Still RPG month: Risen

One of the ever increasing joys of the new age of computing is getting games from somewhere other than Japan. I'm not complaining about glorious Nippon, which has given so much, but it's nice to get another culture. I'm from Canada, so for me American games are pretty base, but Europe man, Europe is a bold new world.

The first moment where I really realized I was playing a European game was playing through King's Bounty: The Legend, a game I played through more than a couple times, where the main character married a 'Frog Princess' and she talked about having tadpoles. Whoa! Europe! What's going on? The Witcher is pretty weird like that too, Dwarves making jokes about tying Carrots to their dicks. You don't do that over here, all games are glum excursions through ultra violence. American games is brown town splattered with blood. You are only allowed to make jokes at the specific joking moment.

I picked up Risen entirely because of Risen 2, that being, Risen 2 sounded sweet. Pirate RPG! Well damn son, I like pirates. Let's try the previous game, made in 2009 (which isn't too far back!) to see how it is while we wait for the second game to go on sale. This is an excellent plan, one that can't possibly fail. Besides I paid $5 for it, which is the 3rd best class of price.

First class is the EA Origins coupon error, which allows you to buy any games under $20 for free. So Dragon Age: Whatever and Shank 2 were free. (Actually I guess Dragon Age wasn't quite free, since it's 21 gb, so there's an opportunity cost to getting that one installed) 2nd best is the Witcher price of 2.50, which is less than the price of just about anything worth buying. I'm digressing rather than talking about Risen. Risen isn't bad, but it's kinda hard to talk about.

Risen feels a ton like the opening of the first Witcher game, though much less in terms of both grounding you into the game mechanics and flavor. On the other hand, while it looks similar, it looks a fair bit better. The engine itself isn't that impressive, but it has some nice touches like dust motes, pollen and waves crashing that pleases the mind. The UI on the other hand is downright primitive, rustic like you'd playing a SNES game that somehow got ported to 3d. I'm not kidding here, it looks like Magic Sword or something.

But I mean, SNES games are sweet, right...

Actual RPG month: Witcher 2

There are only a handful of gaming thoughts I have that come to mind from 2012. Stuff like "I wish homm games didn't suck now" and "I wish I could still enjoy Final Fantasy games" come to mind every year. But 2012 is a year of many new games for me, but not many memorable games.

First one is probably damn, seriously, every shooterish game I play I miss the vivisecting, the UI and the crumbs button from Dead Space. Most games would legitimately be improved by a more integrated UI that feels more natural, and blowing legs off things is always cool. I think that sort of gunplay was in RAGE and Fallout, but never as well done. The crumbs button itself remains something I miss every time though, in every game. I'm not saying I need a button to tell me exactly where to go all the time, but if you're going to say 'go to such an such a place' a route or maybe just something that spins me in the right direction would be so very nicely....

Second one is, god DLC is annoying. Why isn't DLC just always something naturally added to the game? I want to get ME3 this year, and I don't want to pirate it, but I seriously shouldn't have to go through a fucking circus to get the DLC running. I looked at ME2's DLC and it was like, blah blah, bioware bux forum this EA login that and I was like fucking whatever.

Third one, I really wanted to play Witcher 2. And here we are.

Witcher 2 is neat for many reasons. I liked the Witcher for, in order of things I like: the atmosphere, the setting, the truly grey morality, the potion system, the characters I liked, the fact the main character actually had sex, the combat and the characters I didn't like. There is, for future reference, a difference between genuine human sexuality and that weird hundred year old librarian virgin thing in Mass Effect. The Witcher was yeah, a little sexist kinda, but at least it was an honest and earnest portrayal of a manwhore. It is a portrayal of euro-centric style middle ages, which is like the apex predator king of all sexists, the sexism that walks like a monster truck. All of these I expected moving forward, but the Witcher 2 also brings up its game with a gorgeous engine.

It is just so awesome that a company that doesn't have a bajillion dollars can be completely successful beyond the "indie" scope and produce a game that looks triple A. And it got ported to consoles, or at least, the Xbox360. So I fired the game up after finishing Fallout 3, watching the gorgeous intro and started the tutorial.

Took me about ten minutes to hit a bug in the tutorial. God. Fucking. Damn it. PC gaming!

Not RPG month, I swear: Fallout 3 GOTY

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

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

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

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

And it wasn't hard.

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

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

A year in the making: Darksiders!

The time played on this, which I provide to give a vague idea how much play I got out of a game, is all sorts of screwy. I picked up Darksiders like, last year? The summer sale I want to say? I was pretty excited to play it or at least vaguely interested. Mostly on the basis of really liking the art style. Also, I waited a while, because I wanted a controller to play it with but was looking for a deal.

Problem being is my previous PC had little interest in running Darksiders, or at least enough disinterest that I eventually gave up about half-way through. I'd blame the game, but tons of stuff was crashing on that PC for a variety of reasons. Mass Effect 2, which I noted back in its review, would crash in the exact same way and had the same engine. I fixed that by going to windowed maximized mode, but Darksiders being more of a port wouldn't let me. So it got shelved and now it's back.

Darksiders is a weird experience for me in that I've never really played 3D Zelda games. I've been told repeatedly Darksiders is a huge rip-off primarily of Zelda, but I largely don't see it for lack of experience. Zelda is a weird one for me, in that I picked up the first 3D version and it sort of became the figurehead for how much I hated the transition to 3D from 2D. I played through the proverbial golden age of PC gaming and was never too impressed with where 3D took most games. So I never played past the first dungeon, and more for baseline reasons like 'I hate how this game looks' and 'I hate 3D controls'. LTTP was like Super Metroid, I wish they'd made another like ten of that game. So much so that I played the gameboy Zeldas. No, the original Gameboy. Have you looked at that thing? Horrifying. My old eyes can't even tell what's on a Gameboy screen nowadays. Is that Link? Or a turtle? what

So I really have no idea how innovative Darksiders probably isn't. To be honest, when people say games are innovative or whatever, I just think they're showing their ignorance. Games and books feel creative because we have pretty limited perceptions of the vastness of the medium. I probably say it too and I'm probably showing my ignorance when I do it. The only real spot you can have truly exciting creativity in games is in controls and UI, which I doubt Darksiders, Zelda or whatever the fuck else have really broken new ground in

And seriously if you count a game as unique because of storytelling: BOOKS.

Year in Review: 2012

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

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

Play Relevant Month: Fatalism of the Orcs, Again?

Sequels, man, sequels. There's still orcs. And they still must die.

OMD2 catches up with its spiritual "competitors" Sanctum and Dungeon Defenders by adding two player coop, adding the oh so sexy sorceress from the first game as a coop partner. I put those two in quotes because OMD1 was fun, those other two, not really. I think coop is largely the biggest and most evident element added to the game, the engine looks slightly better, the music and sounds remain excellent. The art style is cartoonish and the whole game maintains the same irreverence the first one had. You'd notice immediately if you say down to play OMD2 that it wasn't OMD1, but maybe it would take a bit to discern between the two if you were watching a stream or so.

The other big changes to the game are more behind the scenes sort of stuff. There are new map types and new maps, but those sort of blur past you. The game has a much deeper pool of traps to choose from, with more weapons and the addition of a "trinket" item type that has various miscellaneous effects. The biggest change to those is a grindy system where you acquire "skulls" as you did in the first game to upgrade and modify your gear. The first game has one upgrade per trap, whereas this game has a chain of basic upgrades, then a binary selection.

Play Relevant Month: Raging off the Rocks

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

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

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

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