Play Relevant Month: Grim Dawn

I actually picked up Grim Dawn all the way back in early September, but sort of set it as my tertiary game, something to work my way through over the coming months. ARPGs are often long and take a considerable amount of time to truly review. There's actually several ARPGs out relatively recently I'm inclined to play, but Grim Dawn for whatever reason just looked like the best of the lot, though Victor Vran looks pretty good too.

Grim Dawn is the work of Crate Entertainment, which according to their wikipedia page appears to be an off-shoot or descendant of Iron Lore, whom produced Titan Quest for THQ quite a while ago. While I've owned Titan quest for ages, the game never appealed to me. I couldn't tell you why, but for a long time

Grim Dawn on the other hand was in one of the humble monthlies, and I think this is the game where I mathed it out and realized a full 12 month subscription (which gives a month free) essentially would have worked out as good enough to pick up. Since then, the monthly has actually been even better, with several excellent sidetitles to go with it. So you can sort of blame Grim Dawn from crate entertainment on convincing to me to buy into some crate-style entertainment...

Does that even count as a pun? I'm not even sure anymore.

Regardless, Grim Dawn is an isometric view style ARPG of a proper pedigree and the usual nonsense. Fantasy world overrun with nasties from other dimension, with zombies because zombies, loot because loot and "corruption". No prophecies, though, and mostly bad-ass characters who actually survived the apocalypse.

Facsimile souls: Lords of the Fallen

First things first, and I feel like I'm doing this a lot, Lords of the Fallen is spoken of as a clone of Dark Souls. I played a couple hours of Dark Souls in something like 2012, and found I hadn't quite gotten the hang of the xbox controller enough to enjoy it. I told myself I'd go back, once I felt like I did, and yeah that took years. I've been meaning to, but I've been rushing through a lot of games lately.

As an aside, this game has too many buttons. It amazes me, looking back on people mocking console players for babby controller sort of stuff. The xbox one controller here has something like twenty or whatever inputs, and when I first got my 360 controller I couldn't reliably hit the right button every time. There's just so many! You know how many buttons my precious Sega genesis had? A d-pad, a start button and then three. The SNES doubled that, but it didn't use the shoulder buttons often. I'm not sure when controller design blotted up to such numbers, but it's pretty impressive

Anyway, I don't strongly remember Dark Souls, but it's pretty evident right from the start that this game is attempting to copy a lot of elements of it. I mean more mechanical elements, gameplay and so forth, not stylistic choices. As such, it's sort of a RPG, although 'rolling person game' might be a better use of the acronym.

Unlike DS, Lords of the Fallen is specifically about one mang, and one mang only. Though you can customize your mang in various ways that as far as I can tell don't matter much to the experience, you play as HARKYN, a convicted criminal, possibly of the heretical iconoclast sort, possibly of the just a violent punchy man sort. Harkyn has made his way to the... Top of the world? A temple? A place where people are and it's cold? Anyway you're here to have sex with sexy ladies and dodge roll everywhere.

And there's like no ladies up here because it's a monastery. Er. Yes.

Bad Gaming, maybe: Sacred 3

One of the interesting things to me about living in this "accursed millennial age" is the outlook people have on sequels, reboots, remakes and that weird thing where Doom4, which is a sequel to Doom64 and not Doom3, was just titled Doom in spite of referencing Doom. which is weird. But the thing that interests me is the fact people complain a great deal about it happening, but usually the complaining doesn't actually matter. It most cases people who complain are invested fans. You think the people who lined up to buy Doom 3, who later complained about "the flashlight" (hint: light the darkness with the shotgun like a proper doom slayer) didn't come back for more when Doom came out? Yeah, they did. They complain then they buy.

In Sacred 3's case, it seems to have done so. This is pretty unique to me.

I haven't played Sacred 1 or 2, but I have played Sacred Citadel, which was a button mashing pretty decent side-scrolling brawler. It wasn't exactly stellar, and I think I reviewed it at a C grade a couple years back, but it was decent enough at being what it was. It had bright colorful art and a silly, vibrant style that matched up with it well. It was a humorous game, in that janky european way, so that and that alone colors my expectations.

Meanwhile Sacred 3's rating on Steam is ... Man, it is bad. It is "Mostly Negative" which is a pretty low bar. I mean, for example, Bound by Flame is "Mixed" and Blood Knights is "Mixed" as well. Both of those are janky, weird games, and Sacred 3's rating is far lower. I mean that is bad, that is hobo in a greasefire bad.

So when the humblest of bundles ran a Deep Silver 2 bundle, which put Sacred 3 with all the DLC up for a $1. And some other games, most of them I already have. So yeah, $1 to see this "mostly negative" disaster? Sounds like a plan!

Top down days: Hammerwatch

There is a terrible feeling when I look over my Steam collection.

It isn't the biggest backlog in history or something, but I'm at something like 200 games tried out of 1200 games. That's nice. What isn't nice is realizing I had bought a game I wanted to play, and then forgot to play it for a long time due to it falling into that giant pit of unplayed games. It's an unpleasant abyss.

Hammerwatch is one of those games. I got back in ... It looks like 2014? Yeesh, is that seriously right, that's brutal. Back logs are the most first world problem not involving purse dogs or speculating on ebay sales, but it's still kinda dismal when you flip through the Badge page and realize you've been playing games you're not exactly too impressed with instead of games with Very Positive scores and pretty consistent reviews.

It's also really bad when you go over how many games you've played from six months of the Humble Monthly - which ain't cheap, after six months - and that is seriously at a whooping 1/30 or something. Ok that's worse.

But I did finally manage to play Hammerwatch

Card to kill: Evil Quest

EvilQuest, or Evil Quest or whatever is a top down (I think three quarters topdown was the olden day term) arpg in the vein of, uh, the only thing that is coming to mind is Soul Blazer which is about the least helpful thing I could possibly think of. Have you played Soul Blazer? You should, but anyway the hook for this game is that you're not just any old hero or anti-hero, you're King Asshole of the Angry Dudes, a bald headed evil warrior who seeks to kill a lot of people or whatever.

The writing here is unshockingly rather cliche and amateurish, but that does suit the production and doesn't really detract from the experience. If it was rather serious and consummately well written, you'd end up taking the rest of the game too seriously. Instead it's a bit juvenile, which helps you parse the low-key, low-budget elements with a bit of a smile on your face. On a basic level you're an evil dude who did evil, before being captured and then offered an opportunity to do the evil again. The motivation at the beginning of the game seems to be little more than 'I am not fond of people'.

I'm not trying to malign amateur productions - I mean this is a blog, after all - but when your character calls someone an intrepid instead of insipid fool, well, you're not lifting the heavy word weights. Unless he was trying to say the dude he just murdered had a real sense of adventure, at which point maybe the writing is just going over my head. The dialogue is trite, but ridiculous, with a real b-movie charm. Characters will try to reason with your guy, or prattle on or give hubris filled speeches but all the uncrowned King Asshole comes back with is "I kill you now".

Visually the game is ... Unflattering. There's nothing super attractive here to speak of, and comparing it to SNES games goes in the SNES games favor. I mean I've played a lot of goofy retro games in the last couple years and this one falls into the general category of "not artistically talented". I'm always sort of surprised that people don't just steal art assets from old SNES games no one remembers, though maybe they do and I just don't notice. Anyway yeah, it looks drawn in MS Paint. It doesn't hurt to look at or anything, but it's not winning awards for visual fidelity.

The music, as well, is pretty weak. It's not Woolfe bad, but it's pretty bland. It sounds sort of like middle of the pack NES soundtrack, or maybe Genesis/SNES. Not sure how to describe it, beyond "not painful to listen to, but not good either." There are a couple more upbeat tracks here or there, but nothing much stands out.

The gameplay works fine; you have a melee attack, and if you stand still you can fire off charged fireball sort of shots. There's sort of a neat element in that the charge requires you to stand still, but you can hold the charge and move - It just doesn't charge you up any further - so a chunk of the gameplay is finding when to charge, then shifting position til it is fully charged and unleashed the big 'ol triple fireball. Enemies do touch damage, I think, but also usually have melees of their owns or special attacks. You can also cast spells, which is sort of where the boredom sets in, since the game gives you a heal pretty early on and there's basically no tension for the next hour or so I played.

Anyway in the course of the game I broke out of jail after being betrayed by my subordinate Asshole Junior, then went through the sewers and wandered around for a while. You're an asshole in this game, but it also generally comes off that everyone else is an asshole as well which sort of muddies the water a little. You don't kill random townsfolk, but you kill just about everything else. Once you get out into the wilds there's more random stuff to murder, so you murder that stuff too.

In summary EvilQuest is passable, and might be worth picking up in a bundle, but it's not really exciting or great at anything. I did enjoy the moments in the game where people talk trash at your character and he threatens to violent murder them rather than just taking it on the chin.

Card to Kill: Block Legend DX

I end up with a lot of games from groupees bundles, as I've mentioned earlier. The current system tends to poop out 1-2 games every two weeks, which tends to give me a lot of games to process into cards. Block Legend DX was sort of interesting to me because I immediately felt regret I'd added it to my Steam account when I could have given it to someone else.

After playing it for ten minutes, that emotion faded.

Block Legend DX is oddly enough a match two game, in a somewhat similar vein to Puzzle Quest. Unlike Puzzle Quest, the tiles you match can not be manipulated and only activate when clicked on, as well as offering their unique effect when triggered. You can match up melee attacks, spells, healing, blocking, so on and so forth. There is some bonus for chaining the same tile repeatedly, and they do more if you match up more than the initial two. You shape your character with leveling, so different classes and different leveling paths will result in a different evaluation as to which blocks to trigger.

You can also heal, which is slow, but more you're supposed to put up your 'shield' to block. The block bar is much shallower than your health pool, but much faster to refill, so combat sort of forms an odd rhythm of refilling your bar and then returning to whichever other element you're triggering. Out of combat, the blocks remain, which gives you a chance to reshape the "terrain" of your field and refill your various stats.

The game is all done up in cute, ye olde Final Fantasy style sprites or whichever sprites you associate with these. The game is definitely pleasant to look at, as it is very simple but very colorful and lively. A lot of it actually sort of wasted, since while you're staring at the tiles and trying to figure out your next six moves, your little character is dancing around, waving his or her weapon and frolicking while the enemy does as well.

The music is brutal. The tracks are about 23 seconds long and sound like Gameboy tracks. Not GBA. Original gameboy. The game also likes to play very, very loudly when you first start it up, which was unpleasant. It's weird how it looks so nice - I mean it's retro pixel style, but it's colorful and well done - but sounds so awful. It's all abstractions anyway, but there's a lot of effort put into the art, even if I think it's a mobile port.
 
The core system is actually pretty good, and each game takes about 10-20 minutes to play before ending. The first couple times you play the game, it's pretty sweet, then the bitter reality of the game starts to set in.

You march forward in a straight line, encountering random enemies along the way to the boss. There will be two, and exactly two, towns on each stage. 90% of the time, the town is useless, as it is either impossible to have the gold necessary to do anything, or you've already spent the gold on something else. Or you don't need an item, so it's still useless. You would think the developers would, I don't know, put something useful in the initial towns. I mean this seriously, you just can't have as much gold as it wants you to have early on, because they lazily have all towns scaled to the same costs throughout the game. So there's basically no point to it being there, and no one bothered to fix that because...? I don't know.

The problem really comes in as a matter of difficulty and just pointlessness. Random enemies are basically hapless, even if they were threatening, you can heal up between encounters. They become somewhat relevant on the third or I assume later boards, but they're still basically 30 seconds of who cares in between 30 seconds of who cares. So after it kicks in it doesn't matter, you just march forward to the boss, and the boss is dramatically more difficult. You need to hit a rhythm of block block heal attack attack in between boss swipes, which can be very difficult to do, or not difficult at all. If you chain enough damage combos you can flatten most of the early bosses, and if the game is receptive you can just set it up so you do.

This is a block matching game, after all, and while you can shape the initial field you get when you encounter the boss, you can't really play too many moves ahead while trying to play keep ahead on the block block matching. Most of the time, I found I died to a boss with it below 50% health, but I ran out of block blocks and just died. Or couldn't heal. Or it three shot me. Or it didn't give me any way to actually do damage to the boss.

On top of that, whenever the boss makes a move, you can't input any moves. Between the slow progression of tiles falling into place and the jilting inability to make a move every couple seconds, bosses are dramatically more difficult while not really intense in the right way. And you ONLY die on bosses, so the rest of the game is a huge waste of time. Lastly, and bizarrely, when you complete a quest it flashes a big old quest complete across the entire screen. It can and often will do this midbattle, which just adds to disjointed nature of the boss fights. Since the boss fights aren't very good, and they're the entire focus of the game, the game ends up ... Not very good.

So, basically, you spend about ten minutes or longer getting to the second or third stage boss, then you hope that RNG doesn't screw you or it splatters you in short order while you're essentially defenseless. On top of all of that, the game punishes you further for RNG if you run out of moves. Yes, when you're playing zenmode Bejeweled 3 it is possible to line up moves to make certain you don't deplete, but here you're trying to go block block heal attack attack, and the game is vomitting unnecessary blocks at you.

The item system is kinda shitty too. You can buy items in towns (assuming by some miracle you have enough gold, which is rare) or you can get them from matching the 'item' blocks. Yes, there's an entire set of blocks that eventually give you loot, which fills up a bar on the left hand side. Once it fills, you get an item, though I'm not entirely certain how it works entirely. You're supposed to use items on bosses, but you generally ends up in such a hectic rush that the whole process feels even more disjointed and shitty, assuming you found anything useful at all, which most of time you didn't.

Fundamentally, while I enjoyed my first hour with Block Legend DX, I wouldn't bother playing a second hour. It's just too rng driven, and the roguelike nature of the game means you're back to level 1 killing farting fairies again if the game spawns too many of the not-useful-in-combat blocks. I'm sure I could play better, but the issue here is that you barely get any practice playing the "real" game. It's minute after minute of grinding nonsense, then finally real combat that can be over before it began with a few bad falls. The core of the game isn't too bad, but there's too many block types, you can't swap blocks around and it just feels so random in a really bad way. Also the game's flow is terrible, and you're basically given no time to do anything.

March into Bad Games month: Blood Knights

I was tempted to type out 'bad games mouth' but I'm not sure that joke has any teeth. I totally forgot to game over march anyway, so this review is coming out in April and oh well.

I noticed, around the time I was finishing up Dungeon of the Endless, that I felt like I'd been very hard on the recent crop of games I've played. I've played through some really good games since the start of the year, and not really very many games I've taken seriously that were seriously bad. I mean Final Dusk was sort of alright, but nothing really to digest. FF8 is a weird affair, but it's an older game that feels sort of patched together to accomplish its goals. So I set out to play two games I was under the impression were bad.

I believe I got Blood Knights from bundle stars, who sell bundle which are ... Generally not as well priced as IndieGala or Groupees bundles, but do seem to often have somewhat higher profile games in them. I actually had, at best, little idea what Blood Knights was. I knew it was relatively poorly rated, and also knew it was sort of silly and SteamShots had done a review ages ago. I assumed it looked B-movie as fuck and good lord if you like b-movie cheese nonsense, this is actually a game for you.

Blood Knights is a basic behind the back, god of war slash darksiders slash zelda or whatever brawler where you play as a crusader trying to fight the bad vampires. At the start of the game you are bonded to a vampire, who wears very little in the way of clothing but does look like she could throw a punch at least. Apparently this is cast on you by a priest, who seems oddly nonchalant regarding making some sort of blood pact between the commander of his knights and creatures of the dark. Though to be honest she mostly looks "mean" not really much else.

If you're playing the game two player, you divide up the characters, but if you're playing by yourself you can swap between the two. More on this later.

For the first little while the game hints that your character is unnerved by the blood pact and the vampiress is really hostile to the whole thing, but she's self-serving at best so doesn't really mind killing her former comrades to survive. You sort of get the idea it's going to have tainted feedback or you're going to be made ill by it and then NOPE another vampiress vomits on you and then you're a vampire. I'm not kidding. The scene is totally your dude being like 'oh god some of it got in my mouth aaaaaahh'

And then your second in command kicks you off a cliff. This pretty much sets up how storytelling works in this game. Right off a cliff and into the loo.

Long Card Road Home: Hero Siege

Over the last few months in spite of giving up on buying new games for a year, other than bundles, my badges page has continued to bloat over with a seemingly endless sea of games with cards just waiting to be dropped. So, for the month of June as we all await the summer sale, I'm going to work on my card back log. My cacklog. My ... wait, that sounds ...

I acquired Hero Siege from the ShinyLoot roguelikes bundle on Groupees a couple weeks ago. In retrospect, I probably should have taken them up on more of the games available in the bundle, but Hero Siege and TOME looked about the best of the lot. I haven't picked up TOME yet, since it doesn't have cards, but Hero Siege looked like an interesting game to give a shot after enjoying fellow 'roguelikes'. I don't think Hero Siege is, by any means, much of a roguelike. It does have some pretty random elements, and I have to admit there is a certain charm to the whole "id potions by jamming them down your throat" school of thought.

My first experience in Hero Siege was - and I'm not making this up - playing for what steam records as two minutes. I think about half that was puzzling at the weird you can buy gems menus (Is this a phone game?) and what not, then playing maybe thirty seconds. A prompt flashed up on screen to start the next wave, maybe, and then while I was figuring it out my character fell over dead. I have no idea why.

It is possible I stood on a trap or something, but it feels strange just how much stuff in this game one-shots you right from the get-go. The game actively doesn't really feel like it wants you to play it. Unsurprisingly this actually frames a great deal of my experience with the game!

Back to forming plats and stuff: Rogue Legacy

So a couple of weeks back I finished up my write up on Guacamelee! and I felt kinda bad about it. The game was really charming, and much of the time I really enjoyed it, but it had multiple elements that just made me grind my teeth or get bored. Part of it I wrote off as simply a matter of platformers. I've played a couple here and there over the last few years, with few of them feeling as good as Sonic Classics or New Super Mario on the DS. Was that world? Whatever. Anyway, I did the only sensible thing about uninstalling a platformer I got fed up with - I went through my list of pending card games and immediately installed another platformer.

Rogue Legacy is a delightfully inspired fusion of ARPG, roguelike (or the genre that fundamentally spawned ARPGs anyway) and platformer with beautiful properly retro graphics that settles on basically dying, and passing to your offspring a horrible quest to be maimed horribly in the hopes of eventually, one day, taking down that damn nasty castle. The game really reminds me of Act Raiser, actually, on the visual level. It's a little bit weird since it reminds me of both parts of Act Raiser at once but hey that's cool.

So given I've been frustrated and irritated with platformers since like, 2010 or something, you'd imagine I installed this game, played it for ten minutes then uninstalled after I brutally died three times in very short order, right?

Actually maybe it reminds me of Soulblazer. Maybe it reminds me of 16-bit era games in a general way. In a good way. But not of Super Castlevania, which I played back in 2011 and found did not age quite as well as I'd hoped. Can I go with 'it reminds me of Quintet? Does anyone ever remember who that is?

Grinding on that tower like a pop music video: Prime World Defenders

I'm a big fan of Tower defense games as what I mentally refer to as "coffee games". Games you can pour your first copy of coffee and then play while you slowly savor your home-brewed, fresh ground steaming beverage. As such, this is going to slant this review in sort of a weird manner, because Prime World Defenders is a tower defense game that gained things by losing it.

PW:D is made by Nival Entertainment, who I don't know overly much about. I believe "Prime World" is a brand for their grouping of products, though I haven't looked into any of the other ones there's at least two more. Nival apparently did some of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I found incredibly boring. I have something like a thousand hours logged in HoMM3 and quite a few in HoMM4 even, so I was rather surprised to find HoMM5 incredibly dull and not at all what I was looking for. I'm not going to hold it against Nival though, since I have no idea how much of it was their fault. Ubisoft continued to plow on, with the next developer further simplifying odd elements of the game and adding weeaboo shit. Do you really think people who have trouble with turn based strategy games have trouble with things like hexes and the fact there's multiple currencies? People don't have trouble figuring out how different monies work. We're capitalists. Money is 90% of what we do!

Anyway, as I said, Prime World: Defenders is a tower defense game, but with something of a twist that takes over a great deal of its gameplay and resources. That twist is free to play style grinding, though as far as I can tell there are no in application purchases in PW:D. Maybe f2p is the wrong description, but it feels like someone had some good ideas vis-a-vis f2p CCGs and then grafted those ideas onto a tower defense game.

It's sort of interesting because whether or not you like this game likely starts and finishes right from the question of whether or not you can appreciate a very upfront and obvious skinner box. Actually, to be frank, the game is probably a hybrid of the core gameplay of a tower defense with the addictive spicing of a Diablo game on top of it. Does that sound good?

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

What a Skill Tree: Path of Exile

This isn't really anything beyond a moderate depth look at Path of Exile simply because I don't quite have it in me to truly master another ARPG. I suppose if this were a Blizzard game, well, I'd have less issue claiming mastery - but PoE's gearing and skill set up system is an arcane mystery in its own right. Since PoE is innately free to play with a reasonable f2p model, I don't necessarily feel like a deeper review is fundamentally necessary regardless - If the game sounds interesting at first blush, why not give it a try? The only upfront cost is a 2.7 gigs (on steam) download, which should be reasonable for most.

I downloaded this primarily because I'd sort of considered it, discussed it with a friend and then he was like "hey you want to give it a try?" after it hit steam and again, why not, it's free. I can talk for ages about how different and wild legitimate f2p gaming is but really, there's just something to be said for this process being somehow both more and less enabling than buying software. Anyway, Path of Exile is an ARPG in the vein of Diablo 2. Like a true Diablo and/or Torchlight game, it apparently had a seven year development cycle. In many ways it tries to do one of two things: stay unreal close to its roots and then get as far away from them as possible.

At its core, as with all ARPGs, Path of Exile is a smashy/clicky  gameplay model. You hunt into the wilds for pants, using a variety of furious mouseclicks to get there then you acquire pants. In terms of its combat model, PoE feels much closer to Diablo 2 than Torchlight 2 - which is to say it's pretty nimble but not quite as zoomy fast as Torchlight 2. Combat is not as visceral either, but again, this ties it closer to Diablo 2 than its fellows. As such the core gameplay is very close and there's really not much I can say. It's akin to describing the word 'like' to someone who doesn't speak english - It's just too embedded in my sense of gaming. It's very solid as far as ARPGs go, feeling more responsive than Torchlight 2 except for issues of netcode which we'll get into.

Whatever else I'm going to go on about in this discussion, it's worth noting that Path of Exile is essentially and utterly a sequel to Diablo 2. It expands on the gameplay elements, but it carries so much of D2 throughout its DNA that you can straight up say - If you liked Diablo 2, and you're not a blizzard fanboy, you'll like this. I have encountered a couple weird opinions where people still in love with Blizzard just spew weird rationalizations at me for hating it.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there's still lots of things wrong with this game. But it shares almost all of them with Diablo 2 on the most part, so if you played hundreds of hours of that the only real excuse should be 'I think I've seen enough ARPGs for one life, thanks'.