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 :(

what a fucking Shock

Video game branding and in fact the fundamentals of branding have shifted further away from the ideals of my childhood, or at least the claimed but truly not attended to ideals of my childhood.

I want to say that marketing people were more creative in those by gone lost halcyon days but a deeper resentful thought occurs to me that whenever people refer to eras we can barely recall they are entirely full of shit. One I'm fond of is "Gamers these days are dumber" and "has to be dumbed down for the console crowd!"

I'm old as gamers go but I really don't think there was an era where game and intelligence were some sort of ubiquitous marriage. People like to say this but in which era exactly? The mainstream when I was very young was ... Mario. I didn't really enjoy Mario so much as a kid, preferring Sonic through into my teens (and then getting out of console gaming when Sonic should have too) but either or you really can't make an argument for Mario being an especially harder to play game than say, Call of Duty. Have you ever played a fucking FPS on a console? It's quite a bit more difficult than Mario's beep boop run jump gameplay, at least from a mechanical perspective. You could sort of argue that RTS games require 'more' out of the player than either, but RTS games never "Dumbed down" or "dumbed up" anyone. They're just there and they're pretty much the same. There is perhaps some progression of titles that "would have been" for the PC slipping onto the Xbox or what have you, but I'm A) not entirely sure those titles would have existed at all without consoles B) actually any stupider. More RPGs which aren't dumbed down are actually just really irritating and filled with tedium, which in case you haven't solved all the fucking mysteries sherlock, are not actually on any level an interaction with your potential or lack thereof intellect.

So I think that's a load of shit and I think waxing nostalgia about a past era were marketing departments didn't fuck rape the sequel engine is probably intellectually dishonest as well. Still it's hard to really look at Bioshock Infinite and not seriously wonder at least a little bit about the stillborn progression as it goes. I was re-watching some Yahtzee videos (Zero Punctuation) to see how he felt about stuff I'd recently played and watched Bioshock 2's review. I agreed pretty much totally in regards to this one, the game largely did not need to exist and wasn't very good. It was good enough to finish, but not really better than say reinstalling the first game and just replaying it again.

This is a snapshot of Bioshock Infinite's wikipedia page at the time of this review, whenever the fuck that is. The problem here, if one is not certain, is that the game isn't on speaking terms with actually being FUCKING OUT, OR PLAYABLE. There is more detail here than most games I've played or will ever play, in spite of the fact none of these people have to my knowledge played it. Maybe they have, at which point ... Should wikipedia seriously be hosting what is essentially an internally review product shot? (Maybe there's something here to be discussed regarding the natural progression of media outlets arriving and eroding until they become 'mainstream journalism' but cyclical shit is JUST THAT)

But still I digress - the part of this game that I truly well and hate is that it's named "Bioshock" in the first place. Bioshock itself is billed as the spiritual sequel to "System shock" a series I've never played but have been told I'm a bad person for not playing. Tough but fair. The name Bioshock comes from the impact of genetic engineering techniques either on your person, or on a society, at least on a general level. The SHOCK of BIOtechnology. Har, dee har, har... har... I mean maybe it's actually named for two programmers eating too much Domino's pizza and brewing up some truly shocking biology. Maybe. The SHOCK of colon BIOlogy?

What exactly is Bioshock about this one? It appears to grope the same "We're nouveau artists of the sublime video realms" tree as Bioshock -or at least the same low hanging branches- in that this giant paragraph here seems to talk about nazism, but beyond that I'm at a loss. Does it have the same characters? No. Same mechanics? Other than guns in general it sounds like no. Some connection to the story? Coy answers from the marketing department who haven't determined the first fucking thing about their game. Fire all marketing departments.

So they could have called it "something"Shock and most likely it would have fit fine. I would say 'Skyshock' is the easiest from what the game seems to be about, which sounds like Bioshock and I think 99% of the population would get it. I'm not really suggesting that name, since that name is sort of mopey.

But they literally think we're so unbelievably stupid we can't assemble the publisher, the developer, the lead programmer, the genre, the word shock and successfully deduce that this is the successor to Bioshock. It's a real fucking mystery is what it is, and there just can't ever be enough clues! Just never enough FUCKING CLUES! Need INFINITE CLUES! So instead they re-use the same name and then tack on Infinite, as if to reinforce we're infinitely stupid and can't solve the mystery of the missing Bio.

Infinite fuck yous, Bioshock. Not buying you til you're $5 anyway cuz I still haven't beaten ALL THESE GAMES.

Oh and on a side note if you're one of those arrogant and self-congratulating plebs who like to talk about how 'people these days are so gosh darn stupid look at blah blah' you should really ground yourself in a deeper understanding of the material at least insofar as human history. Not only do basic statistics technically argue otherwise, but the most basic points just don't make any sense.

I mean the most ironically parroted one is the bit about how only idiots breed with idiots nowadays, which sounds like good logic if you're a nazi and you think eugenics is proven to work but ... It just doesn't add up. Have you looked at your ancestors? I mean really looked at our pool of ancestors? There's several generations who engaged in gun warfare where they lined up shoulder to shoulder and shot at each other. Before that they were peasants in the dark ages, or busy fucking goats in rome. It's a wonder we don't have goat genome in our blood stream somehow. Or thought the sky was made of Magic. When were our ancestors brighter? Maybe there's a couple glorious civilizations, like say ancient China, but those people turned around and starved to death because they decided to just stop farming.

And sure, you can point to popular culture. Go for it. Thirty years ago was the eighties mother fuckers. Reality TV ain't got shit on this! Bright neon rollerblades and rapping Turtles!

Get your hands on your wand

I didn't like Magicka. I tell you that because if you did like it, don't go int othis trying to defend it. You're not going to argue out of this one: I didn't like it, and I'm not going to like it.

I bought it for three dollars. I might have bought some DLC with it. The game is relentless in terms of DLC, I think they released like 17 different piles of shit to throw onto the turd furnace and it just boils with fecal rage. I don't generally like DLC, because it usually just makes me wait even longer to buy games I'm not even going to play.

So maybe I should like DLC for doing me the favour? Thanks DLC!

Anyway - Magicka. The single player campaign is all I have strong memories of. I tried playing multiplayer and it was just a clusterfuck. I know, you're going to say "That's part of its charm" and I'm going to respond I don't care. Diablo 2 multiplayer was a clustfuck with explosions and blizzards, barbarians yelling and other wacky shit. That game was released like a hundred years ago and it looked better, played better and was on every level better than this shit piece of a game. Though it actually comes with its own set of excuses, it doesn't have the issue of "I'm not even sure which character is mine and I no longer even care". That is a problem I actually had with this game in multiplayer - the controls are so sluggish and horrible that I wasn't sure which dope in a robe I was actually playing for a minute or two. I played MP for a couple minutes. I eventually got bored and just went AFK; the game continued without my input, or maybe it didn't, but I didn't really care. I think they might have been mad at me for leaving, but then I was mad for being told to buy and/or play this fucking awful game.

The title screen looks like garbage and the opening screens all look like garbage. I would say the game looks like garbage, but I actually dig the art style of everything that isn't a focus for the player. Which is to say; I liked the backgrounds! It's slow and clunky to get to whatever it is you want to do, which is always a good sign.

so then you get to single player, which appears to be ... I don't know, it looks like it's trying to be cute and funny, but it's a complete failure in that regard. I just found the accents and dialogue to be a rather weak, dull attempt at lightening the mood to help make up for just not having any idea how to make an interesting anything. It feels like a clown at a funeral. I was doing the single player for an achievement, which was irritating and forced me to play for an hour when I'd already realized from my earlier multiplayer that the game was stupid and not worth my time.

Maybe my patience is not at its strongest when I feel like I'm being forced to play the game. I mean yeah you don't have to do the coal thing and who cares, but I already owned it so I felt like I should go through with it, get it done.

The main character looks stupid as fuck, but again, the game is trying to be cute and funny so ... Yeah? I guess? Is that really much of an excuse or something? Crap looks like shit because it's supposed to be so LIKE IT?

The tutorial is terribly boring, but it does manage to explain the basics of the system. After being buggy and not working for a bit mind you. Not really sure how you code a tutorial that instructs you to do something and then you can't do it? After getting that to work it explains the element thing.

This is where the game breaks down. The game is essentially, as best I can tell in my two hours of hating my life edit playing it, structured around mixing elements in two fashions. Actually mixing them on your bar and then mixing then on enemies. So you make enemies 'wet' then you 'freeze' them, and then you smash them. You can mix the elements to make like, water and freeze bombs, and then maybe some other shit I never bothered to figure out because...

The game is a clunky mess. Combos take several clicks to activate, then to charge up, all while dodging around various enemies. The controls are sluggish and you get debuffed often, then enemies jump on you, then I'm just really tired of playing this shitty game. You're not really punished, most of the time, but it adds this constant layer of tedium and annoyance to doing even the simplest thing.

The combo system is an amazing idea on paper as well as in execution and in the embrace of a better game would be stellar. I mean it is stellar and really cool, but in this game I feel like I'm repeatedly entering my pin code at the grocery store while the cashier talks to me. I don't know how else to express the feeling of awkward mixed with annoying. I'm buying cottage cheese and spinach and the cashier is looking at me funny. Oh, she forgot to ring up my jalapenos.

That is the feeling I get playing this game. This creeping dull ache that lodges itself right between my eyes, that's the feeling I get.

I felt the entire time like I was wrestling with a snake covered in shit, but with more button pressing. The other big problem is the game just has no space to do anything, the arenas feel very pinched in and tiny.

So I got my achievement and literally alt-f4'd that very second. This is after reloading into an earlier checkpoint when I got to a push that, as best I can tell, was actually created to punish me for not being careful when it came to getting the achievement earlier. The dull ache in my head completely prohibited figuring out the regenerating can't hit snake boss, so fuck you. Then I uninstalled it.

This is actually in a category of games I firmly wish I could delete from my steam account forever and not have to see ever again. The best description I can give of this game is playing a poorly written sitcom with wizards doing chores while you enter pin codes over and over again.

It's just really dreary. Maybe I'd enjoy it drunk, but you know what else I'd enjoy while drunk? Walking home in the cold. So that's not much of a compliment.

Sometimes the song and dance actually is enough

It's kinda strange going into games you know are overrated. You can tell enough from a trailer to tell, well, that one isn't quite the stellar knockout your peers are wailing about it being.

Bastion, well, yeah you can tell from the trailer instantly that's it something all right.

First things first, the narrator, nope nope not gonna talk about that. Gonna talk about art. What's the word mean? Not quite sure. I've been told that engineering is all boxes and aesthetics is all curves, and art is where you blend the two to makes something functionally aesthetic. The meaning of that one might not be immediate, but truth be told Bastion is gorgeous. It looks somewhere between the charming SNES era pixel delights of the bygone age before 3D crapped everything up and a watercolour painting. Maybe it's a pixel portrait rendered perfectly through a watercolour filter, I don't know. By the way sometimes you blend in bullshit and hype into art, and you get pop culture, but Bastion has no truck with that and the game's art does right by me.

The game is real pretty, right down to its bones. Even beyond the visuals the sound meshing together nicely really ratchets things up a step. The game is dreamlike and blissful, which is at times almost off putting given what the game appears to be about. I think the game implies its a nuclear apocalypse, but maybe it's just some other form of apocalypse.

It's also offputting because it's a failure as a game.

Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, well the game, as a game, sucks. Hard. I found myself bored and listless more times than I could count, with the "level falling into place" gimmick overstaying its welcome about 30 mintues into the game. Don't care guys, just put the level in front of me. Oh cool I fell off because I was bored and just rolling forward while your art drops into place. Sweet game design. You run everywhere, slowly, unless you're fighting and then that feels slow too. Combat is course and unintuitive, boring and unrewarding. The enemies have a measure of personality, but fights are mostly dull button mashings that there's probably a better way to do...

Except I don't care, and the game doesn't seem to either. There's likely a well spring of better means to an end, but maybe there isn't and the game didn't push me to try to discover it. Maybe the 'training arena' thing is supposed to teach me that but by the third one I was terribly bored of them on a conceptual level. I'm not saying the game is hard, I'm saying it sucks. The counter system sucks, the block system sucks, the ranged system sucks, the aim system sucks (like really sucks), the weapons all suck and so on so forth. All sucks. It's a perfect suck. For most of the game I found myself wishing I could just do something else, then past the first half you actually get a gun worth using and then things are ... Better, though still not great.

This is where we talk about gunplay, right, ok cool. One of the things FPS games have so rightly to themselves is when you push THAT BUTTON bullets come out and they're innately satisfying. Maybe decades of movie culture being driven into our brains, but you hit that and you feel good for unloading a clip into a splicer, demon, mutant or other player. Bastion has nothing like that in the first two hours, the weapons feel clunky and above all else shitty. You'd think a hammer would do it, it doesn't. It has the satisfying feel of a limp noodle striking the pasta bowl. Shit still hits you most of the time anyway. You'd think the grenades would, except in a tense situation they seem to stop working and just cartwheel off the fucking planet. You eventually get the carbine, which feels pretty decent. The mortar is great, and should have been in the game earlier.

One of the turrets has slow moving homing bullets, which you can dance around if you're carrying the repeater. Fine! So I need this one gun! Cool. Thanks. Oh if you're not, you try to shoot them and then maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but I'm bored.

So I think to myself, am I supposed to block? Maybe. Sometimes that doesn't work. Maybe not. Sometimes you counter block, which takes timing, then the homing shot loops back around and kills you.

Are you fucking kidding me? You actually have the dull ache in your groin necessary to pop up COUNTER! when I just tripped up and killed myself off using the shield? Man this game, thiiiis game.



Yeah great. The game just forced a weapon on me and then that weapon is terrible in the following fight. This has happened a couple times and it's incredibly unwelcome as game design goes. I actually died here, which happened not especially often, then just stopped playing for a bit because it was so unfun. If you can't make out the screen shot here for the fucking bloom effect (note: this shit sucks too) I'm trapped in a plant cage and the weapon I'm using either doesn't work on it, or does but I can't tell for all the shit smudged on the screen. Why would you ever do this? Look at this screenshot, does this work for you?

Anyway so it's a righteous romp through a beautiful drawn and gorgeously rendered daydream with sweet as fuck sound engineering, with some sort of good weapon system and sweet village building minigame. There's so many things right with this game, so much correct and awesome, that the fact THE GAME itself is THE SUCK is just so much more jarring. If it was just a stewed pile of shit through and through, you wouldn't even blink at the woeful flaws. In fact you probably wouldn't reach those flaws because you'd put it down. It's a game that draws you in and keeps you going, but for every delicious spoonful of great story telling, beautiful art and gorgeous audio work you get a couple flakes of broken glass. Om nom nom nom ow fuck my mouf.

I'd probably buy it again, and if they made another game I'd probably buy that too, because it's actually sort of satisfying to play a game that truly is pretty enough and artistic enough to just keep you going. The gameplay really isn't that far off being decent and if I was asked to tell the developers how to improve it - I'd say ratchet down the tedium, give the weapons more oomph and remove any/all shit like this

Where's the fucking pig? Seriously, this section lasts about 5 minutes but it's intolerable. There's a bunch of shit like this, where visibility is poor, you can't tell what's going on, enemies off the screen are shooting at you, so on and so forth. I can sort of understand if it's supposed to add to the drama, but it's just miserable. It doesn't really add to the challenge anyway, so it's just miserable for the sake of being miserable. The latter half of the game mostly does away with it and the latter half of the game is mostly really good, so maybe they should have just focused on making the latter half more of the game.

Next up - Get your wands ready, it's time to talk about a game I actually didn't like (really)

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.