Still RPG month: Risen

One of the ever increasing joys of the new age of computing is getting games from somewhere other than Japan. I'm not complaining about glorious Nippon, which has given so much, but it's nice to get another culture. I'm from Canada, so for me American games are pretty base, but Europe man, Europe is a bold new world.

The first moment where I really realized I was playing a European game was playing through King's Bounty: The Legend, a game I played through more than a couple times, where the main character married a 'Frog Princess' and she talked about having tadpoles. Whoa! Europe! What's going on? The Witcher is pretty weird like that too, Dwarves making jokes about tying Carrots to their dicks. You don't do that over here, all games are glum excursions through ultra violence. American games is brown town splattered with blood. You are only allowed to make jokes at the specific joking moment.

I picked up Risen entirely because of Risen 2, that being, Risen 2 sounded sweet. Pirate RPG! Well damn son, I like pirates. Let's try the previous game, made in 2009 (which isn't too far back!) to see how it is while we wait for the second game to go on sale. This is an excellent plan, one that can't possibly fail. Besides I paid $5 for it, which is the 3rd best class of price.

First class is the EA Origins coupon error, which allows you to buy any games under $20 for free. So Dragon Age: Whatever and Shank 2 were free. (Actually I guess Dragon Age wasn't quite free, since it's 21 gb, so there's an opportunity cost to getting that one installed) 2nd best is the Witcher price of 2.50, which is less than the price of just about anything worth buying. I'm digressing rather than talking about Risen. Risen isn't bad, but it's kinda hard to talk about.

Risen feels a ton like the opening of the first Witcher game, though much less in terms of both grounding you into the game mechanics and flavor. On the other hand, while it looks similar, it looks a fair bit better. The engine itself isn't that impressive, but it has some nice touches like dust motes, pollen and waves crashing that pleases the mind. The UI on the other hand is downright primitive, rustic like you'd playing a SNES game that somehow got ported to 3d. I'm not kidding here, it looks like Magic Sword or something.

But I mean, SNES games are sweet, right...

Actual RPG month: Witcher 2

There are only a handful of gaming thoughts I have that come to mind from 2012. Stuff like "I wish homm games didn't suck now" and "I wish I could still enjoy Final Fantasy games" come to mind every year. But 2012 is a year of many new games for me, but not many memorable games.

First one is probably damn, seriously, every shooterish game I play I miss the vivisecting, the UI and the crumbs button from Dead Space. Most games would legitimately be improved by a more integrated UI that feels more natural, and blowing legs off things is always cool. I think that sort of gunplay was in RAGE and Fallout, but never as well done. The crumbs button itself remains something I miss every time though, in every game. I'm not saying I need a button to tell me exactly where to go all the time, but if you're going to say 'go to such an such a place' a route or maybe just something that spins me in the right direction would be so very nicely....

Second one is, god DLC is annoying. Why isn't DLC just always something naturally added to the game? I want to get ME3 this year, and I don't want to pirate it, but I seriously shouldn't have to go through a fucking circus to get the DLC running. I looked at ME2's DLC and it was like, blah blah, bioware bux forum this EA login that and I was like fucking whatever.

Third one, I really wanted to play Witcher 2. And here we are.

Witcher 2 is neat for many reasons. I liked the Witcher for, in order of things I like: the atmosphere, the setting, the truly grey morality, the potion system, the characters I liked, the fact the main character actually had sex, the combat and the characters I didn't like. There is, for future reference, a difference between genuine human sexuality and that weird hundred year old librarian virgin thing in Mass Effect. The Witcher was yeah, a little sexist kinda, but at least it was an honest and earnest portrayal of a manwhore. It is a portrayal of euro-centric style middle ages, which is like the apex predator king of all sexists, the sexism that walks like a monster truck. All of these I expected moving forward, but the Witcher 2 also brings up its game with a gorgeous engine.

It is just so awesome that a company that doesn't have a bajillion dollars can be completely successful beyond the "indie" scope and produce a game that looks triple A. And it got ported to consoles, or at least, the Xbox360. So I fired the game up after finishing Fallout 3, watching the gorgeous intro and started the tutorial.

Took me about ten minutes to hit a bug in the tutorial. God. Fucking. Damn it. PC gaming!