Play relevant month: Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon

There's not many games or releases or concepts I get hyped for. We live in something of a two pronged gamer assault world now - God, what does that sentence even mean - somewhere between the shitpipe that is early access and the other, shittier pipe that is triple A hype machines. We are constantly being blasted on the two sides of our faces. Yet games are largely all about the same level of quality, with a few stand out gems, but most are "fine" or even "fun but flawed". Yeah there's a couple really obvious stinkers, but usually if you don't like a game in this day and age it has more to do with genre and intent. So why get excited? There's going to be 2-3 more entries in that genre, that very year, in case you don't like a given individual game.

But Blood Dragon ... Well, for one, I had zero excitement for Far Cry 3 itself. The only excitement I get from Far Cry games is when I forget they're not Crysis sequels or whatever, but then, I wouldn't even get that now that Crysis 3 was the joke it was. However you take a brand new engine like Far Cry 3 and you commit to giving a DLC pack with some far out 80s action, I'm going to take notice. That first trailer really sells the idea. Then you announce it's going to be a cheap standalone attempt at a more experimental style of game? I won't lie, my ears perked up. Admittedly, the experimental side of Blood Dragon lies in the less than mainstream or at least less than modern mainstream because that really is quite the hammy 80s production. Or a 2013 production through the eyes of being an 80s production? Layers and layers of obscured tropes here son. It's cyber-boots on a human skull all the way down to the turtles here.

The actual resultant game almost has a sense of meta awareness to it, a box inside a box feeling of both playing and the game itself. It's petulant and juvenile on both levels, with weird quirkness that extends beyond the Play button on Steam. There is also this odd rub of being almost a truly indie production, with odd little problems and screw ups in design that surprise you given the pedigree of both the studio and the core title this one is based off. I mean I've read Far Cry 3 has terrible, terrible writing but I never heard anything about it being a bad game from a design stand point.

It's also sort of weird in that Blood Dragon almost feels intentionally mediocre at the start, luring you in with a rather bleh starting point then - When you stop expecting anything awesome to come out of the lumpy beginning and the oddities of uplay - actually gets really, really good. At everything. All of the things. And the voice actor is a wizard.

Of bad ass.

Not RPG month, I swear: Fallout 3 GOTY

The humor of buying this game is I never really intended to. I can't remember why, but FO:NV was on my wishlist, so a friend bought it for me. Or maybe it wasn't and he just bought me it, I don't know. I'd never played through FO:3 and I was told FO:NV totally replaces three.

I'm a little weird in this - If there's a sequel that totally outpaces the original, I always want to make sure I give the original a fair shake, because there's no going back. So I bought FO:3 because someone else bought me FO:NV when I didn't really want either. Then I started playing FO:3 when there are other games I felt like playing, but I just finished a controller game and I was trying to avoid RPGs since I wanted to play Witcher 2 a year after the first one. So I started playing ... A controller game that is also a RPG.

Ahem. I'm playing it KB+M though!

Fallout is a little weird for me as well because I never played the originals. One of my close childhood friends had three 'favorite' games: X-Com, Master of Orion and Fallout. Oh, and probably Simcity, but I'd played that before I knew him. So he loaned me two of them and I don't think I ever loaned anything else. X-Com and MoO are amazing classics, so I never played Fallout. That's sort of dumb, but for some reason I just never did even though he raved about it tons when we were kids. That's probably pretty shameful as my PC gaming cred goes, but I honestly don't have any cred. I just played lots of X-Com.

And it wasn't hard.

I do not necessarily like the post-apocalypse dystopia setting in any broad sense of the term. Though I don't think that post-apoc is necessarily as bad as say, time travel, it has a certain way of ruining any thematic sense. Stuff just gets thrown in without any real sense of logic, creating game worlds that lack any sort of coherence. I do love Dark Sun mind you, but fantasy post-apocalypse is a pretty rare treat comparatively. I like to classify Morrowind, likely my favorite true fantasy rpg, as sort of in that vein as well. Granted, I know basically nothing about Fallout's setting, but I'm leaning against it almost on an innate level.

So Fallout probably always had its work cut out for it. But hey Rage managed it, right?

Year in Review: 2012

This isn't a top ten list or even a top anything list, or even of games that came out this year. Rather, since there's steam sales going on, it's a round up of everything I can remember playing through this year, divided into categories that will probably piss off what few readers I will ever have. It also links to Steam, which may not be the best way to buy the game. Unfortunately I can't figure out what is ever on sale on Amazon, and GMG scares me. Oh and GamersGate cancelled the one thing I bought off them this season, but I don't blame them for deciding they shouldn't lose thousands of dollars on pricing errors.

So you know, do your research! Or don't, time is your own.

Play Relevant Month: Raging off the Rocks

When Doom was put out all those ages ago, it didn't really have much of a story. Like a good horror film, it presented itself through powerful visuals. It had lighting, it was spooky, you strapped in and off you went against the demon hordes. Game storytelling has moved up a fair amount since I was a little kid all those years ago, but there is something to be said for the Mario, the Sonic, the Doom style of gameplay introduction. You pick it up and go.

Rage on the other hand wants to have a story, so it opens with a cutscene, then what amounts to tutorial. The first time through, I got bored through the tutorial before I could save. I assumed it did the checkpoint autosave thing! So I had to do the start again. I stands out when you think about Doom, where I'd have been knee deep in the dead (hehe) in the same span of time.

The open is so jarring and weird to me besides. Like I said, you have your classic pick up and go games, and then you have storied games. In this, you're a guy in a pod, you wake up suddenly. And then pod opens to like, outdoors? So you think you're in the middle of some wasteland, which I guess you are, except some guy jumps you and bullets start flying seconds later. The pod was right there! If they wanted my delicious meaty bits, why didn't they just open the pod?

And then you're talking to John Goodman. He wants you to help out. For lack of anything else to do, you do. Spoiler: That describes the entire story.

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.