Eric Allen's Blog, page 4

Philly Cheesesteak (sort of)

 

1-2 lbs pot roast (or pork, or chicken, whichever you feel like)

2 green bell peppers.

2 onions.

2 tbs olive oil.

1 packet Au Jus gravy mix.

4 cups water.

1 cup diced *Velveta cheese (preferably the queso blanco type)

Salt (or garlic salt if you want to get fancy).

Pepper.

Hoagie Buns.

 

Pour water into the instant pot and add the Au Jus packet.  Whisk together until the powder is mixed in.

Cut your meat into several medium sized chunks and place in the gravy mix spaced evenly apart.

Pressure Cook for 50 mins, and allow 10 mins to depressurize afterward.

 

While the meat is cooking, dice your peppers, onions, and Velveta.

 

When you have 20 mins left (10 mins cook, 10 mins depressurize) pour oil into a large skillet pan and heat up on high.  Add your diced veggies, lower heat to medium, and sauté until thoroughly cooked through, should take about 15-20 mins.

 

Once the meat is done, add 3 cups of the Au Jus to the skillet and bring to a boil.  Discard or save the remaining.  

 

Add in the diced Velveta and stir constantly until it has melted completely into the mixture.

 

Lower heat to medium and shred your meat with a fork.

 

Add shredded meat to the skillet and mix and stir in so that the sauce soaks into it all then leave on the heat until it thickens.  Add in 1 tbs of cornstarch if it seems really watery.

 

Season with salt and pepper to your preference.

 

Serve on hoagie buns.

 

 

*I use Velveta because it melts really well, you can use other cheeses if you prefer.

Persona 5 royal

 So, a few months ago, around the time I finished with my plethora of Riftworld novellas, I saw that Persona 5 Royal was on sale on the Playstation store.  I'd heard good things about it, and decided, eh, why not?  ...after a quick check to make sure I didn't need to play the previous 4 in order to understand what's happening anyway.  Luckily it's its own contained story, with a few vague connections that people who had played previous games could point and Captain America, "I got that reference" at.  I also have no idea what the difference between Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal is, but I assume it's one of those paper Burger King crowns.

Aaaaaaanyway, I loved it.  It's one part Jrpg dungeon exploration.  One part visual novel.  And one part dating sim (not the creepy kind, I'll explain on that later)  It is an epicly loooooooong game.  I finished it with just over 126 hours of gameplay.  And for $25 that's a lot of bang for my buck.  It literally took me months to finish it with a few hours here and a few hours there.

You play as a guy who tried to do the right thing, but ended up doing it against a powerful politician who basically wrecked his entire life, getting him thrown out of his home and school, and placed on probation with prison time waiting for him if he screwed up again for it.  He goes to live in a foster home and soon finds that he has been granted the ability to enter the hearts of those who have been twisted by their desires to force them to confess all of their crimes.  As the story progresses he picks up quite a few allies and supporters until it all comes to a pretty crazy epic conclusion.

The story is a bit on the weird and convoluted side, but where it really shines is with an amazing cast of characters.  I probably wouldn't have stuck through the game to the end if not for the characters.  They're all really entertaining and well fleshed out.  Each of your party members has their own story that unfolds slowly throughout the game by spending time with them (hence the dating sim aspect) as you progress through each character's story, you're given dialog options that give you different amounts relationship points as you'd get with a dating sim, but this is less dating, and more getting to know your friends.  It's just very similar to a dating sim in that regard.  There are also a bunch of side characters with stories that you can build bonds with.  As the levels of your bonds go up, you gain access to more and more powerful support abilities, so spending time with the people around you makes you stronger in the dungeon exploration and boss fight parts of the game.

There are also long stretches of story cutscenes that are presented in visual novel format.  My brother found it a bit tedious, but I loved it.  The three aspects of the game blend together into a very fun and entertaining game with a pretty good story, amazing characters, and fun gameplay.  The game also has a very distinct visual style.  It practically bleeds style.  It's very visually interesting to look at.  People can gush all they want about photorealistic graphics all they want, but I'll take something that is visually unique and interesting to look at over realistic any day of the week.

There's only two small things I didn't really like so much about the game.  The first is that the music is kind of meh.  There are one or two memorable tracks.  The final boss music being really, really awesome.  But for the most part it's just kind of generic elevator music.  And the second is that it does that silent protagonist thing, where you choose dialog options, but the character never actually speaks.  I've always hated that.  I know it's supposed to make you feel like you're more a part of the story, but for me it does the exact opposite.  Would it kill them to have the character say whichever dialog option you choose aloud, like in, say, a Mass Effect game?

Anyway, I really, really liked the game.  I had a lot of fun with it.  There are a few parts where the story drags a bit, but it's held up by the great characters and their interactions with each other.  I thought the three different gameplay types blended together pretty well with the story and characters, and the visual style, to make a game that was truly unique and definitely worth the time to play.  (also it's on sale again right now on the playstation store as part of the Black Friday Sale, so, pick it up if you've some extra cash and 126 free hours.)

Jambalaya

 My parents got me an Instant Pot for my birthday and I've been experimenting with creating a few recipes lately.  Thought I'd post a few on my blog.  You might be thinking, isn't that kind of a weird gift for a 40-something dude?  Cooking is one of my hobbies, and I've always wanted a pressure cooker, so here we are.

So this is a recipe for pressure cooker Jambalaya I came up with:

2 tablespoons olive oil 

1 onion diced 

1 red bell pepper diced 

1 green bell pepper diced 

3 green chopped green onions 

3 cloves garlic chopped 

2 cups chicken stock 

1 6 oz can tomato paste 

2 tsp Cajun seasoning 

1 tsp onion powder 

1 tsp garlic powder 

3/4 tsp sea salt 

1.5 cup rice 

2 large chicken breasts 

3 uncooked sausages 

Salt and pepper

 

Instructions

1.)  Rinse the rice.

2.) Pan fry your sausage until it’s cooked through enough to keep its shape when you slice it.  It doesn’t have to be completely cooked through.  Set aside to cool.

3.) Cut chicken to whatever size you prefer.  Season with some Cajun seasoning, salt and pepper and let marinate in a bit of chicken stock, just enough to coat it all, while you prepare everything else.

4.) Add oil to Instant Pot and sauté vegetables.

5.) Turn off sauté function. Add chicken stock. Use a wooden spatula to release any brown bits that are stuck on the bottom.

6.) Add in garlic powder, onion powder, and Cajun seasoning.

7.) Slice sausages into 1/3 to 1/2 inch thick slices and add into the pot.

8.) Spread the rice in the pot as evenly as possible. Top with the chicken without overlapping.

9.) Pressure cook for 10 mins.  Allow another 10 mins to depressurize.

10.)Shred chicken if desired, or leave as is.

11.) Mix it all thoroughly.

12.) Salt and pepper to your preferences.

 

Takes about 45 mins to prepare and cook, 30 of them being ignoring the instant pot while it works its magic.  Feeds 5, you can also upscale it if you need more, by adding more rice and chicken stock, everything else remains the same.

Star Wars Squadrons.

 I was really excited for this game.  Back in the day I LOVED X-wing, Tie Fighter, X-wing vs. Tie Fighter, and the rogue squadron games.  I really enjoyed the flight sim, space combat gameplay in the Star Wars universe, usually with at least a decent story to go along with it, oftentimes a pretty good story.  I mean, have you played Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike?  That game has an amazing story, that fit really well into the original trilogy, and fun and challenging gameplay.  The opening level where you have to defend the Yavin 4 base while the Empire is bombarding the crap out of it in retaliation for the destruction of the Death Star was so good that i instantly fell in love with that game.

Anyway, I really like the Star Wars flying sim games.  They're fun, and let me live out my childhood fantasies of being Luke Skywalker.  Childish?  Yeah.  But, I mean, I was a child.  So sue me.  So, I actually preordered this one.  The trailers made it look great.  EA had finally made an okay Star Wars game in Jedi: Fallen Order last year, and I was optimistic that this game would be at least decent.

Yeah.  No.  It was not.

So, I play games for the story.  I DO NOT care about online multiplayer AT ALL.  I don't like people.  I might even go so far as saying I hate people, in general, as a concept.  My idea of heaven is being alone, forever, without having to interact with another human being for the rest of eternity.  I don't want to have to deal with people.  Dealing with people is extremely stressful for me.  I have anxiety attacks just thinking about it.  I will go ridiculously out of my way just to avoid having to interact with people in my daily life.  I play games to relax after a stressful day of having to deal with people.  I don't want to have to deal with people while I'm trying to relax.  So that aspect of this game will never appeal to me in any way.  I expected at least a so-so story mode.  Even with such a low bar, I still managed to be disappointed in it.

The story mode of this game is basically just an extended tutorial for the multiplayer side of things.  The game never actually shuts up and just lets you play it and figure things out on your own.  The story is bland and uninteresting.  The characters are either very flat, very annoying, or very unlikable.  And the gameplay itself is kind of boring, really, and feels copy and pasted from Battlefront 2 with a few minor bells and whistles added to it.  The graphics are decent, and the music is all right.  But graphics are not everything.  My all-time favorite video game is 16-bit.  The story mode of this game feels a lot like the story campaign of Battlefront 2.  It's just not told very well, or very interestingly.  It's lazy, boring, full of bad or nonsensical writing.  And the characters are just grating.  I would not be surprised at all if you told me that the same person or team wrote the story campaigns of both games.  This was NOT a story that needed to be told, and, when you get right down to it, it was barely even a story at all.  This game feels like it was just slapped together in a few months as a cheap cash grab.

 

I did attempt to play the multiplayer mode once, and I just felt like there was no overall point to it.  It's just playing the game for the sake of the gameplay, which, in my opinion, wasn't all that great to begin with.

Unless you REALLY want an online multiplayer flight sim space combat game, don't bother.  It is only $40, but I'd say the actual game content and quality is more on the level of a $15 indie game off Steam.  Not worth the price.

Four things. And a lizard. Sans lizard.

 Okay, so I finished my editing work on all my little novellas that I wrote this summer and if you so feel the urge, you can read them by following This Link. They're at the bottom of the page.

Soooooooo.  Here's a little synopsis of each of them:

1.) The Reality Engine - A scholar runs away from home, searching for an ancient artifact that may hold the secrets behind the creation of the world.  (28k words)

2.) The Fox King - A slave girl uses a war to make money toward buying her own freedom.  (26k words)

3.) A Certain Necessity of Evil - A slave girl murders her masters and is sold to an assassin who begins training her as his apprentice.  (33k words)

4.) The Bastard Princess - A queen's bastard tries to make a life for herself in a world that hates her and blames her for a devastating civil war.  (39k words)

 

Like I said, these novellas are meant to set up the characters and the world for a forthcoming novel that I plan to begin work on later this year.

Red Dead Redemption 2

So, for my birthday, my brother got me Red Dead Redemption 2, a game he's been trying to get me to play for ages now.  This is the same brother who got me all of the Mass Effect games for Christmas, not because I wanted them, but because he wanted me to have them.  Notice a bit of a theme here?  He didn't even get me a new copy of the game.  It was used, and didn't come with a case.  Whatever.  So I figured, I'd give it a try, I did end up enjoying most of the Mass Effect games, excluding 2, after all.

So, up front, I have to say that I have never had any interest in Red Dead Redemption 2 at all.  I saw a bunch of trailers, tv spots, and ads plastered all over the internet, but I also heard some really, really bad things about the working conditions  for the people who worked on it.  They basically got paid slave wages to work 90+ hours a week on it, and didn't even get bonuses when the game did well, while the executives raked it in and kept it all for themselves.  I'm not really huge into westerns.  I'll watch an occasional one here and there if someone else suggests it, but I don't really watch them on my own.  It's not a genre I've ever really cared all that much about.  Except for High Noon.  That movie is pretty badass.

 

So, I really liked the prologue of Red Dead Redemption 2.  I thought it was fun to play.  It had interesting characters.  I liked the combat, which is kind of reminiscent of Mass Effect or Gears of War.  The hide behind thing, shoot at things, move up to hide behind other thing, repeat, etc etc etc.  I thought to myself, well, if the whole game is like this, I'll probably end up loving it.

And then the prologue ended, and the game turned into the EXACT kind of open world game that I hate.  The kind where your main story progression quests are not marked out, if they even exist at all.  There's a whole bunch of side quests marked out all over the map, and some of them are rather entertaining little stories, but there's no main story quest you can go do to progress in the game once you get bored with doing side quests.  Look at the Witcher 3.  You've got about 17 million side quests and points of interest splattering the map like a freaking Jackson Pollock painting.  But where you go for the next leg of the main story is ALWAYS clearly marked out for you, so once you get bored with doing side stuff, you can move on and progress to the next part of the story.  It's the same with Horizon Zero Dawn.  And Final Fantasy 15.  And Xenoblade Chronicles X.  And Nier Automata.  And Mass Effect Andromeda.  All of those games are big open world games full of all kinds of side quests and things to explore.  BUT THEY ALL HAVE A CLEARLY MARKED OUT MAIN STORY TO PROGRESS IN WHEN YOU GET SICK OF THE SIDE STUFF!!!  

 

Red Dead Redemption 2 has no main story that I can find.  It's a big open world with nothing to do in it but side quests.  I did a bunch of side quests.  I got bored of doing side quests.  There was nothing else to do.  So I quit playing, because I have better things to do.  Sidequests do not a good story make.  Frankly, I don't really care if a main story comes into it later, it bungled things so badly here in chapter 1 that I have zero desire to play any further than that.  When there's no clear goal, or next step to progress the main narrative of the game along, what's even the point?  Do they expect you to just sit around and do 300 hours of side quests and then tell you the game's over?  Yeah, no thanks.  Don't care.  Just doing sidequests endlessly, no matter how interesting their own individual stories might be, just isn't fun to me.  I want to be able to progress in the story when I get bored of side crap.

So yeah, did not like, would not recommend.

I did another thing. Well, four things. And a lizard.

 So, there I was, sitting around at home, bored out of my mind.  You know, because of the deadly plague of death, as foretold by prophecy. No dating.  No going out to movies.  No going out at all, really, except for work.  Lucky me, my job is an essential service.  

So, with all that free time, I sat down to work on a few things.  At first I was finishing up the first draft of Memories of a Time Long Forgotten, the sequel to Memories of What Never Was.  But I got to a certain part that was particularly tough for me to write, and I kind of kept putting it off for a while.  SOOOOOO, I kind of stopped doing that.  Then I started looking at my partial draft of Carrying the Weight of the World, the story I started last year for NaNoWriMo.  I did some plotting and outlining work on that and I came to a really annoying realization.  This book that was intended to be a standalone fantasy story, was, in fact, going to end up at about 300k words because there's a lot of world building that needs to be done, and a lot of character development done through flashbacks to set up the world, the several forms of magic, the current political climate, and the characters themselves.  So I sat around and thought about what I could do to shave that down, and condense the story a bit.  Then I thought, well, this character's flashbacks have a whooooole lot of the world building in them.  Why don't I just write a novella about her backstory?

So I did that.  And I had a lot of fun doing it.  It's 28k words long, introduces several of the key characters in the larger story, and gives a very good grounding in the world that it all takes place in.  It also showcases one of the three systems of magic in the world.  In my opinion, it's a pretty good little novella.  As I was patting myself on the back for a job well done, I thought to myself, well, that turned out pretty well, why don't I do another one for this other character.

So I did that too.  And it turned out even better than the first.  This one's 40k words, a bit heftier and on the longer side for a novella, but it gives all of the main protagonist of Carrying the Weight of the World all of her motivation and explains why she's the bitter, jaded runaway that she is in the beginning of the main story.  It also explains the second of the three magic systems, all of the world politics, the current political climate, the state of the common people, and why the world is ripe for the massive rebellion that Carring the Weight of the World is about.  Then I thought to myself, well, that was great, why not go for three?

So I did that too.  And this one turned out okay.  It's 31k words long.  It's not the best of the three, I will admit.  The idea of a child serial killer training to become a super assassin was kind of cooler in my head, than it turned out to be in writing.  But it does go a long way toward setting up one of the major characters in Carrying the Weight of the world, and gives a look at another aspect of the world that leads to the rebellion, and also has some more world building in it.    It explains why this largely Asian and Middle Eastern population follows more of a hybrid Middle Eastern/European set of customs and traditions.  Then I thought to myself, well, there's a couple more characters, but one of them was included in the first novella, another's backstory needs to be woven into Carrying the Weight of the World, but this last one might make a good novella.

So I did that too.  This one's the shortest of the four, at 23k words.  It's the backstory for the villain of Carrying the Weight of the World, and it was probably the funnest one to write.  Mostly because I had to take this evil, mass murdering crime boss, and turn her into the hero of her own story, and that was a fun and interesting project to work on.  Also, I basically got to make a 9 year old supervillain, which was really fun to do.  This one gets the last of the world building out of the way, and showcases the third and final system of magic in this world.  And gives the villain of Carrying the Weight of the World her motivation.

So, with all of the world and character building I got out of the way in those four novellas, totalling a little over 120k words all together, I went back to my outline for Carrying the Weight of the World, and shaved it down by quite a bit.  Now I think that I can probably get the story told in a still hefty 150k words, but that's a heck of a lot better than 300k.  The bad news is that I have to throw out pretty much the entire 50k words that I already had written, as most of it was rewritten in the four novellas.  But the good news is that I had a lot of fun.  Probably more fun than I've had writing in a pretty long time.

So, now, instead of a standalone novel called Carrying the Weight of the World, I now have a series called Riftworld, which includes:

The Realty Engine (completed)

A Certain Necessity of Evil (working on final draft now)

The Fox King (first draft done, needs a lot of editing)

The Bastard Princess (completed)

and the novel

Carrying the Weight of the World (outlined)

 I've got a few more weeks of editing on two of the novellas to do, but once I'm done with that I'll post all four on my website.  And for NaNo this year, I think I'll take another stab at the new version of Carrying the Weight of the World. 

As for the lizard, I was making a reference to the single worst Doctor Who episode since the new series began.

Anthem

So I was flipping through the playstation store to see if there were any good deals and I found Anthem marked down to something like $10.

So, Anthem is that big EA/Bioware game that was supposed to be the next big thing, but hilariously flopped.  On launch it was a buggy mess.  It didn't live up to expectations in story and characters.  And people just did not care to be dumping time into yet another live service looter shooter game when there are already so many out there.

Up to the release of this game I had been watching it with an overwhelming feeling of "meh".  I don't typically care for shooters, and I am wholly uninterested in online multiplayer.  There's nothing like being dressed down by a foul mouthed thirteen year old for not being as good at the game as he is to put you off of that sort of thing.  And though the game looked beautiful, they didn't really show off much of it before release.   I don't know why people were expecting this to be the beginning of a new series like Mass Effect, but apparently they were.  They hyped themselves up for it, and the game just didn't deliver on expectations.  And pretty much about a month after the game's release no one was talking about it anymore, and a fraction of the people who bought it were still playing it.

So, I figured why not see the train wreck for myself.  Now, keep in mind, that I played this game more than a year after release, and it has had some significant bug fix patches.  So, for the most part, the game ran pretty well.  I did run into some bugs, but they weren't anything exiting the game and restarting couldn't fix.  The servers that the game runs on were, unfortunately, not very reliable.  I kept dropping in the middle of missions with "unable to connect" errors, which is kind of aggravating.

Anyway, I played through the story, and a few of the side missions.  And I had fun with it.  For what it is, it's not a terrible game.  The problem with it is that it's trying to be an online live service multiplayer looter shooter.  Every problem the game has stems from that aspect of it.  If this game were a single player story based experience with additional multiplayer for the people who wanted it, I think it would have done a lot better than it did.  The story is okay, not the best thing Bioware has ever put out, but it's not terrible.  The characters are fine.  The gameplay is fun enough.  The biggest problem it has is that it wants to be a live service multiplayer game, and it's kind of clearly not.  I played through every story mission solo.  On normal difficulty I died a few times, but made it through without needing anyone else.  As a single player game, it wasn't bad.  I never bothered with any of the endgame stuff, because, like I said, it's just not my thing.  The thing is though, I just can't see why anyone would want to continue playing this game after the story is over?  What's the point?  Why should we care?  That's where this game fails.  It didn't give anyone a reason to continue playing the endgame looter shooter aspect after completing the story.

So, anyway, I feel that I got my $10 worth out of it  It was a fun distraction for a few weeks.  I have no desire to play further, and probably won't ever play through the story again, but I mostly enjoyed my time spent with it.  I wish it hadn't been an online multiplayer game, but we can't have everything.  I think one of the biggest reasons why this game failed was that people put Bioware on this high pedestal and that places unrealistic expectations on them.  Not every game they make is going to be another Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic, and I think that people are now starting to realize that.  They had their fair share of duds in the past.  Dragon Age 2 anyone?  Mass Effect 3 (even though that one's my favorite, despite everyone else in the world hating it for some reason).  If you accept this game for what it is, and don't pile unreachable expectations upon it, it wasn't a terrible game.  It was, maybe a little mediocre, but, I mean, people are allowed to be mediocre at times.

Memories of a Time Long Forgotten

So, as I finished Memories of What Never Was a bit ago, I found myself all hyped up to continue the story, rather than following my plan to finish up the first draft of the story I started for NaNo last year, called Carrying the Weight of the World.  So, that one is going to wait for a bit while I finish up the rough draft of the second part of this trilogy thingy I started way, WAY too long ago.

So a couple years ago I started the first draft of this story.  And back then I had it titled Shadows of What Might Have Been.  It's a phrase that I used a few times during Memories of What Never Was, and I kind of liked the sound of it.  But it doesn't really have much to do with what happens in the story.  So I figured I'd stick with the memories motif and change the title to Memories of a Past Long Forgotten, which is a lot more indicative to what actually happens in the story.

The main reason I stopped working on it was that there were some pieces missing, and it wasn't coming together the way I wanted it.  I back burnered it and went back to editing the two stories that were nearly complete.  But I've been thinking a lot since that time about what I would do to fix it, and what more it needed to make it all work.  And last week I started reading through what I had written (almost 100k words, about 2/3 of the story) and making a few edits, as though I were working on a second draft.  I added in a lot of new chapters that were needed.  Cut out about an equal number of other chapters that weren't working, and ideas that I didn't like, and now I'm ready to finish up with the finale. 

Anyway, I'm a LOT happier with this story now that I've done some extensive fixing on it.  And to be honest, a lot of what I already had written wasn't all that bad, either.  Most of what I didn't like, some pretty bad character decisions I'd made, took some doing to remove and change, but now I'm pretty excited for how well these edits have turned out, and pumped up to write the rest of it.  So, I'm expecting that in the next couple of months I'm going to have a full first draft to work with.  And hopefully it won't take me 5 years to edit this one like it did the first one.

How NOT to write a buddy/rival character.

So, with all the staying home and not going anywhere or doing anything over the last few months, I've set my eyes upon the ever-growing list of video games I mean to play but never have time to between work, working on my writing, and the ever-continuing search for the future Mrs. Allen.  So, the last couple months I decided to pick up a series of games that are a sequel to another series that I really liked.  Trails of Cold Steel.  The first two games are basically the same story cut into two parts because it was so huge it wouldn't fit in a single game.

So, you have this buddy character Crow who then becomes the rival character for the protagonist Rean.  The first time you meet this utter douchelord, he tricks you and steals from you.  And the game expects you to laugh it off and think, "oh, wow, this guy is really cool."  Uh.  no.  That is not how reality works, game.  Every interaction that you have with this guy for the rest of the first game is meant to make you think he's cool, but literally every single one of them ended with me thinking he was just an even bigger douchebag than before.  He mocks people, he slacks off, he doesn't pay attention when anyone is talking to him, he manipulates and uses people.  He's a complete and total sociopath.  And through the whole first game the entire rest of the cast keeps saying how cool he is.  Every single interaction you have with him makes him out to be an even bigger dick, but this game goes ALL IN on telling you his cool, when, by his actions, he's the furthest thing from it.

So, throughout the first game there's this mysterious masked terrorist that's bombing military bases, setting off bombs in crowded cities full of innocent people, kidnapping people, hijacking the mother of all small dick artillery guns to obliterate an entire city with, and several other unsavory things.  Then he assassinates the guy in charge of the country, and sets off an enormous civil war.  And at the end, this guy takes off his mask, and surprise, surprise, it's Crow.  It's meant to be this huge shocking moment, where you feel all betrayed that this cool friend is actually the guy you've been fighting all along.  But, I mean, the guy is HORRIBLE to you, and everyone else in the game.  I didn't guess that it was him, but I wasn't shocked to find out that this horrible guy that is just the absolute worst, is actually this terrorist who has murdered a bunch of innocent people.

And then Rean, for the entire next game, keeps going on, and on, and on about how he's going to beat Crow, and bring him back to the good side.   He keeps telling all of Crow's friends, don't worry, I'll save him.  It's like his entire focus as a character in the second game is to find a way to beat Crow, and then force him back into the life that they had before the war.  It's the biggest part of his motivation for the second half of the story. 

There's a part where Crow captures Rean, and then tells him why he's doing all of these horrible things.  It's because the guy he assassinated to start the war decided not to rebuild a bridge that was knocked out in a flood.  that's it.  That's his entire motivation for murdering innocent people, bombing civilian targets, and assassination.  The guy didn't rebuild a bridge, and his hometown fell into poverty  because of it.  Oh boo-freaking-hoo!!! 

So, to recap, this guy is a lying manipulative douchebag to everyone he meets.  A total pervert.  OMG the lengths this jerk goes to in order to see naked, underage girls is INSANE.  He tricks and steels from random strangers.  He murders innocent civilians.  He sets off bombs in crowded cities during festivals.  He bombs military bases.  He assassinates world leaders and starts a massive civil war.  And he does all of this because he's sad that his hometown couldn't survive without a bridge.  He is a murderer, a war criminal, and a terrorist, on top of being a sociopath, thief, and all around asshole.  And this game expects me to be, in any way, invested in "saving" him. 

Uh, yeah, no.  DO NOT care.  I'm nearly at the end of the game.  I haven't quite finished it yet.  And, realistically, if Rean manages to beat Crow and bring him back to his side.  He's just going to be executed for treason, murder, and war crimes anyway.  But the game will probably just let him off with a slap on the wrist, because he's the main character's friend.

So, yeah.  This is NOT how you write a buddy/rival character.  You can't spend the entire story TELLING me that he's such a good friend, while SHOWING me that he is anything but.  Any perspective writers out there, please, take this example, and learn from it.  Because I see this sort of thing in all kinds of different media.  Movies.  Books.  TV.  Other Video Games.  If you want me to believe that your buddy/rival is a good guy at heart, and has a true friendship with your main protagonist, he can't also be a murderer, terrorist, assassin, and all around douchelord at the same time.  He actually has to have real motivation that makes sense.  He actually needs to have a real bond with your protagonist that we see develop, and can feel that these two people are great friends.  You can't show him doing all this horrible crap to everyone, and then tell me that, oh yeah, he's a real great friend though.