Adventures of the Worst Spy Ever

I'm not great at stealth. It's not fundamentally in my nature; I understand the concept, but damn am I ever impatient and bad at it. I mean, make it simple and linear, I'll probably get it. Make it sort of dicey or weirdly floppy and my true secret agent persona comes through: Set everyone on fire and go totes ma goats with an assault rifle blazing. No man is an island, and no one misses a volcano, but no one gets out alive either.

A literal master of stealth

So anyway Alpha Protocol is some game that did lukewarm in reviews and is actually well loved on SA, which isn't really much of a thing since people on SA tend to group think a little. But then so do reviewers, so I guess that's fair?

The game is really generous with being an espionage game, since like I said I'm actually the worst spy ever conceptually seen in a video game. And I mean literally seen, assuming your eyes have not already melted. In spite of being about spying and sneaking, the game fully supported my class choice of COMMANDO and didn't seem too upset with me for killing piles of dudes. So many dudes. This is nice.

Combat, which is often complained about in the game, seemed pretty reasonable on the most part. The actual gunplay and cover system seemed mostly fine, and close combat is satisfying to look at albeit extremely simple. The problem, and of course some of the complaining has a foundation, lies in the transitions. There's a couple examples, but all of them do have to do with that. The first one is that while melee is good and ranged combat is fine, sometimes you can knock enemies out of melee and then you sort of flail for a bit. It's very strange. Bosses, as well, transition between phases of combat which the game does terribly. The one boss goes immune to damage while you're punching him which just feels really weird.

The stealth dome: for stealthing

The cover system, man. I mean really, I've yet to see a game where the cover system even approaches functionality. Other than Doom, where the cover system was an accident. A basis of all good gaming is a smooth and reliable set of reactions to input - Known as control. The cover system felt out of control, sloppy and on the most part pretty disinterested in me. Thankfully I just shot everyone, they were dead and my bullets were my cover.

The story in Alpha Protocol is pretty simple - A military contractor does bad stuff, black operations, do stuff maybe don't do stuff and there you go. What is interesting about AP is I don't think it's possible or at the very least easy to examine most of the story on a playthrough. This is unique and pretty impressive. This element, and how the various factions interact, play out and so on, offers both replayability and a different story for each person based on their choices. I'm not entirely certain how perfect the various elements in fact are, since I'm only going to go through it once, but I managed to miss entire boss fights, get most of the cast killed by accident and not learn half the players actual identities. If I didn't have a giant pile of back logs, I'd probably go through the game again with a different play style but I have this huge backlog.

What did really suck about this is after a while the game starts framing acts with a conversation with one of the antagonists, presenting the game sort of as flashbacks. I didn't really enjoy this over much, since it kinda spoiled plot points, but it was constructed in a unique way each time that show off how the game interacts with your own narrative.

The characters, though, are the real boon of the game. And bones. Literally.

He told me to put the Bees to someone. The Beeeees.

The cast is, as one can imagine in a very grey morality spy game, a mixed bag of enjoyable personalities. I found interacting with them to be the real delight of the game, some of them because like the crazy guy in Taipei because they're funny and some of them because the dialogue system is enjoyable to work through. You can influence what you guys says, but only up to a point. Also, different attitudes work with different people well, which creates a sense that the characters are actually characters and not talking boxes that poop out replies. It gives conversations a legitimate sense of being a conversation and develops them into people you like, or hate.

Probably the worst part of the game, though, is blatantly obvious forced decisions. The game puts a number of "no win" choices in front of you. The issue here is that, they're not subtle, they're played to the trope which is ... Rather dull. It's the weakest part of the story, but the story is not necessarily very strong. It's the well written and well voiced characters that are. So I can deal with that.

All in all, it had its flaws and I understand where the bad reviews start - the various "skill" minigames could use some serious adjustment in terms of Not Being a Chore - but the actual meat of the game is a strong evolution on the genre that I guess unfortunately didn't do so well. Pity.

Which is to say I am part of the Goonmind and yeah, recommend this game.

Torchlight 2 (Beta)

i like snow

Full disclosure: I did not and will not be buying D3, so I can't really compare the two games. I played a ton of D2X, but none of the first Torchlight. So for me this is a transition from D2X to TL2 Beta, with no ARPGs between or about.

I played the stress test beta for most of its duration. I played the first little bit on all of the classes, and played through most of it on the Embermage, as well as almost as much with a friend on the Outlander class. I think I got a pretty decent take on the game, though maybe not. The game is not promoting a closed unhackable multiplayer experience, so my intention is by no means to bother with the game multiplayerwise.

In simplest terms the game is Diablo 2 run through a Warcraft or maybe a Dota2 filter; it's hard to really describe the visual style outside of these terms. It is attractive and cartoony, with nice animations and good visual variety. It isn't really stunning by any means though, the game looks somewhere between big title and indie release. The spell effects are visually strong and the art carries nicely, but it isn't quite as top tier as some of the stuff I've played recently.

Outside of the visual style, it's Diablo 2. I mean it's faster paced, with more skill variety and better itemization, but it's Diablo 2 repackaged and refined. It moved quicker and in most fashions it is a smoother game, but it really does feel mostly like the same game. I'm not sure this upsets me - Most of Diablo 2's flaws were either in basic problems with the genre that have been ironed out since then, graphical weakness or just odd programming errors. They've fixed most of those and then brewed up some new ones.

On the plus side, inventory tetris is completely gone. The game actually gives you space for each "type" of thing, as well as space on your pet as well. Your pet can shapeshift, sell things for you and even purchase potions. I noticed the pet doesn't remember the shopping list if you close the window, which strikes me as odd. I feel like it would be better if you could tell the pet 'I wish to keep this many potions on me' and then it would buy potions to fill you up to them.

fucking pirates

I really like the pet thing too, it feels somewhere between hunter pet (from wow) and druid wolf minions in d2x. They're also thankfully relaxed about the pet dying, which is the worst part of any pet game. Sure it's a little silly that your pet can never die, but who cares? You can die and that's all that matters.

The game also has much nicer visual variety. I loved D2's willingness to go to different places and explore a world built up around the first game's lore, but the game was still a bit too tightly wound around the 'grey stone walls, everything covered in blood, demons made of hobos stitched together' sort of thing. TL2, at least from what the beta has shown, features lots of different locales and styles.

On the downside - And this might be the beta talking - the game does introduce new issues to the genre. The biggest one, and one that painfully departs from D2 (or at least, is worse than D2), is its flat out harder both to parse how much elemental damage you're taking, what kind of resistance you need and how much resistance you need. The resist system didn't make any sense to me at the time, it felt unresponsive. One of the worst moments came in the last dungeon in the beta: An enemy was nailing me to near death with "shadow" bolts. From off screen. How do I tell what element it is doing? The only way I could figure out was highlighting over its name bar. In D2, whatever hits you registers on your character with an elemental animation, but TL2 didn't seem to really bother. Even worse I just ... Have no idea if the enemy was just too powerful, my resists were too low or my gear not good enough.

A bad issue of this is the game does not allow map resets easily. In D2, if you fought too tough a boss, you'd just reset the map and start the area again. I'm not really sure why TL2 wouldn't allow you to do this - You can just go online and join another player's game, but it's an unnecessary step of hassle in a genre where the ability to just grind up more gear to fix your flaws is clearly part of the design. Sure, you can turn down the difficulty, but who wants to do that?

The other problem with this is, well, you clearly need a bunch of resistance from very early on in the game, at least on Veteran difficulty. Items are not easy to read, and it's hard to tell if items are at a higher item level (ie have a bigger pool of stats). I'm not saying items are tough to figure out, it's just they're sorted poorly and you have to struggle to add up which ones are relevant, and which aren't. The most irritating element are the enchants, which don't really list as being an enchant. Since you're supposed to be able to remove and add enchants, it's really difficult to tell what exactly IS the enchant. I don't much care for this, since it makes comparing items for upgrade harder or just outright impossible.

Overall, though, the game is a visually pleasing and streamlined modern version of D2, with many of the years old annoyances gone at last. Enemies arrive on the battlefield in a variety of ways too, with skeletons pulling themselves off swords they were impaled on, enemies bursting from huts or jumping down from fortress walls. It feels good and dynamic.

I didn't really feel the class balance was quite there, but the beta is supposed to go through a revision period when it comes to skills, so maybe they'll get that closer to "good" soon. I'm looking forward to buying retail, though I'm not sure if I'll pick it up when it releases or just get it a little cheaper at the winter sale. $15 (in a four pack) isn't too bad a deal, though. I mean it looks nice, it's polished, it's clean and it's fun. $15 for a good quality release is quite a deal, even if it's graphically a bit behind the curve, but who cares anyway.

I mean besides this will run fine on my notebook

Just enough causes to get behind

I'll admit it straight out – I've never played any open world game that falls into the “Like GTA” category. I've never really played, at least to any level of actually remembering playing it, GTA games or any of the games that are patterned to be 'like' GTA. “Open world gaming” is actually sort of new to me, other than like morrowind, which isn't new at all.

I picked up Just Cause 2 for at best something along the lines of 'a song'. I think it was on sale for 2.50, but maybe I paid five dollars for it. This is the line where Steam games just get really silly. I paid that much for the Witcher and I'm actually left with the feeling I should pay more for the next game to make up for it. I put off playing it for several months due to lacking an Xbox 360 controller. My teen years I played consoles and then in the next decade played computer games, so suffice to say I'm pretty solid on a keyboard. But years of writing has given my an appreciation for doing something different with my hands, especially if that difference is not developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Gripping a control pad gives you nice solid feel when it comes to platforming and driving, but shooting is another story.

The game has a learning curve and that curve is choppy. Some stuff is instantly obvious, like how bad I am at driving a car being mostly on my end. Some stuff is too hectic to pick up on – I recognize keys mostly based on their position against my hand, so the QTEs trouble me and I sometimes fuck them up. I'm also still not sure which buttons do what in a car, I think one hops out and another shoots or something something, parachute? Oh it's parachute. The weirdest thing is realizing the dodge button, which launches Rico into a roll, is paramount to utterly definitive. Dodging is more effective than basically everything else in the game. Hook shot onto a speeding car? Enemy bullets still home onto you. Hook shot onto a motorcycle and then take off at top speed? Again, dodge works better.

The game has, admittedly, little more than a fondness towards reality. It follows its own rules, and those rules are not sensible. Physics, especially, are just silly. Gatling gun fire launches enemy units into the air, and car crashes are incredible kinetic explosions that reliably launch everything not strapped down hurling through the air. While clownish, it adds a sort of 'action film' element to the game that I appreciate. The game has little interest in realism.

On the other hand, in terms of building a game world the developers wow me. While it's true the game looks basically like an island with some cities and stuff on it – It reminds me immensely of hawaii – The attention to detail is really rewarding. It's visually lush and makes me wonder how bad the developers of fantasy games must be. The game is pretty enough that sometimes you just skydive or drive around, casually sauntering to the next mission with an eye for the scenery. That hasn't happened to me in ages. Dues Ex: Human Revolution and Bulletstorm were better looking games, but lacked the critical drop in tension or raw splendor to really sink it in.

Missions, on the note, have reasonable variety that uses the game itself well. Missions essentially direct you to head somewhere and do something the engine could let you do otherwise, but with some structure to it that adds to the difficulty.

Difficulty is a big component of the stuff I find miserable about the game. Death is no more than an inconvenient occurrence, resulting in needing to taxi yourself back to whatever you might have been doing or back a checkpoint in a mission. The problem here is that since difficulty is “who cares” the game doesn't really seem to care if it throws up on you. The aiming AI, as I've said, is goofy. It's not generally a big deal, but the game is pretty absurd about simply respawning waves of enemies out of your line of sight, even in places where no one could be. Where it gets really annoying is rocket launchers which magically home in on you. Obviously the designers really didn't care, since a bullshit death means so little, but this complete lack of concern leads to some frustrating gameplay.

The correct escort quest: On a motorcycle

One of the other big ones is the whole upgrade system. Running around finding bits allows you to upgrade a narrow selection of vehicles to really no point (since they're never the ones you steal) while also allowing you to upgrade guns. My real issue with the gun upgrade system is weapons absolutely must be upgraded or combat is just irritating, which the game makes no real mention of. For some reason the developers never thought to put in auto switching, so you gleefully attempt to fire an empty gun at people. Suffice to say, unupgraded weapons run out of ammo at the drop of a hat. After upgrading weapons with the parts I'd scrambled together I'm pretty much forced to use those guns, since the other guns are still crap.

The last real irritation is the race system. Flying a plane is not enjoyable in the game, which is probably since flying planes is not exactly the world's easiest task. I tried doing the flying challenges and just found them frustrating, flight unfortunately does not truly convey a sense of speed. On the other hand the car/truck challenges feel fantastic, with many of them being clever or creative usage of the game world. The one where you just drive through a city and plow through civilians was a bit drab, but there's one where you zoom through a military base, and one that is plotted along the wrong lane of a highway. These are neat and exciting to fiddle with.

All in all I think this is definitely one of the more outright concerned with "fun" games I've played in a long time. It's certainly not flawless, but it's pretty and silly much of the time. Given I got it at such a low price, it's impossible to complain though.

Planeswalker sounds like some sort of airfield enthusist

I've been playing Magic on and off for the better part of my life - Something in or around eighteen years, in fact. Magic computer games are generally overly complex, crash prone and fun through the pure delight of Magic the Gathering itself. The game's core system is largely really fun, and DOTP 2012 manages to hold onto that.

I still play online "real" magic, and as such, never played DOTP as a multiplayer game. I honestly can't imagine doing so, as multiplayer comes in two varieties - duels, which the game is poorly suited to for reasons I'll get into and then big "group" games, which the game might be suited to but inversely lacks basically all the reasons and is terribly slow for anyway.

As a basic magic game it offers some grounding in the setting, which helps build the single player some personality. It's not bad, though the art assets and deck designs for the various planeswalkers who act as opposing AIs does leave you a little annoyed sometimes. The various decks might be based around core themes, or honestly maybe they're not. It's certainly easier to simply imagine them as poorly conceived piles that don't really act on a theme. The art for the various planeswalkers offers a generally stiff reminder as to the innate childishness of Magic's art. The women are all slim, buxom and largely showing off as much skin as credible. The men are all either in the 'skinny but clean cropped sauve' look or big muscle bound hulks.

There is a golem, too, I guess. Oh and a cat person - who is thankfully male.

It's not really the sort of thing that really bothers me in most games but in Magic it's been literal years of hitting the lowest possible mark that common fantasy art will allow. Now that people give zero fucks about D&D, Magic art is just slim women with big tits about half the time. I don't mind slim women with big tits at all but fantasy allows for such a huge breadth of possibility that you think you could move past sticking tits on everything.

Yeah this just in, fantasy artists: Not actually creative.

The decks, as I said, are a mess. They're fun to tool around with, but innately a bit unbalanced. Opinions vary on what beats what, but I think the game fails terrible in terms of potential. The decks often lack focus, and the unlocks rarely allow you to move towards a more focused build. I feel like the idea of having a sixty card deck with two possible themes, then unlocks allowing a focus on either. The unlocks don't do this. They generally just build towards ... Nothing in particular, with many of the decks get unlocked junk that doesn't help the deck. Some of the decks are frustrating messes that feel like could have been more focused, using cards available in the existing pool, but weren't for reasons I'm unsure of. Given the game is at its best attracting as much positive sentiment as possible I don't really know what the excuse is.

Deck building is infuriating and essentially, poorly coded. The deck builder is worse than Magic online, which is worse than a freeware program used in 2002. That's really terrible. It's slow, sticky and I don't really understand why it needs to be the way it is. The worst thing is you can't adjust the number of lands in your deck, which is never more annoying than the one multicolor deck treating its nonbasic lands as spells.

The weirdest element is, to the best of my knowledge, the complete lack of nonbasic lands. This is a weird thing to put in a review but if I was designing magic for casual to advanced level players, I would literally take every step possible to remove mana screw and develop the game from the ground up to improve player choices as they relate to mana. Allowing people to build two and three color decks with ease is a concern for developers of the real game, but it is literally irrelevant here. The designers control the metagame absolutely and these concerns are nonexistent. A deck isn't "more powerful" by using two or three colours, since the general advantage of access to a deeper pool of choices is again irrelevant. So the excuse is ... I'm not sure. Nonbasic lands can be a little weird to use for new players, but they're no more advanced than several of the goofier card choices.

Admittedly, if given reign of such a project, I wouldn't use stuff like Proliferate or Legends at all either, and would probably only use a very limited list of nonbasic lands.

Of course, this leads into another problem - the game doesn't allow you to choose how spend your mana or what lands you tap for mana. This is a tremendous issue and one that weakens several of the decks. While the weirdness of the one Angel's kicker just randomly deciding to be less powerful "because" is certainly odd, any multicolor deck struggles to predict which mana will actually be available at a given juncture. This is horrible, terrible design and really highlights the weakness of the program.

Trying to fight and plead with the game for the usage of your resources leaves a lasting impression of disgust with the game. I believe they claimed they're fixing it in the next version of the game, which is sort of not really the salve to the problem. This is sort of why I would never play this game online. While Mtgo is innately a touch stressful given the fact that, while free on the most part you're essentially betting real money, the idea of losing matches not to bad draws or making mistakes but the game just randomly deciding to tap my lands wrong is uniquely horrific.

The other issue, of course, is that rather than thinking it through and producing the decks at all roughly the same power level, some are just better so I imagine instead of a decent variety of decks you just get nothing. I'm not really excited to find out - Sure, I can log on and try it out given I own all of dotp, but I own a mtgo account with packs and tix and a zombie deck I'm borrowing.

Which isn't very good, but I did say borrowing.

Regardless, dotp is a pretty good way to introduce magic with some unfortunate weaknesses in design, some of which carry over from the main brand and some of which I wish the main brand showed up to fix. It's not a very good advanced product, which I think is the intent, but it's a little frustrating. It was something like ten dollars total though, so I'm not griping too hard on it.

Still, better development would have lead to a better game. I mean outside the crashing, which the game does a ton. And the painful performance issues, but that might be the problem with it being a port.

Icarus is like the least subtle of all imagery ever guys

I never played the original Deus Ex. I believe a friend of mine I grew up with loved it, but I never recall actually installing it on any Pc I owned. I had a weird space in my life where I played friends SNES and PSX games while other friends bought pentiums, then I saved up and bought an Athlon when those were finally boss. I feel like DE fell into that gap. The first Quake game I installed on a PC I owned was Quake 3. How weird is that?

I'm not really certain if that took away from or added to the deus ex experience. There's not a huge list of "Best game ever!" PC titles, but the original sits on that shelf. Supposedly, anyway. Is HR one of the best titles ever?

You couldn't fault them, on the most part, for making a serious attempt. Right from the moment the credits flash up on the screen the game is smooth, crisp and well made. It has few moments of feeling buggy or out of sorts with itself, with most of the game at a consistent level of quality and polish. The game just feels like someone actually went over it and cleaned up all the crap that just about every game has, actually paid attention to how things flowed and fixed those things. The graphics look better than they are, as though GASP attention was paid to how to set things up to look better. Sound quality is asotundingly good, with great music and mostly good voice acting. The fact the dweebs and feebs aren't well voice acted honestly doesn't hurt it so much. I mean, that's what normal people sound like.

Cyberpunk is near and dear to my heart, and Human Revolution is probably founded with at least some love for the much shit on genre. I read Neuromancer when I was young enough to not realize that was a sex scene, and I've probably been grumbling about how debased the concept has been ever since. Human Revolution holds strongly to the genre and on the most part keeps its head above water. You've got a decent hacking minigame, guns, cyborgs and some jacked up asian super cities. Cyberpunk always has to have crazy asian super cities. That's what white people think of you, Asia! You're gonna build craaaaazy cities!

Which is actually to say the setting and sets are cyberpunk, but the story is not really effective in that regard. The story is good, certainly not great, but at least subtle enough that you won't instantly guess every single element of the ending from the get go. A tremendous number of ideas are lobbed to you with the slowest of pitches, and the ending, well the ending didn't really do anything for me. I actually sort of hoped that it would simply let you go back to Detroit and talk to the characters about your choice, get their impression you know? Is that so difficult? I also don't really care about referencing the next game. No seriously, you don't need to. If you make a game in the same world, you do not need to "set up" the next game. Especially in a fucking prequel. Storylines do not need to be tied together if you do your job right, things just happen as they will.

I really don't know why writers do this. Ok I do know. See, when you're writing something from beginning to end, you get this smug moment when people realize something from the beginning tied neatly to the end. That's tricky and it's subtle, and people love the shit out of it. It doesn't fucking count when it's a prequel though, which is not to bitch at Human Revolution itself for doing it but just in general. Fuck you, Dune Prequels.

I didn't really pay too much attention to the pure narrative or think too hard about the plot. I like Jensen himself, but I found most of the other characters hard to care about or like. Except the one that died, man, I liked that character. Apparently I could have stopped that death though, which makes me feel a little bit stupid. I think I actually could have too, but the game conspired to make it look like it wasn't preventable - I thought I'd done it, then death triggered and I realized a minute later some dork was still alive. More information game, please? Oh and I really liked the IT guy, he was actually sort of well represented. Yeah he's a douchebag, but he's helpful and actually gives a shit under his thick douchebag exterior. Your boss on the other hand seems like a wang the entire game through. Also there's several characters that are supposed to be SECRETLY something but it's about as secret as a punch to the kidneys.

The game's combat is extremely varied in both quality and style. I found myself using the cover systems only sometimes. Sniping out of cover is tricky and some situations called for more traditional Doomesque usage of cover - which is to say ungracefully sprinting behind walls like a screaming child - but when you do use the cover system either because you should or just strictly because you can, it's pretty great. In fact my biggest problems with the cover system is the enemies make little use of it and you often just ... Can't. Level design often seems like it was set up to punish you for it. It's a serious pity because when you're allowed to use it, you have this neat set of controls that allow cover to feel streamlined and reasonable with far less goofy button presses or sticking to walls at random.

The other problem with that is seriously, cover as a concept works only insofar as if the two opposing forces both agree to abide by it. You see, the agreement here is that generally speaking two people both don't want to die. It's a concern, see, because bullets make you dead or just hurt real fucking bad. Enemies in Human Revolution seem to have mixed concerned regarding both being shot and how much they dislike being shot. Enemies just don't care, they stand in the middle of the room and gun you down as you unload repeated shotgun shells directly into their mid section. This is a very weird feeling. The game is pretty good about enemies feeling 'like you'. They gain almost all of your abilities over the course of the game - they cloak, snipe, have better armor, immune to EMP and some grenades I think - and use guns in much the same way. But they seem to just take a random amount of damage without any really good visual indication that they were damaged or how much damage they're going to take. There's a point in the game where you fight the 'asian super city thug' enemies and I swear their heavies have the most life of all non-boss characters in the game. It's really confusing, since they look like poor people clad in hoodies with machine bits and the PMC heavies are wearing what appears to be a tank. They take less damage to kill and actually seemed to have access to less augments.

Than street thugs? What? God, so confusing. It actually represents the biggest spike of difficulty in the game and then the game was incredibly easy going forward. Very strange.

One thing I find more funny than outright bad is the people who complain about boss fights being combat oriented. I mean there's two big things about this that make me laugh. First, the boss fight people complain about it "is bad" if you have most likely all but two augments you may not have really picked up as 'the key' to beating him, since there's no suggestion you're going to fight this guy or what he's "Weak to" so to speak. If you have those two augments, he's actually probably nowhere near as hard. If you didn't happen to magically clue in, it's hard no matter what you do. The second thing is people are a little bit silly about 'stealth runs'. See, the thing is, it's a shooting game. You know going into it, on a personal level, it's a game about bullets entering and exiting things. The idea that you'll never have to fight anyone in a spot you can't stealth or stun your way through is actually a little juvenile, if not outright buffoonery. If you completely specialize in any element of the game, the game punishes you pretty harshly, so I'm not really sure why you're supposed to get a free pass for ignoring combat skills. It's a combat game!

I didn't ignore combat and the first boss was still something of a chore anyway. I'm not so sure how the later bosses would be, but complaining you didn't have an easy time of running through the game on your "I specifically made illogical and stupid choices" run is just stupid complaining. Especially if people warned you about it.

Boss fights are a bone of contention for the game and on the most part I would definitely say the first one overshadows much of the game's flaws in pure shittiness. It really isn't a well designed fight, mostly because as I said the game isn't very good about telling you how much health someone does or doesn't have. Maybe one of the augs I didn't get would offer that option, but it didn't seem like it was among the abilities. The later 'elite mercenary' boss fights are pretty neat, not really great but at least something interesting to them. There's also what I imagine is sort of a boss fight against two security robots? That was pretty funny. I didn't have any "anti tank" sort of weapons on me whatsoever, so I just widdled them down with a revolver and a chain gun.

While I think the first boss is probably the game's low point, it's over and done in less than an hour. On the other hand, the game's two very poorly thought out parts resonate through the entire game. The first thing is the energy cell system. Augments take power, and that's fine. I can deal with that conceptually. The problem is, you have 1 energy cell that actually regenerates. Later cells redline and do not regenerate, which is extremely annoying. You have to concede huge chunks of inventory space in order to eat to refill these and I mean that in a direct sense. I'm not sure they ever regenerate. Maybe after boss fights. This is atrocious, because you burn through cells pretty quickly doing just about anything. And then you have to eat candy bars to be able to do them in all but the most obnoxious of ways, which is to say standing with your head to a wall waiting for your one regenerating cell to regenerate. It's really strange too, because it's not like you wouldn't use the candy bars if you had fully regenerating cells, you'd just spend less time tediously waiting for the one cell to regenerate. It made takedowns far less enticing - if you have only a single cell, you can't use stealth to get into melee with an enemy full stop. It doesn't work, because augmented stealth chews up energy. So you have to eat candy bars nonstop and that leads into the next problem.

The inventory system is really, really bad. I'm not entirely certain where the Diablo style block of blocks system first arrived - I know it predates Diablo, but that's the game I can remember fucking with it the most. In Human Revolution it's just excrutiating, everything bad about it is bad. You can't reload a gun from ammo on the floor without dropping something, and you can't drop something from the item pick up screen. So if you want to pick up six rounds of revolver ammo from a security card, you have to open your inventory screen, drop something to make space open him again take the ammo reload the gun then pick up the discarded item. This is quite literally the worst inventory system I've ever seen. The fact you have to reload guns outside of combat is an annoying chore to begin with - I don't just mean you have to reload while sneaking around, that's fine. But Jensen doesn't reload his guns between levels, which is just absurd.

The thing that really stands out about this is you just can't wrap your head around why it functions the way it does. Fundamentally speaking the Diablo system is just a ridiculous fantasy and used because in reality picking up four suits of armor to cart back to town to sell is just so far removed from a reasonable system that no one's brain coughs on it. You've already ridden the donkey this far just keep fucking going. But human revolution is actually pretty reasonable much of the time, yeah you have regenerating health but beyond that the game isn't so super fantasy ridiculous that the inventory system fits. What I would have done is probably allowed for one sidearm, two medium weapons and a single heavy weapon - which is basically what you can reasonably carry anyway - and then slots for particular items, without forcing me to play tetris with crap in my backpack. The reason this is so frustrating has to do with the game's open ended nature coupled with its entire lack of willingness to give you any idea what is coming out. Do I need these EMP grenades? Will enemies be vulnerable to gas? Will I have a spot to lay down mines? Will I need access to repeated take downs? You really have no idea and there's no easy way to even change preparations without going back three saves and twenty minutes of your life. If you're going to give me all these options AND saddle the energy regenerating system with a massive inventory hog in the shape of candy bars I have to stockpile to use effectively, you really should streamline the inventory system. See the thing is, the game is fun, but inventory tetris isn't, so making me fuck with it isn't helpful.

And yeah you totally can just stick to two or three guns, leave lots of space cleared out and be fine - But that takes away from your options in a way that has less to do with the game's challenge (beyond having not enough ammo in a pure attrition sense for fighting robots or nonsense like that) and more with having less fun. Picking the precise weapon for a job rather than spraying shotgun rounds at long range or using a revolver to kill a robot (ugh) doesn't actually make the game much harder, but it sure does feel tedious. Giving you a set reasonable limit and then perhaps some idea which guns you're going to need would be helpful. You'd still likely end up with inventory problems anyway. The other issue is that weapon upgrades can't be removed from your weapons, so you end up wanting to keep your upgrades armaments to keep upgrading them. That takes away from the drop and grab style of play, unless you want to use unupgraded weapons the whole game.

The weapon upgrade system in general was sort of muddling. I'm not sure if you lose upgraded weapons if you drop them or if they're considered always upgraded. The augment system, though, is really good and really well thought out. I do wish there were slightly more long range combat augments, something to improve your range or damage or something like that. But beyond that I felt like they offered you a toolset that expanded what you would do but didn't force you into doing things. That and many of the augments have in and out of combat options, which feels good. One of the things I hate about games offering you 'new skills' is those skills often have use either in combat or out of combat, with no overlap, making them feel considerably less useful.

All in all, I think this was one of the best titles I've played in recollection. It certainly has a share of flaws, many of which probably should have been removed in development, but it lacks those major flaws that games tend to have. It is rarely tedious and never gratuitous, which works nicely for me.

Like with witches but even more tits

Oh man, the Witcher. Oh man.

It's been years since I've played a MMORPG - Truth be told, I only ever played the one - but I'd been forewarned the Witcher is pretty just a MMORPG. I didn't really get that vibe full on at the start - fetch quests and wandering around like a moron who can't successfully push their way up a four foot hill or fence isn't exactly an innovation originating in the MMORPG market. Hell yea the Witcher's got that.

Combat didn't make any sense to me until a friend pointed out 'It's all a big Quicktime event!' then I realized how it works. Combat is better than most RPGs but just barely. It's sort of a rhythm game. You pick which sword you're supposed to use, then pick which style, then you're supposed to click again when the cursor changes color. It's a bit demeaningly simple, but honestly? It's better than the usual clickfest RPGs like to run with. I think there's a damage bonus for successfully clicking at the precise second but I'm not entirely sure. There's also reference to "special moves" at the higher levels but I never really managed to figure out how to use them. I set people on fire and then hit them repeatedly. Then I'd stun the last one and execute them.

The other elements, those being the usage of your limited grasp of offensive magic (which feels more like being a Psyker than a Mage) and alchemy, are a mixed bag. Potions are limited by a 'toxicity' bar, which precludes chugging them nonstop, but are otherwise pretty easy to craft reliably. There's a cost involved, enough that you don't keep buffs up all the time but not so bad as to preclude doing it. As you get later on in the game there are more and more ways to increase how much potioning you can do, which helps round the difficulty curve.Sex in the Witcher is immediate and hilarious. Awkwardly so, but hey sitcoms have pretty much lived off that crop for the last forty years. I've read people find the sex cards a bit misogynistic, which I think is probably both true and truthful. Which is to say yeah, it absolutely is, but it is in sort of an honest about human sexuality way. Tell me both genders don't do that and I'll call you a liar. I'm not really saying they need to be in the game - They certainly don't - But they're hardly the worst thing I've seen in a video game.

Still, I laughed pretty hard at the second sex thing. You meet some barmaid behind an old mill and head on inside for a romp. The cutscene suddenly shifts to a shot of some peasents across the river, commenting they should look for a Witcher since the Old haunted mill is acting out its ghostly problems again, making spooky noises and shaking. Perspective switches and its the barmaid making the usual noises as the Witcher, already on the scene and conducting his investigation, is fucking her brains out. I probably only laughed so hard out of complete shock.

Outside of sex, it's a roleplaying game about a moral choice system as it relates to a character who is both sort of a blank slate and intentionally written as sort of ambiguous in his beliefs. There's a great deal to be said for how you can imprint your own thoughts on the game and while I'm sure your choices don't massively influence the story you do get to see people you would have killed or talk about events that you made decisions about with them. I also really liked the game's "book" systems. As a character who has suffered amnesia, you are able to learn about your enemies and other things through literature made available in the game, which also creates a way to churn gold. In order to do a quest, you need to extract a specific component from fallen foes. To do this, you need to know how, so you have to buy a book. It's a good feeling though it's a bit frustrating when you're not certain if you missed a book or not.

So the combat is okay but not great, the graphics are a couple years old and the moral choice system is about as successful as any given system has ever been. That leaves us with little more than the story to talk about.

The story and theme are dark. Not grimdark, not grimderp, not needless or over the top. People get fucked up, bad shit happens, some people are donkeys and other people are sort of noble. It isn't bombastic, though you do see villages set on fire and people definitely die in the thousands.

On the other hand the main character isn't ridiculous about it. He knows he's a killer and while he struggles with it enough to seem a bit human, he's still something of a psychopath. As such the story is related to you in an even handed, less than flowery somewhat gritty manner. I really dug the style, as it feels very "European dark ages" and not in the lame King Arthur's wankfest sort of way. I mean a legitimately dark age story, admittedly in a medieval world with alchemists, sorcery and genetic mutants. The story is loaded with anachronisms, or maybe mistranslations, though most of them seem pretty intentional.

I found the plot and the 'twist' at the end kinda mediocre, but up until then I was pretty satisfied with what I was playing. The twist itself is interesting in how dark it is, and adds power to the story, but I actually felt like it was unnecessary. The idea that a plot thread could drop away in failure just feels more like the rest of the story to me.

All in all, I paid 2.50 for this game and it was an absolute steal. It's a quality work that, while at times a little disjointed or odd, was probably the best 2.50 I think I've ever spent.

Mass Effective Moral Choice System

Damn, playing some old games. Well, older games. Sort of a weird hybrid RPG sort of dealio from a company that I guess became considerably more famous following its release, or something, fuck I don't feel like looking up Bioware. I feel like this is the Baldur's Gate company, but maybe it isn't and maybe it doesn't matter. RPGs are so painfully overhyped its just atrocious. People like to forget this but there's a point in RPG development where people start confusing tedium with challenge. People will go man, Final Fantasy, great fucking game! Maybe it is, but I got a couple hours in and remembered they literally buried any good elements of the game under a huge heaping of tedium. And there's no story. And the combat sucks. Wait, why is this considered a great game? What at all was good about this game? Well, it's a RPG, so that's just what people expected! This is, mind you, from a generation of design school that eventually concluded RPGs should punish the player. People would actually argue that World of Warcraft was going to fail because unlike Everquest, it didn't punish you enough. Because mindless tedium is challenge. Yep.

So yeah I've gone through Baldur's Gate and maybe half the Icewind Dale stuff. I think I finished maybe 10% of Planescape Torment and just found it agonizingly dull. Maybe I got further, but I can't remember. There's text and dialogue and characters doing shit, but I just remember hoboy tedium, walking around this crazy town having boring adventures. Tedium, just endless tedium and bad systems and bad combat. But it's ok because it's a roleplaying game, so gargle those tedious cocks and slowly suck that roleplaying goo out. Hoboy.

You must gather your party before venturing forth.

Anyway so Mass Effect doesn't like me watching streams on twitch tv. Seriously! This is the second game in a row that goes crash happy if I've been watching my friend play MTGO. I was going to write a like two paragraph review about how overhyped nvidia's drivers are (how is this even possible) but it turns out its probably adobe flash or something shitting in my crappy computer's pipes. Fuck you Adobe, I hope Steve Jobs comes back from the dead and ravages you with his zombie aesthetics just all up in your shit. The game is pretty unstable to begin with, but if I've played a stream it crashes in a couple minutes tops.

Right off the bat the game gets me with two things I'm a total sucker for: Nice looking space shots and good music. Damn it Mass Effect, how did you know this was my weakness? The music is seriously the first thing that hits me. It isn't outstanding by any stretch of the imagination, but it's good. And sometimes good is enough to carry me through the start of the game.

Games go in two different ways with little deviation and this isn't meant to be an insightful point. Either games are painful at the start and then open up, or the start is awesome but then gets really shitty. Mass Effect tends greatly more towards the latter, as the beginning is weird and obtuse. The game's combat is honestly pretty bad. There's a ton of neat ideas in it, but it feels flakey and strange. A particularily stunning moment was a firefight with Krogan. I knocked him down, at which point my gun overheated. He healed to full, while my allies, a few feet from him, ignored him before he bumrushed me in melee. Then beat me to death while I wondered how melee worked.

I wasn't really mad. I clearly fucked up, but it's a pretty weird moment where you hit someone at point blank with a shotgun and then they just get up before punching you out. While your allies look on, perhaps in disgust. I'd be pretty disgusted. With this game.

Combat outside of this is pretty hohum, but even a couple hours into the game I find myself wondering exactly 'what just happened'. The game isn't being obvious about information - I have no idea if my allies are dying to critical strikes, if an explosion hit them, if they're debuffed, whatever. Cover seems a bit dicey at times and the game constantly puts you in ambushes, which does the design no favours. The whole cutscene before an ambush thing is ... Not especially well thought out. The grenade system confuses me as well, grenades seem to have no arc or interest in gravity. They just sail onwards, to infinity and beyond. Given they're not all that powerful to begin with, their status as "like a bullet but harder to aim" was a bit dull. On the other hand the weapon system seemed really good after a while. Most games with 'points in guns' you end up wanting to put all your points in one gun, then not use the other ones. The class I picked had access to two guns, and both of them felt equally useful but in different bits. Also the overheat system encourages some weapon swapping no matter, which felt fine.

Roleplaying games having pretty terrible combat isn't anything new, but the thing that really stands out in this game is just how little information is presented to me in combat. One of the things World of Warcraft (and perhaps all mmorpgs) spoils you on is the ability to analyze what you did wrong. If Mass Effect offers me a timeline showing exactly where I fucked up in beautiful detail, I haven't really found the option. When I die, I'm often not sure if I'm off the beaten path, doing things wrong or just ... unlucky. It's an odd feeling. Basically: Combat is kinda bad at times. It's also pretty different and doesn't drag itself out most of the time though.

The other elements of the game though are good to great. Cutscenes, as mentioned, do tend to over stay their welcome. As a basic design consideration, no game should ever do a cutscene then do something you can't save that might kill you. Want to put a cutscene before a boss fight? Too bad, it's shitty design and no one appreciates it. This isn't cinema, guys. You can do a cutscene just before the boss where they give their speech, allow the save and then have the fight. If you don't, either that or the fight is too easy or you have to constantly waffle your way through boring ass cutscenes. Not worth it me hearties. Moral choice systems are largely as meaningless as they were in the earliest days of gaming. I've never really understood why designs fixate on 'good' and 'bad', when really you're always sort of a good guy no matter how you play. Why not build the choice system around, say, greed, duty, law, disorder and passion? With special bonuses coming from both your dedication to an aspect but also your mix of choices. There's a big difference between the nobility of following a law completely to the letter and undertaking an epic quest on your own path to save some downtrodden orphan, but they're both good. Also, there's just as big a gap between a charming rascal who does under the table work and undermines the authority of his government, and a murderous fiend who does that moronic Chaotic evil thing that doesn't exist in real life. I'd like to play a charming rascal, but the derpy murder is fun play style is rather boring.

You murder tons of people in every roleplaying game ever made. And they're not even people! They're bit and boops from the computer.

Designers never really seem to take advantage of that and I'm not too sure why. The difference between 5 points in the "Law" column versus 3 points in Law and 2 points in Passion aren't hard to determine going in or coming out. So you get a slightly different power? Big deal. It's also harder to minmax and gives the player a great sense of freedom to just play the fucking game. I'm not even sure what the good and/or bad points actually did.

I played the game without any real minmaxing, I even let the autolevel system do its thing on the most part. This was sort of a mistake, since the game is a little retarded about electronics/decryption of objects, but I flipped it off, maxed those skills and flipped it back on. Score.

The back story feels like someone played Star Control, or whatever else. Ancient species cyclical hoo hah monitored other life forms precursors the halo the bugs the whatever, I don't know. It's a mash up of various ideas, not really too creative but decent enough. I enjoy the dialogue and I like the politics. I didn't totally like the whole romance angle, it feels a bit forced and stilted at times, but much of the game's progression is like this. Anywhere you go, people immediately know just about everything. You become a Specter and instantly there's people crawling all over you for help that only you can provide. I can understand this from a military angle, but random gangsters? Feel like they'd take a bit to learn through unofficial channels. Anyway the romance probably would have been better had it possessed a bit more randomness. Then again, the eventual sex scene was pretty tasteful and I can't really fault the game for stilted nature - doing it between missions (the romance, not the sex, ugh) is because they didn't want players to miss it. The rest of the characterization is pretty good though, I especially liked the Citadel Security turian that joins the squad after a bit. Also your lieutenant was a pretty well acted dude, though I did find the racist human female rather ... Flat.

The worst element of the story is how ridiculously limited the evidence given or needed at various points is. Your superiors will believe an audio recording, but not a recording of various scientists on the one planet talking about their experiments? Like, uh, you're telling me your space man's suit doesn't have a camera?

They have those now! In real life! I think they had those in desert storm!

The game actually reminds me a fair bit of Morrowind - Which also had great music - in many of the good and bad ways. Morrowind, mind you, had incredibly worse combat. When I say Mass Effect's combat is bad, it's bad for gaming in general. It's certainly no worse than any roleplaying game I can bring to mind and probably a great deal better than most. Level design makes or breaks it, with some of the levels having snipers that shoot you from a million miles away and other levels paced well. Plus it does have shot guns. I love shot guns.

Unlike Morrowind, while I really liked this game, I don't think I'll be replaying it, at least until my next system. I believe this is the second unreal engine game to crash constantly on my machine - thankfully unlike Darksiders which I didn't bother to finish, Mass Effect is pretty decent about autosaving.

Lastly, I want to specifically talk about the last two big moral choices at the end of the game. There's a pair of them, which have some influence on the ending and perhaps the next game. The first choice has three options - though I'm not too sure which one specifically leads to what. The tactically correct decision given the situation is ... Bad. What? Then, following that, the tactically correct choice for the next option is ... Good?

Seriously, good and evil become increasingly dumb concepts when you're in some way 'evil' for making the correct choice. At least within circumstances where you've murdered 800,000 Geth who just want to know why beep boops their boing :(