Eight weeks of playing roles: Shadowrun Returns

 

Roleplaying winter couple of months continues with some sort of successful kickstarter game. Hurray. It's cold out! Let's play the role of someone who can open their not frozen shut windows. Because I can't open my window. It is covered in ice. Is this ok?

I don't have any strong memories of Shadowrun as a teen; I'm not sure if I was too old or too young. I have the weird luck of having read Neuromancer in my formative years - like, to the point I was young enough that William Gibson marched me right past a sex scene and I didn't even know what they were doing - which I think shaped a lot of my ideas about how the future is going to go. Everyone should read Neuromancer, even if it isn't Gibson's best work. Shadowrun is, to my loose grasp of cyberpunk as a conceptual predecessor to the eventual genre it "became" Neuromancer by way of magic and other wackiness, likely making it more akin to the early Warhammer 40k lore which was also something of a melting pot of concepts.

Did you know Warhammer 40k actually originally had a sense of humor?

As for kickstarters, I was really excited when kickstarter first came into being as it represented gamers being allowed to choose what would be developed and influence the market in a more hands on, or wallets on, manner.  The end result however has been something of a mixed blessing. The whole cycle of Kickstarter into Early Access into Steam Cards into Steam Sale has really highlighted a lot of points where the game industry has problems that we all gleefully blamed on like, Electronic Arts and Bobby Kotick for the last decade and as it turns out those perceptions might not have been on the money.

See the joke there is kickstarter has wasted a lot of people's time and money, though I think it is less egregious than the whole green light early access "give me money for an unfinished product I don't plan on finishing chortle" set up.

But SR:R is a kickstarter "success"; the game was made on time, I think, came out and people reacted to it in a pretty reasonable fashion. I've heard mixed opinions on it, but it's a roleplaying game and I had more interest in playing it than finally trying to get through Fallout: New Vegas (which is just so hyped I'm scared) and trying to figure out what the first Dragon Age actually "is". Is it Origins? No I mean yes it is on Origin and I have the full version, but which one actually is it? I don't want to think about it. What happened to putting numbers or clear titles after games?

Right I'm getting distracted. SR:R is a top down, isometric RPG with guns, magic and trolls. It is a mix of cyberpunk and magic, though it ends up feeling like the cyberpunk side is pretty subdued compared to the magic, so that might disappoint a little. As I hinted by mentioned Neuromancer, it takes from an oddly bog standard view of the future, in which nations no longer quite exist and huge megacorps do things for money. Very close to Syndicate, I believe, which this game feels like the more honest RPG cousin of.

I'm referring to the shooter that people wanted to be an isometric RPG there, in case you didn't care. You don't. Let's move on.

Eight weeks of playing roles: Final Fantasy Eight

You know before we talk about anything else I really want to say I was surprised at how long FF8 is, in both positive and negative ways. There is a fairly good amount of content in the game but it is gated behind wandering in circles and just the worst pathing elements good lord. Admittedly it isn't that much longer than FF7, but it really feels longer, but again, in bad and good ways... My in-game played time is rather different from my out of game played time, and I only saw the game over screen five times...

People talk about Final Fantasy games - Frankly, they talk about roleplaying games - Way above the level of enjoyment I think anyone actually gets out of them. You get this moment, when you ask someone what their favorite RPG is and their words just stop making any real sense. From Final Fantasy to the Witcher, to Baldur's Gate and back again, it all just comes off as 'good lord I need to justify this skinner box so hard'. I'm not saying these are bad games, not at all, but it sure does end up feeling like it when you sit down and play them again. Except the original Final Fantasy. God that game is just a bleak void of a skinner box. Argh.

Anyway, I mention this because Final Fantasy Eight is or was probably my favorite in the series, insofar as actual FF games and not like FFT or weird spinoffs or whatever. FF8 is the one I went into expecting was super bad, then found I actually just like every element of it. People bemoaned every element of it, often to the point of absurdity - Squall is extremely Cloudlike, and yet he was derided for elements he shared with the FF7 protagonist - and in the end uh, to be honest, the game didn't seem that bad. Seriously Cloud and Squall both do the '...' thing. Cloud, I guess, gets a bit of a pass since he actually has brain damage and then gets more brain damage over the course of the game, but still...

On the other hand coming back to this game, well... It's a little bit of a strange one, isn't it? The feeling, not the game. The game is pretty Final Fantasy ## you know? Like FF7 I was expecting to come back to disliking it but just playing it anyway because memory is a fickle thing. Here I came back to something I have actual nostalgia for and just being like man, this is just the damn oddest thing.

I mean yeah, the skinner box, the loot thing? FF8 drops much of that element, and I started to wonder by the end if the loss of big lewtz was a big part of why a lot of people really didn't "get" it?

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2014 in review

As with previous years, this review splits games into four categories. I'm going to proactively not read my earlier YiRs and just assume I remember roughly a year later the system I was using. Maybe I'm not. If I recall correctly, it works like this. This is an entirely subjective, made up of nonsense system, based completely on my experiences. I tend to dislike things that are overhyped because I'm trying to figure out what is so great about it, and like things where people tell me they're bad because I'm always awaiting the game to take a big dump on my face.

Category A: Games that I think everyone should pick up and try if they have any faint interest in them. Games I came out of feeling like I'd really enjoyed myself. Something to branch out and try, and definitely something to pick up if you like the genre they are included in.

Category B: Games that I think, if you're interested in the genre, are definite good times. Not necessarily something to pick up if you're not into it, though, but maybe if you like the look. A bit riskier as propositions go. Most games I finish fall into this category.

Category C: Games that are decent enough if you like this or that sort of game, but not really the sort of game you should go out of you way to try. Games I quit near the end or games I was reluctant to finish tend to fall in here.

Category D: Games I regret play, regret buying or regret existing. I would advise against picking up category D games unless you find your tastes run in stark opposition to my own, which is mind you entirely possible.

To switch it up this here, I'm going to start with the games I don't recommend, and then move up the games I really liked. Whoa. Daring.