Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 14

I’m moving just up the block on Twitter

Tuesday I did something I’ve been contemplating for a long time now, going back to the point that I deleted all my old posts on this blog to start over. I started a new Twitter account, in effect rebooting my social self. Unlike the blog, I did not delete my old account just yet. That will happen in January, and in the meantime, I’m posting notices every day that I’m moving addresses. That way if someone wants to follow me over, they can.

The reason why it took me so long to reach a decision on this is due in most part to my follower count, which at present is 1,947. But lately I’ve come to realize that maybe half of that count is marketing accounts. They started off with people behind them, but then one day the owner of the account decided to use a bot to post ads for their stuff, and they never came back. They don’t engage with anyone, they just toss out the same 5 or 6 tweets every few hours to keep their stuff in the stream. (And by stuff, I mean books, music, and marketing services.) So really, what’s the point of keeping 1,000 followers if they never read what I’m saying day to day?

There’s also a very compelling reason for me to start fresh. More and more often, I see on blogs and in comments that Twitter is regarded as one of the most toxic social sites these days. I think it’s no more or less toxic than, say Facebook or Tumblr, but Twitter stands out more because it’s where so many people go to just rant about everything that’s bugging them. It’s a micro-journal, but I think lots of people end up getting tunnel vision, only using Twitter to air their anger without giving their positive side an equal chance to to be shown. People reading their streams get triggered by that negativity and go on the attack, and soon, it’s all just one big fight that no one can possibly win.

Thing is, I’ve been just as guilty of doing it. For a long time, my Twitter stream was all about what was bugging me, and I didn’t spend enough time presenting any other side of myself. I see a lot of people yelling at Twitter to change the way the site works to filter out all the hate and anger, but I feel like as far as I’m concerned, I need to be the change in the system that I want to see. I need to take more time to be positive, to help promote a more welcoming environment.

A few months back, I started easing back into Twitter by posting random stuff I say, or conversations between myself and my husband that were amusing, or at least seemed funny at the time. I’ve started doing more tweets talking about my goals with workouts and my paid editing gig. And even more recently, I’ve started posting music videos that I’m watching, just sharing something that I’d like for my followers to check out. But anyone who digs that and then goes searching through my old archives is going to see how much time I spent being just another one of the angry Twitter crowd, and I’d rather start with a clean slate, even if it means having to rebuild my followers list from scratch.

Now please understand, I’m not saying “everyone needs to lighten up.” If you use Twitter as a place to air grievances and you like it that way, you keep doing what helps you feel better. But I’m feeling like I’ve been a part of the problem, and I don’t want that. I want to get back to my early days on Twitter, when I might post something and one of my followers jumps in wanting to chat about it. I want to get back to being engaging and fun to be around. I want to give people a reason to go to my profile and just scroll down through my feed. I want them to be entertained, you know? That’s where I started at, and somewhere along the way, I lost the plot and became angry over everything. It got to the point that I wandered off to recover myself, and now that I’m back, I think more than anything, I just want a blank canvas to say “Okay, here’s who I am and what I’m about.”

Anyway, my new account is https://twitter.com/Zoe_Whitten, and if you want to follow me there, I’d love to have you as a guest on this new journey. For right now, if you’re a follower of my old account, you’ll notice I’m mirroring tweets on both accounts. So if you follow me on the new account, feel free to unfollow the old one. No need for duplicate tweets in your stream, yeah?

After January, I’ll close the old account and shift all my links on my blog and other social sites to reflect the change. I could do this all at once, but among the other 947 followers hiding out among the ad-bots, there are people I talk to and I want to give them time to see the change coming and decide if they want to follow me over to my new stream. We all know how fast that stream moves, so they might not see the first few announcements that this is happening. If they miss all the announcement, or if they decide not to make the move with me, I’ll miss them. But I guess that’s what makes every move bittersweet, losing touch with friends.

It’s a little scary starting from zero. I can’t be sure if I’ll get back up to my high mark of 2,500 followers, before the numbers scaled back and then began a seemingly eternal ebb and flow. But I think that maybe if I do what I’ve been doing here on the blog and give folks a reason to want to visit, with a little work and effort I might blow past 2,500 and get back to building my audience instead of struggling to reach the followers I already have.

Or, that’s the general plan, anyway. We’ll see how it goes in a year or three.

Book excerpt from Wolf in the Headlights

This is the first of several excerpts I’ll be posting over the next few weeks for Wolf in the Headlights (Alice the Wolf 4), as has become my custom when I release new books. This time, I’m offering at peek a part of chapter 6, following immediately after a big fight. (Wouldn’t want to give away all the best bits, right?)

___

The gauntlet is breaking down as most of our opponents divide to run left or right up the halls to deal with the larger packs of dogs led by the Prestons. At this point, I have trouble finding anyone to hit because one member or the other from my pack is mauling them before I get within range.

I get to the corner where the counselor’s office is, and I’m thinking this is way, way too easy. Aisha and Regina have a huge army at their disposal, so why are there so few skilled fighters involved in this attack? The only conclusion I can come to is that this is a diversion.

Maybe Aisha will humor me with an answer.

I open the door and walk inside. Aisha has Monica tied to a chair with duct tape, and she has a knife to Monica’s throat. Monica’s mouth is covered in more tape, a move I almost understand given Monica’s typical bluntness.

I dip my head in a brief nod. “Aisha.”

She returns my gesture. “Alice. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but you’re not in the best of moods, are you?”

“I’ll be in a better mood when you put down that knife.”

“I will soon, but it’s time we had a chat.”

“We don’t have much to discuss. I told Regina we didn’t have to fight, and she chose to attack anyway.”

“Indeed she did. Regina thinks we can use you, just not in the way she’d originally hoped.”

“You’re supposed to make an example out of me. I get that.”

“You’d be wrong, and I’m pleased that our plot worked so well.”

I think hard on what she means by this, but I’ve got nothing. “You’re not making an example out of me?”

“No, I’m polishing your underdog image.”

I shake my head. “You lost me.”

“You made a valid point to Regina about our image problems. We’re escaped convicts, and no matter how we present ourselves to the public, we’re criminals. But not you. You’re a real all-American girl, a former gymnast and a football player. You were raped by bullies, and when you fought back against their efforts to repeat their crimes, the courts punished you. You’ve got a documented battle with a serious illness, and now you’re stopping a gang of terrorists from killing your classmates. That’s a hell of a history to lay out for the press, and you probably noticed the news vans you passed on your way in.”

“You’re using me as a mascot?”

Aisha grins. “You’re as bright as Regina said you were. Yes, we’re making you the face for the revolution, even if you don’t want the job. By this time next year, you’re going to be on the covers of magazines. The humans are going to eat you with a spoon, and we’re going to let it happen before we expose you, your pack, and every mystical person in this podunk town.

“See, if we come out of the closet, it’s all the same shit.” Aisha raises her free hand and waves it, making her voice high in pitch, but not in volume. “Aaaah, look out. They’re evil monsters. Kill them with fire.” Aisha lowers her hand. “But when you and the weredogs come out? That’s going to muddy the issue. People will find out your folks lied to you, and they were killing werewolves and vampires even though they knew you were a monster. The public is going to learn what a tragic life you’ve had, and it’s going to break their hearts.”

“When more monsters come out, their pasts aren’t as relevant,” I guess. “What will matter is how they behave in the future.”

“Bravo.” Aisha makes a soft clap against her knuckles, waving the knife closer to Monica’s throat. “You’re going to make a great detective and a great face for the revolution.”

Another clue clicks into place. “That’s why you won’t let me go into hiding.”

“Right again. If you try to keep out of the public eye, we have plenty of minions to convince you to come out of hiding, and you’ve got so many friends, you can’t watch them all at the same time. For that matter, you can’t watch them or protect them if you’re hiding to avoid exposure.”

This is a brilliant twist, one I never saw coming. I win, they lose, and yet they still win because I look good for their cause.

I wave back at the door. “All of those people in the gauntlet are pawns.”

“Someone’s got to go to jail for this, but they won’t be serving long. We didn’t have to kill anyone. There’s just some minor assault charges to sweat off.”

“But not you,” I say. “If you’re captured, they’re going to fry you in Texas.”

Aisha laughs. “Who said I was going back to prison?”

“Uh, me? Maybe?”

“I’m sure you’d love to fight me, but you’re about to have to apply pressure to a wound to keep your friend alive.”

My eyes widen, and I shout “Don’t—!”

Aisha slides the blade along the side of Monica’s throat, and while I flicker over the table to cover the wound, she blurs out the door, laughing the whole way.

I suck in a breath and scream, “Help me!”

___

Wolf in the Headlights is available for just $4.99 at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and my blog bookstore. If you review books on your blog, you can request a free review copy by emailing me at zoe_whitten (at) yahoo (dot) com.

New release! Wolf in the Headlights

This has been a long, long time coming, but at long last, I have a new book out. (Hard to believe that when I started writing, I was able to put out a book every three months.) Here, finally, is the cover and blurb for Wolf in the Headlights (Alice the Wolf 4):

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Life as a pack alpha hasn’t been easy for Alice. She’s lost loved ones, struggled with raising a child on her own, battled an army intent on slaughtering her and her allies, and barely survived a deadly disease that’s left her scarred and weakened. A quiet life seems even more impossible with the looming threat of war against Regina Burke and Aisha Warner and their combined forces.

But her enemies have come up with a new plan to publicly expose her as a lycanthrope. Alice is forced to play along, polishing her public image while at the same time building her pack into an army of her own. As if that weren’t enough to keep her nerves frayed, she has to take responsibility for a packmate fleeing from a bad home, avoid a band of determined assassins, and still find time for homework. It’s a tall order even for Alice the unflappable.

Could life get any more complicated? Unfortunately, yes.

Wolf in the Headlights is $4.99 and can be found at Amazon, Kobo, Nook, and on the blog bookstore. (Keep in mind the price will be different if you live outside the US.)

I’d like to apologize for the delays in getting this book out. First my PC died, requiring a round of online begging for donations to get a new box. (A campaign that resulted in enough funds from faithful minions to get a good rig, good enough to even game on, so thanks very much to my mostest loyalest fans for helping me through that problem.) Then we moved from Milan to Pavia so my husband could be closer to his mother. (She’s 89 and recovering from a bout with skin cancer that marred her face pretty badly.) Even after we got settled in, the company my husband worked for kept calling on me to do paid editing work. With as strapped for cash as the move made us, I could hardly refuse, and working on corporate stuff with all its differing rules put me out of the right headspace to edit my own stuff. Which I know sounds like an excuse, but do keep in mind that I’ve gone from a release every three months to once a year. That’s because I’m no longer in good shape, physically or mentally, and that extra editing work wears me out. But now I’ve got the next book in this series out, and I really hope to have the fifth and final book out on time. (It should be coming around this same time next year.)

Secondly, I would like to request your help in spreading the word about this new release. If you would like a review copy, write to me at zoe_whitten (at) yahoo (dot) com. (Side note: does this trick even work on the bots anymore or am I doing this in vain? I dunno.) If you follow me on Twitter, you can find an ad for the book pinned on my profile, and a retweet of twenty would be deeply appreciated. Similarly, if you follow me on Facebook or LinkedIN and see one of my promoted links, a share can help me reach new readers and is really helpful. Even just telling a friends who’s a fan of werewolves and vampires about the book can help out. Whatever you do, thanks very much in advance for your help. Without you fine folks helping me out, I’m getting nowhere fact, and I hope you know how grateful I am for all your support.

I’m closing this out with news that there will likely be another book release this winter, but details on it are still a bit sketchy. If I can get the cover artist to finish their job, I will be releasing Sex Doll Evolution as a set of two novellas in one volume. If it turns out that they can’t, I’ll be rereleasing The Life and Death of a Sex Doll with the two new novellas added with a slight price increase. I’m really hoping to release it as a separate book, as it’s been one of my best sellers, and I’d hate to punish past readers and make them buy the book again. But if it can’t be helped, it can’t be helped.

For the record, I’m not even upset at the artist for their delays on getting the cover to me. Like me, they’ve been suffering health and computer problems. I’ve had both, leading to the delay of my book, even though I had the cover and blurb done since last year. So yeah, I can totally understand their problems. Still, I’m going to get in touch with them this week and give them a final, FINAL deadline, and if they can’t do it, I’ll just get a refund and begin final edits on a new combined omnibus.

Okie-dokie, that’s all the news for now. Thanks for reading me, and I’ll hopefully see you soon with a new book review. (Of someone else’s book, not mine. Reviewing myself would just be tacky.)

Game review: Dead Cells for PC

You probably expected this review to come out sooner, and to be honest, I did too. I’d purchased Dead Cells when it was still in early access. If you know me on Twitter, you know from my rants that I hate early access and refuse to pay to beta test for most companies. But after watching multiple Let’s Play videos and seeing how smooth the game play was, I decided to take a risk and pick the game up early. Before I even get to the proper review, I would like to offer kudos to the developer for releasing an early access product that was fantastically stable. In the thirty hours I played before moving to the full release, I never once had a crash or any kind of glitch. You can’t even see that in many triple A games after their obligatory day one patch.

Once the game went gold, I got a notification in-game that I should start a new game to experience “the full story,” and I did so with much trepidation for reasons I will explain later. From that point forward, I put another seventy-seven hours into the game, for a grand total of 107. So, know this review is coming after much kicking of the virtual tires, and that despite what I’m going to say, I will continue playing the game for a long time after this is published.

So….Dead Cells is a game I’d really like to hate. I can’t because it’s stable, it’s got gorgeous graphics, and fantastic music and sound effects. But I want to hate it because of the controls and because of the absolute pain it was to gather the main tools of movement within the game, runes. I want to hate it because much like Binding of Isaac, success or failure often comes down to the tools randomly doled out to me in the course of a run. I want to hate it because much like Binding of Isaac, so much of my time is spent groaning over bullshit created by RNGesus that it dilutes the times where I am actually enjoying the game.

Don’t get me wrong, on a good run with fun weapons and skills, this is mostly a joy to play. But a bad run will often be followed by another, and another, and given that a run to the last boss takes me around an hour and thirty minutes, those bad runs can often make me feel like I’ve wasted my time for nothing. (Y’all speed runners are probably snickering over my run time, and y’all can bite me.)

A good run will give me plenty of chances to find upgrades for Brutality, Tactics, and Survivability, and investing in these skills will grant extra percentages of health in diminishing amounts. (In theory you can invest in all three stats equally to get more health, but this results in a wimpy main weapon, making the boss fights much harder, and in the late game equally boosted skills seem to grant the enemies some bonus defense and damage to counter your progression.) A bad run will result in fewer upgrade scrolls, or worse in upgrade scrolls of the wrong color combination. There’s a special kind of anger reserved for arriving to the first boss with a wimpy health bar, one healing potion, and a combination of bad weapons and skills that just tickle the boss instead of harming him. That special kind of anger can happen over and over because the random number generator decided to build frustratingly similar runs again and again, and again.

For that matter, it’s entirely possible to end a run with one set of weapons, and find those exact same weapons as your starting set in the opening area. So you go to the menu, press restart, and…yep, you get the exact same weapons again. I get it, this is a likely probability with random number generation and a small pool of options. But if my last run sucked with a certain set of tools, I sure as hell don’t want to use them again on my next run.

Even on a good run, the controls can be a major hindrance to my enjoyment of Dead Cells. I’ve seen review after review praising the “buttery smooth” controls, and I’m not feeling that. I often find that pulling down on the left stick and hitting jump, which should result in a ground slam attack, will instead make my undead hero make a small upward hop before dropping into the midst of a crowd of enemies. I will then try to jump back up to the platform I was crouching on above said mob, only to have the double jump whiff out two feeble motions, leaving me in range of an enemy attack. I have intentionally dropped off of ledges, only to have my dumbass hero grab the ledge and haul himself back up despite me holding down on the stick, or for him to grab a ledge on the other side and climb up. I have crouched a good forty pixels away from the chain “ladders” and had my asshole hero shift over to climb down. This is all made more frustrating because the procedurally-generated levels means there often are control “gotchas” like this on every single level.

Remember how I said I was wary of starting a new run to experience the full story? The reason for that is runes. It’s not so hard gathering the first two, but the second pair are entirely dependent on whether RNGesus feels like being nice to me. In the early access version, I would guess that around fifteen hours went into getting the third rune, and hour twenty-five is when I finally got the fourth. The first rune lets you summon vines to climb at certain access points, while the second allows use of teleporters. While this is vaguely metroidvania-like, it mostly just feels like busy work. Even the third rune, which makes the ground slam potent enough to break through marked sections of floors, feels like something you could have started off with and it was just gated off to stretch out play time.

But then there’s the fourth rune, which allows for running up walls a short distance, and friends, you NEED that rune in the worst way. And….you won’t get it for the longest time because it’s gated off behind two bosses and a mini-boss. On my second play through, I needed seventy agonizing hours to finally get that fourth rune, and all because with each run my selection of weapons wasn’t good enough to kill the second boss, Conjunctivitis. (A name I will never attempt to speak aloud, and which I had to look up online because I’m never sure how to spell it, much less pronounce it. Seriously, just name this fucker “Beholder,” Motion Twin. I know you renamed him before, and this new choice is feh-king awful.)

Even with a good selection of weapons, I also needed to grind many hours to get two extra healing potions so I could deal with the boss’ many painful tentacle-rape phases. (Side note: the price in “cells” to unlock extra health potions and other basic games functions like banking funds are so expensive that it’s a pain in the ass to unlock anything good. Conversely, if something is relatively cheap to unlock, you can almost certainly expect it to be garbage.)

There’s a school of thought that finally beating a hard boss provides joyful euphoria, and I am not in that school. Finally beating a hard boss brings momentary relief and lingering resentment because I just know I’m going to have to fight that fucker again at some point. In this case, victory also brings a measure of fear because there’s still an “elite” mini-boss who has to be found and defeated to get my rune. If I die to the elite mini-boss or any minion before finding him, welp fuck me, I can go back to the start and try again.

Getting that spider rune means finally being able to access all areas of the game, and often a wall run path will allow you to skip a lot of bullshit just to get where you need to be. Once you get it, you can pull off tricks that make you look like you know what you’re doing (those moments are fleeting, because inevitably the controls will do something to make you look like a moron again), and you can use the “easier” path to get to the final boss, The Hand of the King. (Another side note: At all cost, avoid Forgotten Sepulcher. No matter how well you prepare yourself, that place is a run killer.)

And, can I just say, fuck the design of this boss fight? The boss itself is mostly manageable, but some asshole decided, “What this place needs is spiked pits on either side of the arena.” Because of that asshole, I have never beaten the final boss, and I may never be able to do it. The boss basically knocks me into a pit, and there’s half my health gone no matter how much I upgraded my skills. I jump up to try and get out, and one of two things happens. Either the boss bitch slaps me back into the pit, or my asshole hero grabs a breakable ledge that drops him right back into the spikes again. Seriously, fuck this boss fight. Fuck it with the most diseased dick possible.

*Takes deep breaths* I should mention the story, which is mostly meh for two reasons. The first is the way it’s presented, which is through finding rooms with notes. The hero even comments at one point, “It sure is convenient finding all these notes. Lore on a shoestring!” That’s a bit too on the nose about how half-assed the storytelling is. I don’t feel like I got a better experience by starting over from scratch to see these notes, and the fact that RNGesus almost tripled my time to collect the fourth rune made collecting all this lore even more agonizing. Then there’s the story itself, which goes like this: a plague struck a kingdom and the king took EXTREME measures to curtail its spread. His efforts were in vain, and his kingdom collapsed under a bloody revolt. The plague somehow mutated some sewer sludge into gaining sentience, and said sewer sludge found a pile of bodies, revolting soldiers who were beheaded. The sludge becomes the head of a body and attempts to kill the king because of course it does.

It’s not terrible, but it’s just so stock standard that you can find the same ideas in many, many other games. Plus, there’s a minor niggling detail in the story that makes lots of enemy encounters later in the game somewhat annoying for me. These bodies you’re possessing were part of the king’s army, right? So why is it that most of the king’s healthy troops are two or three times your size? It’s this bizarre video game logic, and yeah, I know it’s pretty common, but still I get to these ten foot minions, and every time I think, “The body my hero is wearing came from these troops.” Before the lore notes, the size disparity didn’t bother me because I didn’t know where all the bodies my sludge-possessed hero were coming from. But after knowing what’s going on, it kind of kills my immersion. In other words, adding a story actually subtracts something from the overall experience for me.

Now let’s talk weapons and skills, a topic I can be much more enthusiastic about. As you progress through the game, you will find blueprints. You have to survive to the end of the area to turn in the blueprint, and in what seems like a weird glitch to me, you have to exit the menu of The Collector and then go back in to see the new weapon, skill, or mutation. Then you have to pay The Collector in cells to unlock that item and make it available in-game, either at a shop somewhere in the levels or as randomly encountered loot. (They can be found out in the open, inside treasure chests, or behind “locked” doors that require a certain amount of money to open. I say locked in quotes because you can actually break down the doors if you don’t mind being cursed. The curse is lifted after killing 10 enemies, but until you do, you’re a one-hit-kill target. I actually like this, and the cursed chests with the same effect. In certain runs, the curse becomes a kind of risk/reward challenge that can help turn a mediocre run around.)

As to what you get, the weapons run the gamut from awesome (broadsword, fire brands, ice blast) to pathetic (electric whip (no amount of upgrading can make this thing useful for me, and I really wanted to make it work because it looks so damned cool), any crossbow, balanced blade). Most of the bows are decent damage dealers, although I didn’t like the infantry bow because it only deals critical damage at a range that I might as well be using my melee weapon for. Bows and throwing knives have a limited number, and you have to recover ammo by killing enemies or waiting long enough for them to fall out and return. They fly back to your hero either way, so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of where they landed. It’s a cool mechanic that nicely gets around the need to restock ranged weapons.

I’d have a hard time picking any favorite weapons, but I can say that weapons need to synchronize with your skills and with each other in order to be good, or better, to be fun. As an example, pairing the broadsword with the ice bow makes a great combination, allowing you to freeze enemies and prevent them from dodging the slow but heavy hitting main weapon. As an added bonus, enemies who thaw out move slower, making them even more vulnerable to the broadsword’s massive swings. Ice blast however, having a slower cast animation, can leave you open to attack from many enemies if it’s paired with the same main weapon. The result is being stunned out of every attempted attack, and obviously this is not fun.

Adding more to this synchronization puzzle, every weapon has a set of special abilities that can be reforged by an NPC in the hub world between areas. Say for instance that you have fire brands as your alternate weapon. You can change the ability of your main weapon to do additional damage to a burning target and voila, instant synergy. (Well, sometimes you can get this to work. The abilities are also generated randomly, and the cost of reforging goes up with every failed recast. It’s entirely possible to blow 20,000 credits and still not get the effect or combination of effects you were hoping for. That can end up being a run killer. Oh, also, there is a cursed ability that makes your hero take double damage from enemies. It is no buono.)

Skills are another kind of weapon, but these have a cool down timer. Some skills are traps like the sinew slicer, a turret that fires spinning blades to bleed enemies to death. There are grenades with normal explosive damage, freezing ice, or scorching flame, and all of these can have secondary effects through their abilities, such as a fire grenade freezing enemies near the dead victims, or emitting a toxic cloud to poison them while they’re burning. (Neato!) But there are also some rather fantastical skills, like summoning a tornado or riding a thundercloud to fly over enemies and rain lightning down on their heads. Then there’s knife dance, which fires off kunai in a circle around you, rapidly bleeding out any enemy they hit. If you get this skill and can manage to reforge the effect of it firing through all enemies, this bad boy can wreck waves of enemies with ease.

Finally, there’s mutations, of which you select one at the hub world after completing the first three areas. (You can also pay to reroll them, but I never bother with it because I like to save my money for reforging weapons and skills.) Some work with skills, like shortening the cool down time for skills, though for some odd reason grenades have their own separate mutation for their cool down timer. There are mutations to double the number of arrows and knives you can carry, to gain more hit points, and to avoid death once despite suffering a killing blow. These are just a few of the mutations I’ve unlocked, and there are many more I haven’t even collected as blueprints yet. This is why I try to stick through lousy runs, because I might find a new blueprint somewhere to unlock a new weapon, skill, or mutation to make my suffering worthwhile.

Oh, I almost forgot the timed gates. In every area, there’s a gate shaped like an hourglass, and as the shape would imply, you have to reach it before a timer winds down and locks the goodies inside away from you. For me the problem is, the time to reach said doors is so unreasonably short that it punishes me for exploring any level, and if I skip everything and run straight to the door, it punishes me again with wimpy rewards. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, and after my first few efforts to get inside only to find shit loot, I’ve never really bothered to do it again. It’s better in my opinion to fully explore and possibly find a wealth of weapons and upgrades than it is to race past everything and be under-leveled as a result.

Lastly, there’s a daily challenge, but unlike the daily events in Spelunky, I really don’t enjoy playing this mode. Here, as with the timed doors, the challenge is based on an unreasonable timer that tasks me to find the boss and defeat them without exploring the rest of the level. I know some speed runners probably love this kind of challenge, but I very much prefer being able to take my time and explore. So when the game goes “hurry, hurry, hurry!” I go “nah, fuck it.” It’s a shame, though, because without the timer, I think I could really enjoy trying to get a high score and make an attempt at a daily boss run.

Despite my complaints, I have put in 107 hours into this game, and I expect I will continue to do so between runs of other games when I need a break from 3D games and want something in a more 2D flavor. (I’m currently running through God Eater: Resurrection again, loving the story and hating my dumb companions. If I have a wish for God Eater 3 coming out this December, it’s for smarter companion AI so I’m not constantly having to rescue them.) Yeah, Dead Cells has some quirks and annoyances that create friction between me and my enjoyment of the game. But if I set that aside, I can also find lots of stuff to praise. The graphic design of the various areas are gorgeous. The animations of my super sludgy hero and the enemies are fantastic. The music is so good that I’ve often called my husband over and handed my headphones to him so he can give a listen, and he agrees, it’s all good stuff.

In spite of my grievances, I give Dead Cells 4 stars. It’s a decent 2D platformer that invites replays through procedural generation, and that eventually rewards your efforts with some killer weapons and skills. But it’s very much one of those “you have to give it X hours before it gets good” experiences, and if you don’t have the patience to get there, this could be a deal breaker for you. If you do have the patience and time to invest, this could be a great game to come back to again and again. So that’s who I’m recommending it for, the patient gamer who doesn’t mind a bit of grinding before getting to the good stuff.

It’s time to talk about Dark Souls Remastered (On PC)

All right, first let me apologize for the lack of content in forever. I’ve started and given up on three books, two of which were sequels from first books that I loved. We’re still flat broke, so aside from a few indie games that I’m not ready to review yet, I’ve only been playing old games over and over. But as you can probably guess from the title, one of those old games is technically new again.

When Dark Souls Remastered was announced, I restarted the Prepare to Die edition because I was certain a lot of older players would be dusting off their copies to get back in for some practice. I totally called that, for the first time being able to play with a world full of invasions and summon signs. I also got to see once again the WORST parts of the PC port, even with DSFix installed. For me, the single biggest problem was the game hanging in certain places like Quelaag’s Domain. There, I might have the screen freeze for up to five seconds. But the absolute worst place for hanging is the Firesage Demon boss fight, where if I don’t move to the far end of the arena, the game will hang for five to six seconds at a time every ten seconds or so. There are other examples I could give, but these were the most extreme.

I want to address the controversy around the price versus what you get in the remaster, and I want to start by saying that with me already owning the PC port, I got the remaster for half price. To me, all the new version had to do was fix those extreme moments of hang ups and it would be worth twenty euros. Part of this is because I got the PtD version on sale for ten euros. So with the two versions combined, I’m still not up to the forty euro asking price for newcomers or folks converting from a console version. But if you’re among the folks who looked at the new features and fixes and said “This is just DSFix and some minor graphics upgrades for an insane asking price,” I want to say…you’re not wrong. In fact I’ll go so far as to say your anger is justified. This is a lazy, lazy port, so lazy that FromSoftware couldn’t be bothered to do it themselves.

I’m not mad about the price, with some caveats, and that’s why I want to talk about the game. You shouldn’t consider this a full review, more like me adding my own thoughts to an ongoing discussion. I want to put this in some perspective for y’all. I have logged 448 hours into the Prepare to Die PC edition, with maybe 250 hours being played in the month leading up to the release of the remaster. Since then, I’ve logged 278 hours into Dark Souls Remastered. That includes playing through with most classes, and even, shockingly, a SL1 run that only got derailed by Lord Gwyn himself. (A feat I’ve repeatedly said would be impossible because I’m not good enough. Guess I don’t know my own limits.) What I’m saying is, my thoughts are coming from a place of high experience, not just a brief glimpse of one class-specific run. (Oh, and I played all the DLC content a few times, too.)

Side Note: What priest bad touched every employee of FromSoftware so traumatically that they would fuck over the clerics in Every. Single. Game? Yeah, they get Wrath of the Gods, but you only get three uses of that bad boy. Aside from that, the lightning spear is shit, and if you’re soloing a cleric, you can get owned by even the dumbest human invaders. It’s the worst class in the whole series, in my opinion. Give me a thief wielding that tiny ass starting dagger, and I still have better odds of surviving compared to my cleric runs.

So, first of all, yes, the remaster does fix the hang ups, so that’s the one thing I’m so, so grateful for. But while lots of pro reviewers were crowing “They fixed Blighttown!” they tended not to notice that there is still lag unless you crank down the graphics settings to pathetic levels. Even after cranking down my resolution down to 1600 by 1024 and shutting off most of the fancy graphics options, I was seeing lag against Sif, Moonlight Butterfly, Gaping Dragon, the Four Kings…no, I can’t think to list them all. The point is, while most of the game runs smoother with lowered settings, there’s still several bosses that can chug down to around 15 frames a second. Keep in mind I’m on a new rig running the game on an SSD with 16 GB of RAM and a GT1080 with 4 GB of RAM. This rig should be perfect to get a buttery smooth 60 FPS, and while much of the game does run that rate, way too many boss fights drop to a crawl. Before I changed my settings, the sewer “waterfalls” in the depths were killing my frame rate, and just killing two slimes at the same time could reduce my FPS to around 10. This is hardly “fixed,” and I’m annoyed at how many early reviews didn’t address this.

The other quality of life improvements are kind of half-assed. Take for example the ability to use multiple items or turn in multiple covenant items. Yes, it’s great that I can now turn in 30 humanity to Quelaana’s Chaos Covenant without having to offer them one at a time. But if I want to feed Frampt titanite chunks to break down into smaller shards, I still have to do those one at a time. And for that matter, why didn’t anyone look at trading with the crow and think “We should fix that to match the way it works in Dark Souls 3“? Nope, you still have to drop items, quit and restart to get the trade to work. If you’re like me and you save up all those trades for one trip, that’s half a fucking hour of drop, quit, reload. It’s bullshit.

The network code, touted to be so vastly improved, is atrocious. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone took a swing at me from ten to fifteen feet away from my character and I still took damage, or I’ve gone from looking at someone five feet in front of me straight into a backstab animation. I can’t even chance a 3V3 duel, not after seeing YouTube videos of other players skating and skipping all over the place. I’ve heard Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice won’t have PVP or Co-Op, and I’m looking forward to that because From Software frankly sucks at delivering a smooth online experience. When that’s one of the biggest selling points to your franchise and you’ve fucked it up in every single version, it’s best if you give up and move on.

On a similar note, FromSoftware insists on posting a warning about playing with cheats every time I start the game, but the sheer number of cheaters I’ve seen online has me convinced that they don’t know how to implement an anti-cheat system. They needed to fix this shit for the remaster, and they didn’t even bother.

And it’s not like we don’t have an example of a better remaster from From. They put out the Scholar of the First Sin edition of Dark Souls II with all kinds of improvements to the game, plus new bosses. They’ve shown they can work out the kinks if they want to. But with Dark Souls Remastered, they handed the port off to a third party, and they signed off on this knowing it still didn’t address a long list of problems. So again, if you’re among the gamers pissed off at being asked to pay 40 bucks for this rush job, I feel you, and I don’t think you’re wrong.

Additionally, I was getting into this for the resurgent population of gamers, and that lasted maybe three weeks. Now it’s back to Prepare to Die levels of activity before the remaster announcement. I got one character leveled up to become a Sun-Bro, and I can set down my symbol to be summoned and wait upwards of twenty minutes before anyone taps me in to play. And yeah, once I get tapped, I can wreck a boss and help pay forward the help I got in so many of my own fights. But shit, y’all, TWENTY MINUTES doing nothing is not fun.

So, to conclude, would I recommend you get Dark Souls Remastered? I’d have to say it’s a personal judgment call. If forty (or twenty) euros for a few minor fixes and graphics tweaks sounds too expensive for you, then go with your gut and avoid this. If you do get this, keep in mind the population is already dropping off faster that a bar crowd after last call. So if you get this, you’re getting it strictly to experience the game with slightly improved performance. For me, it was worth the money, but your mileage may vary.

Game review: Gems of War for Android

Long time no see, right? The move from Milan to Pavia took a lot out of me, and my method of recovery was mostly lounging on the couch playing Bloodborne because it was free with PS Plus, and I figured why not give it another try? And by the way, the new internet connection is so slow that downloading Bloodborne took FOUR DAYS. Obviously, streaming games is going to be out of the question, and that means no PS4 games at all unless I can sort out how to record and upload them. As it is, recording and uploading PC games will have to be limited to around half hour sessions because that tiny ass file will take all day to upload to YouTube and Twitch. *Le Sigh*

(A side note: I apologize to anyone waiting on the remaining episodes of me playing Dark Souls II. I go to upload one, walk away to do other stuff, and come back a few hours later to see Twitch has once again fucked up the upload, so I have to start over…and have it fuck up again. My internet woes are truly terrible right now, let me tell ya.)

My opinion of Bloodborne hasn’t changed with additional runs, by the way. It’s got good bosses and the chalice dungeons are fun, but the vast majority of the game is boring to the point that I can fall asleep while playing it. Of all the FromSoftware games I’ve played, it’s the one I like the least. But hey, I played through all the chalice dungeons with a bloodtinge build, and while it took forever to build up a gun to the point of being actually useful, the end result was a dungeon run that was a literal blast to play. So it’s the same as my review, yeah? A decent time, if you can stomach the grind.

But so…where was I? Right, the review. Before we moved, I got a Kindle Fire tablet to use as a second screen while streaming…and another side note: the Twitch App for android is bjorked and won’t show viewer’s comments or the current stream, so I had to download Firefox for Android to get to the Twitch site. That in itself required a whole other series of workarounds because Amazon tried to lock me out of the Google Play store, and despite Firefox being the defacto browser for most folks on PC, they don’t have it in their store. Can you say oy vey? Because I sure can.

So, Gems of War. I’d heard good stuff about this spiritual successor to Puzzle Quest, and I of course had many good times with Puzzle Quest and Puzzle Quest 2. This would seem like a perfect fit for me, and in small, short doses, it’s not all that bad. But…I don’t like it. I mean, I don’t hate it, either, but the free to play mechanics make any session over an hour into a kind of slow torture, like getting teeth cleaned. At first, it doesn’t seem so bad, but the longer it drags on, the more irritating it becomes.

Let’s start with the basics. Gems of War is a match-three puzzle game with the twist that matched tiles will initiate physical attacks for skulls or powering up spells and weapons for matching gems of the same color. Matching four gems of the same color or four skulls will let you take another turn, matching five gems will add bonus mana for a “mana surge,” and matching five skulls results in extra damage with a critical hit. Where Puzzle Quest pitted your player character against one monster at a time, Gems of War features teams of four versus four, which makes it somewhat easier to create a balanced roster. In this way, you will be able to use almost all the gems on the board instead of just picking whatever matches you can until your chosen color comes up. (This was one of the few aggravating problems I had with Puzzle Quest, by the way. I need red gems for my good spells? Well fuck me, it’s all green and blue with a random skull tossed in to ensure I can’t match anything.)

Another improvement is the removal of the “mana burn” mechanic, which occurred any time the tiles reshuffled in Puzzle Quest. Imagine the pain of eeking out just barely enough mana to power up your attack spell, and RIGHT as you get it, the tiles reshuffle, and fuck you, start again because you lose all mana. Well that’s gone, so reshuffles aren’t the pain in the ass they used to be.

BUT, there are major balance issues with many, MANY monsters and characters. I have quite often whittled down a team to its last member slowly, and right as I’m about to celebrate a victory that last bastard launches a spell that kills all four of my team with ONE hit. Full health and full armor don’t matter. This can happen in PVE or PVP, and it’s never not aggravating precisely because even fully leveled up, none of my team can launch an attack that devastating. You may think the answer is just to recruit those monsters, but monsters are doled out in loot boxes, so you have no control over what you get. I haven’t got any of those monsters despite playing for months, but I have got enough duplicates of shit monsters that I can “ascend” them to legendary levels of shithood. (Totally a real word, by the by.)

Hyperbole aside, the team I have is not bad when those one-shot fuckers aren’t in play, and I can win at PVE or PVP all the time, provided the tiles are on my side. This presents another frustration, where I manage to get one three-tile match, and the falling tiles at the top of the screen offer the enemy four tiles, so that’s a free turn. Then the dropping tiles offer them another free turn, and then another, and then another. In this way, every single member of the enemy team can power up in a single turn while I’m just sitting there wondering why I so rarely see this kind of luck on my turn. Yes, it can happen eventually, but it happens for me rarely, and for the AI, it happens every other game.

It’s not like the enemy AI is all that intelligent. I’ve seen matches that would have resulted in instant defeat for me, and the AI ignores those in favor of something else that does jack and shit for them. Every time this happens, it’s pretty much a win for me, but instead of being happy, I’m left scratching my head and asking, “But why are you so stupid?”

This applies to PVP too because you aren’t fighting another player online. You’re fighting their team as controlled by the AI. This means it is quite possible to wreck a much higher level player’s team because of the AI making stupid choices. By the same token, that “top line luck” can hand victory to a shit team, leaving you stewing because you aren’t allowed to move more than once compared to their four and five moves per turn. And god help you if a team is stacked with monsters who get a free turn after casting their spells. You can end up getting wrecked just waiting for one turn.

But now we get to my biggest frustration with the game: Ascensions and Traits. Every monster can be ascended by grinding duplicate cards, and the only way to level up past the caps is through this grind. The first ascensions aren’t so bad, only needing six cards to do so, but that quickly jumps up to twenty-one and higher, and again, you’re waiting on a loot box drop that may or may not work in your favor for a long time. For instance, I have a monster who only needs two more cards to reach a legendary rank, thus allowing me to raise it from level 17 to level 18. I have been waiting over a month, and STILL haven’t been able to get another card of that type to drop. It turns every round of loot box opening into another form of torture. I just need one. Fucking. Card! And no, I’m denied again. Better luck next time, fucker.

Trait stones are even worse because you need such a ridiculous number of them to add one extra trait to any monster. I have a vampire with a trait of gaining 4 life every time an enemy dies. It took eight weeks of grinding in a kingdom’s “explore” area to get that trait, and once I finally got it, I had to turn around and start the process over for another monster. I’ve been playing “explore” in one kingdom for three days now and still haven’t seen the one trait stone I need. Realistically, I might not see it even if I play all day, every day, for a week.

Is there a way to buy the trait stones? Yes, and it’s one of the most disgusting features of the game. There are daily and weekly “specials” promoting a high-level monster card and several trait stones, usually for around fifty to sixty DOLLARS. And by the way, I’ve been offered other specials going for one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars. This is the most slimy kind of exploitation of players, and if you don’t like it, well fuck you, you’re stuck in for a couple of months of grinding. I wouldn’t be so mad if I could buy trait stones in a bundle by themselves for, say, five bucks. But there isn’t an option to buy trait stones except as part of those monster bundles, and I am not paying the full price of a triple A game for one monster I don’t even want just to upgrade a monster on my team.

Seriously, this is the part that makes me want to rate this game 1 star even knowing that’s the score I reserve for broken unplayable garbage. I very much prefer buying a game outright over using free-to-play models most of the time, but I’m okay with it if the prices on in-game items are reasonable. This, however, is so far beyond reasonable that it veers into sheer insanity, and it’s the kind of exploitation that I honestly hope will eventually result in governments stepping in and regulating this business model to death.

I haven’t even touched on the story yet, and I really should because it’s fucking atrocious. Oh, it’s starts off well enough. You travel to a monster island with a guy named Luther. Years before, he attempted an invasion and lost all of his troops, so now he’s back for revenge. Okay, fine so far, but way too many other kingdoms have you meet up with someone introduced like “Help, I’m being chased by monsters!” So your character goes “Derp, okie dokie, lets kill stuff!” As the quests play out, it becomes clear you’ve sided with a criminal, and all these fights you’re winning are the equivalent of the local sheriffs trying to bring a criminal to justice. Even when it becomes clear you’ve backed the wrong pony, you’re still stuck helping them kill the good guys. That’s some story, huh? You’re the asshole too wrapped up in killing shit to stop and do the right thing. This plot repeats in so many of the kingdoms you unlock that it’s a genuine surprise to find a new companion who isn’t an asshole.

“Oh, Zoe, we don’t play puzzle games for the plot,” you say. Fair enough, but the plots of the Puzzle Quest games were at least serviceable, if a bit predictable. This shit is just drivel pandered out to pad the game to an infinitely playable length. You complete all th story quests for one kingdom, play with the challenge mode or the explore mode, and when that eventually gets old, you pay some gold to unlock another. I’ve had the game almost three months and have unlocked 28% of the map. That sounds good, right? Like, this is a game that you can be playing for a year and still have new areas to explore.

BUT, almost all of that is spent doing the same shit over and over not because you want to, but because your only other choice is forking over sixty dollars to speed up your progress. In short doses, like a trip to the bathroom or a ride on a train, it’s something to do that’s not too mind numbing. But if you sit down and actively try to level up anyone on your team, the grind quickly becomes painful and yes, even aggravating.

In the end, I have to give Gems of War 3 stars. It’s not so horrible to earn a two, but it’s also just so fucking slimy with “micro”-transactions, and the slowness of the forced grinding sucks all the potential fun out of every facet of the game. If you only go in to play for a few minutes at a time and never spend any money, okay, this might be a way to waste some time. But mostly, I just want to advise you to stay away from this game. Please, you can find better ways to use your game time than to suffer through this exploitative shovelware.

Game review: Dragonball Xenoverse 2 for PC

I know it’s been a while since my last post, but we’re in the process of moving to another town, Pavia, and we also got a new dog. (Well, newish, as he’s four years old.) (Side note to self: I’m gonna have to update all my bios to reflect the change of location and the addition of a new furbaby.) Anyway, it’s high time that I post a new review, and while I haven’t quite finished everything Dragonball Xenoverse 2 has to offer, I’ve seen the end of the story and played all the stages of the newest addition, Hero Colosseum. I’ve played enough to issue a verdict, and also talk about why the end game content is kind of a let down for me. But most of the rest of the review is positive fluffy fluffiness…most of it.

I wanted to get both Xenoverse and Xenoverse 2 earlier, but most reviews that I saw were pretty unkind to them. Steam had a sale on Xenoverse 2, and I figured “Hey, reviews have often failed to take my quirky tastes into account.” So I downloaded it and started with an Earthling who I named Retasu in the spirit of the show’s naming conventions. I also opted to go with a build consisting mostly of melee supers because all the builds I saw on YouTube seemed to go all in on ki blast supers, and I wanted to be different. I’m a rebel, yo. The character creator won’t quite let you get totally crazy, but if you want to make a thic tall chica with purple skin and red eyes, you can do that. It’s certainly got more options than some recent role play games that shall go unnamed.

Depending on your chosen race (earthling, saiyan, majin, namekian, or freiza) you will start the game with a slightly different cut scene, and there are certain quest lines made for your race to unlock their ultimate forms. (Spoiler: earthlings and majin both kinda get fucked on the ultimate form, and of course the saiyans have the bestest forms evah. The frieza golden transformation is pretty good, but I prefer “potential unleashed,” an ultimate transformation open to all races by completing advancement classes with a Z rank.) Within most story or parallel quests, you will even hear dialogue acknowledging your race, which is a nice touch.

But most of the plot is the same regardless of who you fight with. Evil demon scientist Towa has resurrected her ultimate champion Mira, and she’s once again plotting to corrupt the whole history of the Dragonball multiverse. In each era, she’s changed a key fight with a villain, leading to a win for the villain. This somehow releases a bunch of extra energy that Towa collects with the intention of merging the demon dimension with the normal multiverse. (I’m not entirely sure how the collection process works, but given how much energy is spent on the average Dragonball fight, I can get behind the premise that someone wants to harness the leftovers for Eeeeeeeevil.)

You’ll note I used multiverse and not universe, and that’s because both Xenoverse games gleefully pull in characters and events from everywhere, even from the films and series not considered canon. So there’s Pan and Future Trunks from the GT series, Lord Slug, Turles, and Broly, among others. This is a Dragonball fan fiction that mixes all the events up, and then casts you as the bad ass hero or heroine who surpassed even Goku himself and became the greatest fighter in the history of literal history. And let me tell you, the story mode works in that aspect. When I reached the point of putting down Lord Beerus and Whis in a one on two fight, I felt like a total bad ass.

The controls are…I won’t say they’re simple or intuitive, but once I wrapped my head around them, I became less of a one button princess. You’ve got a light and heavy attack on the upper face buttons, with interact and jump on the lower buttons. Holding down the right trigger makes the face buttons into super attacks, and holding both triggers makes the upper two ultimate attacks, with one lower face button dedicated to evasion techniques and another to your transformation. While your race dictates the methods of fighting you use at the basic level, when it comes to super and ultimate attacks, you’re free to mix and match from the wide pool of options. You want to make a freiza character who fires super kamehamehas and super galick guns? Go for it. It’s all good.

Then there’s z-vanish, which is problematic in so many ways. In a one on one fight, you can vanish from in front of the fighter you’re locked onto, IF he uses a melee attack, and IF you have enough stamina. First of all, if they throw any type of ki attack, fuck you, z-vanish doesn’t work. Additionally, a lot of fighters, computer controlled or human, will just z-vanish right after you do, leading to a chain of z-vanishes that ends when someone runs out of stamina. Once you’re out, the stamina meter takes forever to refill, leaving you to be pummeled for a long, long time with no way to reverse.

That’s just fighting one on one, but the moment you get into a fray with multiple opponents, you also find how hard it is to get the fighter lock to select the fighter hitting you, and z-vanish won’t work at all if you can’t get the lock on the right fighter. This can make for some frustrating fights where you finally do select the right fighter, only to be hit by another, starting the whole enraging selection process over again.

When these problems aren’t getting in the way of a fight, the controls work well, and I could go for super long gaming marathons with no hand pains. The control scheme does have a learning curve, but the game provides a couple of good starting tutorials to get your toes in the water, and there’s a massive pool of “classes” at the time patroller academy to help you learn more advanced techniques. You won’t start out an expert, but the game gives you many ways to learn and advance until you don’t think about the controls anymore. You just play. And that’s very good.

I should talk a bit more about the academy and tutorials. As you play through the game, you unlock characters you can train with or ask to become your mentor. Training with them will let you unlock some of their signature moves, and while this is optional, it’s great for getting a feel for what these attacks can do so you can decide whether or not you want to use them in your own “deck.” The catch is that these trainers will withhold lessons until you’ve unlocked a certain number of advancement tests at the academy. It may seem annoying, but in this way, the game builds in exams that help you “git gud” as the kids would say.

Oh, and to help take the sting out of the grind for moves, anything you unlock with one character can be applied to your other characters. Even items are shared, so your second and third noobs characters can go into fights with the highest level moves and healing items. That rocks, and I wish more games would let me skip some aspects of the grind in later playthroughs like this.

The bulk of the game is all about playing story quests to fix history, but each time you do so, you also unlock parallel quests. These are pockets of stray time, alternate realities created as a result of your actions, and they tend to create some pretty interesting variations on the fights you’ve already been in. These PQs are where you unlock moves and equipment, along with special items that can sold or traded for favors, so you’ll want to grind through a few of them several times to get the item or attack you want. PQs also drop in other “players” or rather their avatars, but controlled by the computer. These are optional, and I would warn you to check their power levels before opting into a fight. I’ve gone into an early PQ at level 6 and found the game had dropped a level 99 player on me. Eeerrr, yeah, I’ll skip that ass whoopening, thanks.

Whether playing in the story quest or the PQ, you’re dropped into maps that recreate key areas from the Dragonball series, so most of them will inspire some nostalgia for being mostly faithful recreations. And to be sure, they look fantastic. Sadly, though, most are fairly restrictive in their size, and you will quickly find the invisible walls on all sides. With the tournament stages, I can understand this. But if I’m in “the sky” and the only thing being rendered is clouds and a few portal to other areas, why couldn’t the limits of the level been expanded a bit more so I don’t feel like a pinball?

I can’t go on without talking about a huge problem with story quests. Frequently, there will be times when someone is talking, and because what they say has to play out, the enemies you’re fight will no longer take damage. Oh, but the enemy can still harm you. You’re stuck fighting for upwards of two minutes while waiting out the script to finish, and if you get defeated while waiting for that moment? Haha, fuck you, try again.

There’s also another gotcha, the sudden cut scene in the middle of your fight. Were you unleashing your ultimate attack or even just a super attack? You lose all the ki as if it fired off, but the attack isn’t queued up to go off after the cut scene. The cut scenes can also strip you of your ultimate transformation, and if an enemy was right on top of you when the cut scene triggered, chances are good they’ll drop a combo on you before you have a chance to react. It’s cheap shit that makes an otherwise fun game into a pain in the butt.

After completing the main story, the game has some ways to extend the game, but for me, this is where things fall apart. It doesn’t help that breaking the level cap requires a long, long process of grinding. You either grind quests to get XP in the millions, or you grind very specific PQs to collect dragonballs and wish to level up. Those PQs don’t drop dragonballs every time, nor even every other time, so either way you’re stuck in for the long haul of grinding. And maybe you’re of a different opinion and you think grinding is super awesome. I think it’s boring, and I can only do it so long before my attention wanders. This isn’t helped by the diminishing returns you get from leveling up. At level 70, you’re getting four points per level to distribute to your various stats. At level 80, you get two. To really feel the effect of those points, you have to bank several levels, and when each level requires grinding for something like two million points, there’s little to no reward for putting in the effort. Boo, hiss.

There’s one other aspect of the game to cover, Hero Colosseum, which was added pretty recently. This is a collectible figure game with a side story of its own. Bulma has made this game up, and after Trunks and Goten introduce you to the figures, Bulma tasks your character with promoting the arena to the other fighters. Eventually this leads to her deciding to organize a tournament, and…the story just ends. You click on the next story button, and it says “more coming later.” This is…annoying.

Which is not to say Hero Colosseum isn’t fun. I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time collection fighters and leveling them up until I could use special items to upgrade them to ultra rare versions and raise their level caps. I’ve spent whole days just grinding out battles to collect said special items, and I’ve just said how much I hate grinding. So if a side game about collecting figures can get me over my burning hate for grinding, you know it’s got to be something good. And to put this in perspective, I never got into Gwent in The Witcher 3, or Caravan in Fallout: New Vegas. But there’s just something so compelling about the figure fights that I couldn’t stop playing for several WEEKS. I even put aside the proper game just to keep building up my figures. That’s probably why being denied an ending rubbed me the wrong way, because by that point I was totally invested in the idea of winning the tournament only to be told, “we haven’t made that part yet.” So, yeah, that stung.

Oh, and before I get to the final verdict, can I just say that I LOVE the music in this game? Because I LOOOOOOOVE the music in this game. The one song that stands out most for me is from a fight with Metal Cooler (Frieza’s more dickish brother.) That song was so good that I was bobbing my head in time with the beat and even trying to time my attacks to work with the soundtrack. There’s many other songs that are just as great, and if DIMPS releases a soundtrack CD for this game, I would pick that up in an instant. It’s just so, so good.

So, now I get to the final score, and while I have gripes about the game in its cheaper moments, I have to take into account that it gave me around a month of entertainment. We’re talking a little under 250 hours, and I’m not even done with the game, just ready to take a break. So taking that into account, I’ll give Dragonball Xenoverse 2 a rating of 4 stars. It’s not a perfect game, but the premise and the wide array of options allowing me to play out my own fan fiction fantasy make this a solid game and one I’d recommend to any fan of the Dragonball series.

Bandai Namco, aka: Shut up and take my money!

So, this post has been going around my head for a few weeks now because I’ve been playing Dragonball Xenoverse 2 a lot, and while it isn’t perfect, it certainly has been enjoyable enough for me to consider it well worth the money I paid for it. I started thinking about how many games I’ve bought this year that start with the Bandai Namco logo; there’s God Eater 2: Rage Burst, a trio of 80s arcade ports for my PS4, and I bought all of Dark Souls AGAIN so I could have them on my PC whenever I felt the urge to try a new run in any of them. Today, I saw the teaser trailer for Dark Souls Remastered, and I know that this means I will again be buying another copy for my PS4, even though I’ve already bought the game twice before.

Add in to this the upcoming Code Vein, Dragonball FighterZ, God Eater 3, and another potential new release from FromSoftware and it becomes clear that Bandai Namco is going to be getting the bulk of my gaming budget for the foreseeable future. I really want to talk about this, about why I like so many of their games and like supporting their releases sight unseen where with most other publishers I have to be convinced by reviews and Lets Play videos before I will consider opening my wallet.

First of all, I think a lot of this has to do with my experiences playing games and memorizing who published what. Publishing a game is not the same thing as making it. For instance, Bandai Namco did not make the Dark Souls series. That honor goes to FromSoftware, but Bandai Namco has such an amazing plethora of game companies working with them, and each time I see that logo at the start of a game, it give me a positive impression that I’m going to be playing something good. It might be a fighting game, or an arcade port, or a hack and slash “RPG.” (I still dislike calling these games RPGs because my decisions don’t really alter the story, and I rarely have any sense of agency with my characters. The only role play in them is choosing where to spend my skill points, and while that affects how I fight in the game, it does not change the story or the outcome.) No matter what style of game it is, seeing that logo tells me “This is gonna be something good.”

Compare that to Ubisoft, where I’ve played so many of their games and found them to be less satisfying. I can only think of one game I played from them that I liked, and that was Child of Light, a turn based RPG developed by an indie studio. The game’s finishing touches were funded by Ubisoft, but the whole concept and design are so vastly different from most of the Ubisoft games I’ve played. In recent memory, I’ve played two Assassin’s Creed games, two Rayman games, Watch Dogs, and Far Cry 4, and without exception, all of these games ended with me feeling either mehtastic or completely disappointed. So, yeah, to convince me to play anything at all from Ubisoft, I’m going to need more than a few positive reviews to buy a new title. I’m going to need to see the game in action in several Lets Play videos before I get it.

Or take Bethesda as another example. There are some gamers who will forgive Bethesda on every game for the number of bugs they leave unpatched, and even some reviewers who would go so far as to say the mass of bugs and glitches found in launch titles are “part of the charm” of Bethesda games. Yeah, because a bug that erases 20 hours of progress and forces me to start a new game is just so “charming.” The only reason I’ve played most of their games is that my husband bought them, and I eventually caved to play them through. What’s amazing about them isn’t just the number of bugs in their games, but more that the bugs are chaotically dynamic. A feature or quest that worked fine on one play through might be a game breaking glitch in the next, and stuff you know is broken might suddenly decide to work right. In this regard, I have to tip a hat to them. No one else in the industry could get away with releasing shit shows of this caliber and still turn a profit and garner positive reviews. Only Bethesda can get away with fucking you over and you still thank them for it.

This is not to say I’m a cheerleader for Bandai Namco, or think they are squeaky clean in all their practices. I’ve heard them called Scamco Bandai, and I’m well aware that like most publishers, they are willing to do some scummy things in order to squeeze out as much cash as they can from me. They are not a friend, an ally, or anything positive like that. They are a corporation, and their view of me is the same as any corporation. Which is to say, I’m a cow to be milked, except my milk is money.

BUT, and much like my ample derrière this is a big but, the number of positive experiences I get out of their games far outweighs the number of times I’ve felt disappointed. This is the main reason I’m willing to look for their stuff on day one and pick it up rather than waiting a few months for a bargain bin sale. That’s not something I can say for EA, WB, Activision, Konami, Capcom, Bethesda or even a smaller publisher like Devolver Digital. In the past, companies like Activision, Konami, and Capcom were all in my “day one purchase” category because during the NES and SNES days, they too had a much better track record with me. I loved their games, and there were so few that left me feeling disappointed. It’s just that over time, they seem to have forgotten what made their games fun, and they started trading in all of their goodwill in pursuit of easy money. So now I’m not just leery of their new releases. I’m openly skeptical and yes even cynical that they can release something worth my time and money.

And perhaps at some point in the future, Bandai Namco will also drop enough stinkers that I stop trusting them without seeing reviews. But looking at what I’m playing now and what I plan to play in 2018, I can say that for the time being, Bandai Namco can just shut up and take my money.

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This is not a review of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

You might be forgiven for mistaking this post for a review, given that there will be discussions of a game and what I did and didn’t like about it. However, this cannot be considered a review for several reasons, with the first being that I did not complete the game, nor do I plan on doing it. (Nor do I plan on watching the rest on YouTube.) I will not be issuing a score or suggesting whether you buy it or not. I won’t even be going all that in depth with the various game elements. These are just my thoughts after playing for a few days, and I’d like to share them with you so you have something new to read from me.

I got Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain for free as part of the PS+ collection, so that tempers my reaction to it quite a bit. I went in with low expectations for many reasons, the biggest of which was that the last few times I played any Metal Gear games (for reference I played the remasters of 2 and 3 on the PS Vita) I was bored to tears by the game play and annoyed endlessly by the interruptions for ten, twenty, and even thirty minute sessions of “plot”. In my opinion, Hideo Kojima is probably one of the most overrated game makers out there because it often seems to me that he doesn’t want to write for a game. He wants to write a visual novel or even a movie, with minimal interaction on the part of the audience.

The opening of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain certainly seemed to back that up, inviting me to touch the controls once every five minutes or so before playing out yet another lengthy (and often stupid) cut scene. (No, seriously, like my character would watch a nurse being garotted and not so much as point to warn the doctor? FUCKING STUPID.) However, once I got into the actual game, the cut scenes were greatly reduced, and while I really didn’t like the controls, I could at least work with them. Further, some of the missions were, gasp, actually fun to play.

There were hiccups along the way, with the first being just past “chapter 9” and working a random side mission when I was suddenly thrust into main mission “Chapter 12” with Quiet, the “female sniper.” (I have so much contempt for that term, and for “female soldier.” Even taking the times of the game into account, the term wasn’t used for women serving in the military in any country. This just makes it seem like Hideo Kojima is one of those insufferable incels who can’t be bothered to refer to women as…you know, women.) I hated the mission to bring her into my base, and I hated the way she breaks immersion during the mission, leaping twenty to thirty meters into the sky whenever I finally managed to hit her. If she’s fucking Superfemale, why is she even bothering using the rifle? She can just leap over to Snake, fuck him with his own gun, and then hang his violated corpse over his mutilated horse. Quiet’s powers and abilities as displayed in the missions and the following cut scene had me groaning or rolling my eyes, even more so as my dumb as fuck compadre Kaz shouted about how we can’t work with “it.” (Just keep reinforcing those incel vibes, mang.)

But I got Quiet safely bundled away and went back to side missions, and for several days worth of streaming, I was having a good time. Early on, I’d joked that knowing the game had music tapes to collect, I would make it my life’s missions to find A-Ha’s Take On Me. Well I actually found it during a rescue of a random prisoner, and I promptly snatched it up with said prisoner riding Snake’s shoulder. I made a new life’s goal to find Billy Idol’s White Wedding, which sadly did not come to pass.

The mission that broke me was Lingua Franca, though the mission before it had already started to sour me on the African location. It’s not so much the location as my buddy “D-Dog,” who can’t seem to avoid being spotted, and who once spotted will run around slamming into soldiers, drawing more and more of them down on my location. What kind of asshole makes a stealth game and then thinks, “You know what would be great? A dog that can’t hide to save its life.” Up to the African missions, I liked D-Dog. I thought it was great that I had a button dedicated to petting the dog, and I would stop whatever I was doing to randomly pet and praise him just for being a dog. Each time I did this while streaming, I would declare, “forget what I was complaining about. Game of the Year!”

(But incidentally my Game of the year was Horizon: Zero Dawn. I played it again in hard mode for the Twitch stream, and it was just as good as the first time through, though I did notice quite a few more plot holes seeing them with foreshadowed knowledge of the ending. But I will move back to the topic at hand.)

In Lingua Franca, the mission given is that a terrorist organization has taken several of its own members prisoner, a faction of British folks who apparently can’t speak the local language despite being colleagues. So the locals drive over an interpreter to interrogate said British prisoners, and while they plan to execute all the prisoners eventually, Snake’s job is to find one in particular, a man called “The Viscount.”

So, the first time in this mission, I spot a prisoner being led up a road by a single escort, and I pounce the solider and knock him out, easy peasy. I’ve barely got Fulton devices on the prisoner and soldier before I’m being informed that the prisoner has provided valuable intel “back at base.” Um…what? The base is a long, LONG way from this location, and given his wobbling condition when I rescued him, I seriously doubt he was in any condition to give any information.

But never mind that. I’d barely made it close enough to see the camp when a sniper spotted me and shot me, and even belly crawling, he beaned me to death because the belly crawl controls are just slightly worse than trying to drive a tank in a mud pit with both treads busted. I reloaded the mission, saved the prisoner, found the sniper to flank him and…was spotted by a soldier I hadn’t seen standing nearby. I reloaded the mission and snuck in close enough to see the second soldier while also staying out of the sniper’s line of sight, took aim with my own silenced sniper refile, and…somehow alerted every single soldier in the base to my location when the sniper who didn’t see me shoot still swung 180 degrees to report he saw me.

I reloaded the mission once again and ignored both the soldier patrolling and the sniper to follow the interpreter, who went to a prisoner to ask some random questions, most of which were answered like “I don’t know, only the Viscount did!” The interpreter says, “Well then, I will just have to speak to this Viscount myself.” Okay, here we go, the real point of the mission, right? Wrong, the interpreter then walks into an adjacent building and does NOTHING. Zooming in and using my “iDroid” microphone reveals no conversation inside, and sneaking around far enough to look inside, I see the interpreter and several other men just standing around. Eventually the interpreter and his escort leave, so I tail them out to another building, where again, they do nothing. They wander back the way they just came and head for another building. They aren’t patrolling. They aren’t interrogating. This is just bullshit meant to pad out the mission. Needless to say, I am becoming greatly annoyed.

AND THEN D-Dog gets spotted, and the whole thing turns into a shit sandwich. I shut off the game and concluded my stream saying I’d come back to the mission later. But, as the days passed and I thought more and more about that mission, the less I wanted to play the game at all. The real fun for me was in the side missions where I had a simple goal. Achieving that goal might take ten minutes or two hours depending on how heavily guarded a base was, but in each case, these were the moments when the game felt comfortable being a stealth game. It’s the missions where I feel most like I have the gear and the methods available to do the job and get out with a minimum of bullshit that I really enjoyed the game. But in between these enjoyable sessions, I kept running into bullshit that pulled me out of that fun zone. Quiet, the XOF supa-zombie squad, pretty much anything resembling the supernatural. (I mean, really, I watched psycho-psychic and her pyrokinetic pappy destroy a tank and an armored chopper with ease, so what the fuck am I going to do to them using a shotgun, or any gun?)

I realize that what I’m about to say is going to be offensive to some of you (and that some of what I’ve already written is offensive), but it seems to me like the best parts of the game are when Hideo Kojima injects the barest minimum of himself into it and just lets the mechanics handle the heavy lifting. With the side missions in any location, the whole routine of sneaking in, meeting goals, and running away are fun. The moment Kojima steps in and says “Okay, let me inject my genius into this,” he fucks it up so hard that the plot should need a trauma therapist.

I realize some of you think the man is a genius. I realize some of you idolize this entire series as the greatest thing EVAH. I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with you. From the standpoint of his writing, Hideo Kojima is abysmal, and separated from the medium of games, a book written by him would be worthy of mountains of criticism for inconsistency and outlandish absurdity. Put inside a game, his writing burdens what could otherwise be some great ideas. The man desperately needs an editor to step in and cut the fluff he keeps trying to put in his games.

But…I got it for free, and I set the bar real low going into it. Even after deleting the game, I will say I got several hours of enjoyments out of it, and I can see its appeal. It just isn’t a game for me. In conclusion, I’m pretty sure I’ll be skipping Death Stranding until it’s a free game. At this point, I have no faith in Hideo Kojima, and nothing about the premise laid out in the trailers has given me any reason not to believe it will drag its great ideas down with a lot of unneeded bullshit. You’re free to disagree, but that’s my take on any project overseen by Kojima.

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Anime review: Parasyte: The Maxim

I’ve been away a while now, so I should explain what happened. Last month we changed internet service providers, and due to a number of paperwork and technical problems, we were without internet service for a little over three weeks. We got back online two weeks back, but I didn’t really have anything to review. I’m reading a couple manga series that I have backlogged and can’t do a proper review on them just yet, and the games I’m playing were already reviewed some time back. And so, to give y’all something new to read, I present to you my first anime review.

Parasyte: The Maxim is an adaptation of a manga I’d read a long, long time ago, but I’d only read the first six or seven issues before becoming unemployed and thus incapable of buying the rest. I remembered those first issues quite fondly, so I thought, “Hey, maybe the anime is just as good.” But it’s not just as good. No, it’s actually much better. Being confined to a single season of 24 episodes, Parasyte: The Maxim benefits from compression and trimming of the side stories that were shown in the manga. This story is more tightly focused around Shinichi Izumi and his struggles against the parasite invaders who have taken over human bodies and consume other humans to survive. Shinichi is put in this position when a parasite attacks him, but fails to take over his brain, fusing with his right hand instead. The parasite takes on the name Migi, or “Righty” in the English manga translations.

Because of Migi, the other parasites can sense Shinichi as unique, and given that he knows their secret, they regard him as a threat and attack him. Migi, being an emotionless entity, does not want to kill his own kind, but recognizes that he will die if Shinichi does. So he helps Shinichi fight new threats as they emerge. That’s the starting premise, which blossoms into something far more complex as the series advances. There’s the introduction of a parasite who is more selective in her kills because she desires to blend in with humans better to remain safe, even experimenting with eating human food to reduce the number of humans she needs to feed upon. For this change in perspective, she too is soon regarded as a threat to her kin and is attacked by other parasites. Her story is woven tightly into Shinichi’s, but represents one of the few side stories that is more fully explored, and I have to say, I really appreciated being given glimpses into her development as a character.

The other surprise, at least for me, was how often a show so gruesome and gory could also be so funny. A lot of this humor comes from Migi’s misunderstanding of human culture and in particular their sexuality, but later episodes still manage to find a few places for a quick joke that would make me laugh until I was coughing.

Despite the flashes of humor, though, this is a fairly sad story. Shinichi loses many friends and loved ones over the course of the series, and one loss in particular leads to him being gravely wounded. Migi has to do something desperate to rescue him, which leads to changes in both Migi and Shinichi. Shinichi becomes faster and stronger, with enhanced senses, while Migi is weakened and must hibernate for four hours at a time, leaving Shinichi without a way of sensing his enemies for brief periods. The changes help create a tension in the later episodes, but they also change the relationship between Migi and Shinichi. They are no longer two entities sharing space in the same body, more than mere allies by circumstance. They could even be called friends, and seeing this change take place slowly is in my opinion some great writing.

If I have any complaints, they’re very minor quibbles about the animation. The show uses CGI for many of the vehicles, and it’s obvious now matter how hard the animators tried to match the vehicles’ colors to the backgrounds. There’s also some occasional “wonk eye” and weirdly drawn hands, but I’m going to cut the show some slack for that since hands are the hardest part of a person to draw. (Seriously, just try to draw your own hand. It’s freakin’ hard.)

The big finale leads to a fight between the government an a coalition of parasites who have created a supposed safe haven to gather in, but while the government’s plan to eliminate the parasite menace seems to be working initially, it quickly devolves into a massacre for both sides, leading to a final battle between Shinichi and a truly monstrous “boss.” With one episode left, the series winds down with Migi bidding Shinichi farewell, and with Shinichi trying to settle back into as close to a normal life as he can manage.

When I started up the first episode, I said to myself, “I’ll just watch one to see what I think.” And then, like a bag of really good potato chips, I kept going, “Okay,” just one more,” until it was 5 AM and I had to debate going to sleep or watching the last six episodes. I chose sleep, but only because my head was starting to sway and bob from fatigue. I haven’t binged on a show this hard since Kill La Kill, and the number of times I could predict what was going to happen were far outweighed by the number of times I was blindsided by a twist. This is the total package. It has good writing, good visuals, and a great soundtrack.

So I give Parasyte: The Maxim 5 stars and recommend it to fans of horror looking to get into the darker side of anime. Parasyte can be found on Crunchyroll, and if you don’t mind watching ads, you can see the whole series for free. I highly recommend it and I think I might come back to watch it again in a few months. It’s just that damn good.