the entire time like I was wrestling with a snake covered in shit, but with more button pressing. The other big problem is the game just has no space to do anything, the arenas feel very pinched in and tiny.

So I got my achievement and literally alt-f4'd that very second. This is after reloading into an earlier checkpoint when I got to a push that, as best I can tell, was actually created to punish me for not being careful when it came to getting the achievement earlier. The dull ache in my head completely prohibited figuring out the regenerating can't hit snake boss, so fuck you. Then I uninstalled it.

This is actually in a category of games I firmly wish I could delete from my steam account forever and not have to see ever again. The best description I can give of this game is playing a poorly written sitcom with wizards doing chores while you enter pin codes over and over again.

It's just really dreary. Maybe I'd enjoy it drunk, but you know what else I'd enjoy while drunk? Walking home in the cold. So that's not much of a compliment.

Sometimes the song and dance actually is enough

It's kinda strange going into games you know are overrated. You can tell enough from a trailer to tell, well, that one isn't quite the stellar knockout your peers are wailing about it being.

Bastion, well, yeah you can tell from the trailer instantly that's it something all right.

First things first, the narrator, nope nope not gonna talk about that. Gonna talk about art. What's the word mean? Not quite sure. I've been told that engineering is all boxes and aesthetics is all curves, and art is where you blend the two to makes something functionally aesthetic. The meaning of that one might not be immediate, but truth be told Bastion is gorgeous. It looks somewhere between the charming SNES era pixel delights of the bygone age before 3D crapped everything up and a watercolour painting. Maybe it's a pixel portrait rendered perfectly through a watercolour filter, I don't know. By the way sometimes you blend in bullshit and hype into art, and you get pop culture, but Bastion has no truck with that and the game's art does right by me.

The game is real pretty, right down to its bones. Even beyond the visuals the sound meshing together nicely really ratchets things up a step. The game is dreamlike and blissful, which is at times almost off putting given what the game appears to be about. I think the game implies its a nuclear apocalypse, but maybe it's just some other form of apocalypse.

It's also offputting because it's a failure as a game.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, well the game, as a game, sucks. Hard. I found myself bored and listless more times than I could count, with the "level falling into place" gimmick overstaying its welcome about 30 mintues into the game. Don't care guys, just put the level in front of me. Oh cool I fell off because I was bored and just rolling forward while your art drops into place. Sweet game design. You run everywhere, slowly, unless you're fighting and then that feels slow too. Combat is course and unintuitive, boring and unrewarding. The enemies have a measure of personality, but fights are mostly dull button mashings that there's probably a better way to do...

Except I don't care, and the game doesn't seem to either. There's likely a well spring of better means to an end, but maybe there isn't and the game didn't push me to try to discover it. Maybe the 'training arena' thing is supposed to teach me that but by the third one I was terribly bored of them on a conceptual level. I'm not saying the game is hard, I'm saying it sucks. The counter system sucks, the block system sucks, the ranged system sucks, the aim system sucks (like really sucks), the weapons all suck and so on so forth. All sucks. It's a perfect suck. For most of the game I found myself wishing I could just do something else, then past the first half you actually get a gun worth using and then things are ... Better, though still not great.

This is where we talk about gunplay, right, ok cool. One of the things FPS games have so rightly to themselves is when you push THAT BUTTON bullets come out and they're innately satisfying. Maybe decades of movie culture being driven into our brains, but you hit that and you feel good for unloading a clip into a splicer, demon, mutant or other player. Bastion has nothing like that in the first two hours, the weapons feel clunky and above all else shitty. You'd think a hammer would do it, it doesn't. It has the satisfying feel of a limp noodle striking the pasta bowl. Shit still hits you most of the time anyway. You'd think the grenades would, except in a tense situation they seem to stop working and just cartwheel off the fucking planet. You eventually get the carbine, which feels pretty decent. The mortar is great, and should have been in the game earlier.

One of the turrets has slow moving homing bullets, which you can dance around if you're carrying the repeater. Fine! So I need this one gun! Cool. Thanks. Oh if you're not, you try to shoot them and then maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but I'm bored.

So I think to myself, am I supposed to block? Maybe. Sometimes that doesn't work. Maybe not. Sometimes you counter block, which takes timing, then the homing shot loops back around and kills you.

Are you fucking kidding me? You actually have the dull ache in your groin necessary to pop up COUNTER! when I just tripped up and killed myself off using the shield? Man this game, thiiiis game.



Yeah great. The game just forced a weapon on me and then that weapon is terrible in the following fight. This has happened a couple times and it's incredibly unwelcome as game design goes. I actually died here, which happened not especially often, then just stopped playing for a bit because it was so unfun. If you can't make out the screen shot here for the fucking bloom effect (note: this shit sucks too) I'm trapped in a plant cage and the weapon I'm using either doesn't work on it, or does but I can't tell for all the shit smudged on the screen. Why would you ever do this? Look at this screenshot, does this work for you?

Anyway so it's a righteous romp through a beautiful drawn and gorgeously rendered daydream with sweet as fuck sound engineering, with some sort of good weapon system and sweet village building minigame. There's so many things right with this game, so much correct and awesome, that the fact THE GAME itself is THE SUCK is just so much more jarring. If it was just a stewed pile of shit through and through, you wouldn't even blink at the woeful flaws. In fact you probably wouldn't reach those flaws because you'd put it down. It's a game that draws you in and keeps you going, but for every delicious spoonful of great story telling, beautiful art and gorgeous audio work you get a couple flakes of broken glass. Om nom nom nom ow fuck my mouf.

I'd probably buy it again, and if they made another game I'd probably buy that too, because it's actually sort of satisfying to play a game that truly is pretty enough and artistic enough to just keep you going. The gameplay really isn't that far off being decent and if I was asked to tell the developers how to improve it - I'd say ratchet down the tedium, give the weapons more oomph and remove any/all shit like this

Where's the fucking pig? Seriously, this section lasts about 5 minutes but it's intolerable. There's a bunch of shit like this, where visibility is poor, you can't tell what's going on, enemies off the screen are shooting at you, so on and so forth. I can sort of understand if it's supposed to add to the drama, but it's just miserable. It doesn't really add to the challenge anyway, so it's just miserable for the sake of being miserable. The latter half of the game mostly does away with it and the latter half of the game is mostly really good, so maybe they should have just focused on making the latter half more of the game.

Next up - Get your wands ready, it's time to talk about a game I actually didn't like (really)

Laser guided mutant ass simulator

Full disclosure: The last shooter I actually played through is Crysis 2, which I really like. In fact, pardoning my enjoyment of Doom I think Crysis is pretty much what I like in terms of single player shooting. I bought Hard Reset over the sale as well, but that game didn't seem as good so I went with Bulletstorm first. This, by the way, is how back logs grow into mighty forests of games.

Bulletstorm when compared to Crysis has a worse engine, shorter single player and a worse story. It's also got straight up worse gunplay, with a weird melee element that sort of trips you up when enemies magically get into melee and start pushing you around. I say magically because it's either an issue with how they spawn in or I'm not sure, but often I'd suddenly be getting kicked in the side by a mutant you'd think you'd notice running screaming at you.

That's pretty unfair though. Bulletstorm isn't necessarily an attempt at producing a serious shooter, rather a more slapstick goofy gunplay engine wrapped around a basic and simple story that works. You play a guy out for revenge on some jerk off, and you crash land a resort planet that didn't run its logistics so well and was overrun with mutants. It's heavily implied that the one faction of mutants you fight are the remaining tourists.

The game's resource system is uniquely structured around how you fuck enemies up. If you kill enemies with generic bulleting into the gut, you actually run out of ammo. On the other hand if you do fun trickshots, of which I think I explored maybe half the hundreds of them, you get bonus points. This helps encourage weapon variety, since different munitions have different costs and plus it's cool to laser guide an explosive sniper round into a mutant's ass, explode it and kill his friends for bonus points. They probably could have built more of the game around this as its fundamentally enjoyable and doesn't need a great deal of exposition to cover for.

The game's weapons are, however, woefully shitty and a major problem even on normal is that the guns basically don't feel like they do anything. I think I killed about 75% of all enemies with the sniper rifle, with some other limited amount going to the shotgun. The shotgun is terrible, with an effective range of about two feet and almost no damage dealing capacity. In this sense the "Trickshots" become something you absolutely have to do all the time, which takes the wind out of them. Half the time you're better of just booting enemies repeatedly into things, which seems a little ridiculous and gets tedious. There's also a sort of plasma leash weapon that you can pull enemies in and boot them out with, except it doesn't reliably work on half the enemies in the game so I just stopped bothering with it.

Enemy variety isn't great and enemy design isn't especially satisfying. There's a breed of Skull that can soak up regular gunfire without flinching, which is just moronic. I can't wrap my head around this design decision at all. I died to this several times simply because I can't tell them apart from the other enemies, or more likely because I was getting bored of spamming headshots off the sniper rifle. The bosses are, again, something you repeatedly shoot with the sniper rifle. If other weapons work well for them, I don't know, since you're only allowed 3 weapon slots and you need the sniper rifle to kill most everything and then something to switch to in melee when you get swarmed. Which is the shotgun, even though it sucks.

In normal games this isn't quite an issue, but in this you find yourself irritated without guns to do those jobs. You can boot enemies in melee, of course, but it isn't effective on multiple targets and is pretty wimpy unless you have something to kill them into.

On the plus side all the guns have an alternate fire mode that opens up some additional sweet options. The sniper rifle can switch to explosive rounds while the shot gun has some sort of powered up flame blast. Both of these options make them better at their existing jobs, though, so it's not really as exciting as it should be.

What does surprise me is just how good the 'vehicle sections' if you will, are. There's a couple arenas where the game switches it up a bit and I'm surprised at how much better they are than say, every vehicle segment in every fps ever. They're easy and simple, but the point of mixing up a game's variety isn't to brutally challenge the player, rather to break up the set pieces so you don't start to find the tedium.

So all of that is a little mediocre and probably why the game didn't go so well. On the other hand, the game is wonderfully immature in just the right way. The protagonist knows he's mostly fucked and voices his opinion in such a manner, a constant stream of goofy dick jokes and other high school levelbits. It's a sort of modern gallows humor that works exceedingly well within the game's setting. The planet you're on has been fucked sideways by human error and the story explaining what happened is actually much better than expected. There's some good development there and I actually found myself interested in the explanation of how everything got to go mad max style.

My favorite part is probably the female protagonist, simply because in a sea of immaturity, dick jokes and 'your robot side likes how I look in these pants' she isn't written as some goofball bimbo or shrieking nancy. The fact she didn't end up as sex object beyond being attractively drawn (but then so is the male lead) was really satisfying and helped keep the immaturity in the right quarter, but moreover the fact she's an important element to the progression of the story and the main character's "sort of" redemption works really well. Mostly because it is absolutely and completely unexpected.

She introduces herself by punching you in the face. Fresh!

For $5 I'm pretty satisfied with Bulletstorm. I don't know how the multiplayer is, since I'll never bother with it, but the campaign was fine for the five dollars. You can tell they put a ton of good honest effort in trying to keep the arenas fresh and interesting, with the bizarre ass resort world and its myriad of death traps properly varied.

I am going to have trouble watching Transformers Prime after hearing Blum make all those dick jokes, but oh well, Starscream is pretty goofy like that anyway.

the purpose of this blog

The point of this blog is to talk about steam games I've bought and played through, in both terms of reviewing and just sort of getting through my damn back log

I tell myself if I'm more organized about playing through them I won't suffocate under the titanic mass of backlog by the end of 2012. This seems to be a running problem with steam and SA goons, with many losses on both sides.

Truly terrible.