Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 28

Game review: Shadow of Mordor for PS4

Shadow of Mordor intrigued me after I watched several videos of people fighting against uruk captains and building rivalries through the nemesis system, but at the same time, I was worried about the difficulty level given how many times I watched other players dying. I was surprised to find the game isn’t nearly as hard as I’d been led to believe and also happy to find it was as fun as the reviews had made it out to be.

First, let’s just get out of the way that the main story sucks. Talion is just another stubble-face white dude seeking revenge after his wife and child are murdered by bad guys, a trope that video games can’t seem to move beyond. There are several other ways the same story could have been handled without the ubiquitous wife and child murdered cliche, and yet, we’re stuck in this rut. And I have to say, I saw several articles talking about WB paying reviewers to give good reviews with the specific stipulation not to make comparisons to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But really, if they wanted to avoid direct comparisons, maybe they shouldn’t have shoehorned Gollum and Saruman into the plot, and they shouldn’t have lifted a similar subplot from The Two Towers. This game is constantly humping the trilogy for fan service, so why wouldn’t comparisons be fair?

Let’s set that aside because you don’t really play this game for the plot. No, you play it to slay orcs. I’m very much a pacifist, but just a few minutes into the game, watching the orcs and uruks attack human slaves cast them as evil bullies that made it very easy to want to kick their asses. This is also helped with their random, repetitive chatter about how fun it is to torture, murder, and eat their human slaves. The only way they could come across as more evil is if they started declaring, “Baby flesh is the best flesh!”

I expected that, though, as orcs and uruks are basically the condescending cousins of elves, with all of the snooty attitude plus extra aggression. (Someone in the game even makes that comparison, which made me laugh and nod.)

What I wasn’t expecting was how much I’d feel like a total badass right at the start of the game. Like I said before, I’d watched other people playing and getting their asses handed to them time and again by the same captains, so I expected that I’d be in a similar position until I unlocked some of the better powers. But no, I was wiping the walls with the captains pretty much right from the start, and adding new abilities only made that sense of awesomeness more satisfying. I think the main reason why I had it so easy is a difference in play styles. Most of these guys would dive berserker-like into their fights, which quickly led to them being overwhelmed and boxed in by lower ranking baddies. From the start, my approach was to pick off many of the guards around the captains, giving me breathing room before reinforcements could arrive. So the few times I did get killed, it was in a stronghold where help arrived too quickly for me to plan an exit strategy. Or, put in Gollum speak, I found great success by sssssneakin’.

There’s a lot to praise about the nemesis system and its procedurally generated power structure. It helps keep the fights interesting, so much so that I spent a good 20 hours of my 60 hour run hunting down captains in a vain effort to completely void the power structure. Then I finally got tired of that and did the story missions to go after the war chiefs. Most of these were easy, with one exception, an uruk who was invulnerable to everything except explosions. Figuring out how to beat him in a stronghold was much trickier because I might kill 10-15 minions, only to watch as another wave of 40 ran into the stronghold. But once I realized only explosions would work, I led my prey around to various flammable object to light them, and him, up.

The game moves over to a new section of Mordor after defeating all the war chiefs and their commander, The Hammer, and then Talion is given the ability to brand orcs and make them fight with him. Then the missions change from killing the war chiefs to converting them to your side, and this feature changed my playing style and added a new layer of challenge to the game. It was much easier to pick off minions from a distance with a bow and separate the captains and chiefs from their support. But sneaking around a stronghold and trying to brand orcs without setting off alarms required a more measured and cautious approach. Additionally, when attacking the captains and chiefs that I wanted to convert, I sometimes ended up blocked by my rushing orc army, and they would kill my target before I could get anywhere near them.

There’s various missions and power struggles that you can break up to get extra power rankings, which helps unlock the various tiers of abilities. All missions give a certain amount of XP, and leveling up grants ability points to buy upgrades. That said, several remain locked until you get them in story missions. Additionally, there is a currency system called Mirian that unlocks other abilities in a separate upgrade menu. These are things like more hit points for Talion, more arrows, more focus (which is what you use to slow down time while unleashing ranged attacks), and more rune slots for your weapons. Runes grant additional bonuses to weapons, and it was fun to play around with various combinations until I found a setup that was just right for me. I did not, however, unlock all the rune slots, because I never really needed them. For that matter, I didn’t even bother upgrading hit points until after I’d maxed out arrows and focus and unlocked the upper tier attacks for the sword and bow. Why bother with more hit points when the enemy rarely gets a chance to scratch your character, right?

There’s also a nifty Vendetta mission where uruk captains who killed other players will show up in your game. If you kill them, you break their kill streak, and everyone they killed will get a message the next time they play: “Your death has been avenged.” If you fail, that uruk will disappear from your game, but will show up in someone else’s with a higher power rating up to their level cap of twenty. I only failed one of these missions, and that was because another captain showed up with reinforcements in the middle of my fight, leading to my messy and violent death.

There are some complaints I have that keep this from being a 5 star game, and I’m not talking about the story. I could have overlooked that and still given this 5 stars, but there’s a problem with Talion frequently sticking to stuff and getting frozen in place. This is much like a problem I encountered in Borderlands 2, and while it rarely put me in a bad position, it happened frequently enough that I found it aggravating.

Many of the side missions are timed, and this is something I hate with a passion. They are side missions, so they’re optional. But I’d like to meet whoever decided on missions like “kill X number of orcs in X seconds” and explain to them in vulgar detail their mistakes.

Complaint three is that the controls are a bit sloppy at times. I had several encounters where I was chasing a fleeing captain, and right as I was on top of him, my button press meant to make Talion jump onto his back would instead send me to the nearest wall to cling there like an idiot, allowing the captain time to make an escape. In a lot of places, the game stops recognizing buttons prompts, so Talion is just standing there like a dumb ass in broad daylight. Again, this was rarely in a dire situation that got me killed, but it was still irritating no matter when it happened.

And then there’s the ghul matron, a random boss encounter that I swear to God makes the rest of the fights with uruk captains and chiefs look like helpless kittens in comparison. I died maybe thirty times trying to play this one side mission, Nameless Things, and I got so mad after a while that I just said fuck it and walked off. (After tossing my controller. Maybe not a mature response, but like I said, I was pissed.)

And finally, there’s the boss fights with the black captains, the human/sorcerer leaders of Mordor. Not a one of them wasn’t annoying. Boss one has a crap ton of cheap tactics that made me mad, and boss two required a ridiculous stealth approach because actually just shooting him with arrows or bashing his face in would be…fun? And then there’s the final boss fight, which is all quick time events. Because despite players talking about how much they despise QTEs, game makers still like to stick these stinky middle fingers right up our nostrils.

Even with these problems, I can still give Shadow of Mordor 4 stars, and I can see myself playing this over from the start even knowing I have to do those annoying boss fights again. In between those small pains in the ass are many, many hours of wandering around feeling like a total badass, feelings that are only heightened because the orcs and uruks are cast so effectively as big stupid bullies. Every single one I beat made me go “Ha, take that, asshole!” And ultimately, the game is a metric fuck ton of fun. So, if you were on the fence about getting this game, please, consider picking up a copy and giving it a spin. Even with a few ugly orcish warts, it’s still worth your time and money.

Game review: The Last of Us: Left Behind for PS4

This is going to be a pretty short review, mainly because The Last of Us: Left Behind isn’t so much a full game as a little tacked on bit of dessert for players wondering about Ellie’s back story. Ellie’s time spent with her best friend is so short and slow paced that the writers chose to use a flashback method to keep the DLC moving between two malls. In one, Ellie is on her own searching for medicine while running from bandits and clickers, and in the other, Ellie is hanging out with Riley, not really doing much of anything until the very end. (Note how I’m avoiding spoiling either the DLC or the full game. Because I love you.)

It’s this method of flashing back and forth that lends the short story a weird kind of pacing where one section is really slow and full of dialogue, and the other is much more intense and reminiscent of the full game. Just like in the full game, the time spent alone with Ellie is done so with extremely sparse supplies and ammo. You either have to make every shot count or be prepared to run away. Or die. Because that can happen a lot, too.

I was glad that Naughty Dog chose to shed light on Ellie’s time with Riley, and I thought their relationship was cute, even though I knew the moment they cranked up the “aaaw” factor, the runners would be showing up shortly thereafter. I find myself wanting more, but also knowing that it isn’t possible. To go further back and explore why Riley left many months before means going back to a time when nothing would be interactive, and that point it would just be a digital movie. While that might be an interesting story, it’s no longer a game, and there’s no point exploring that aspect in a game world.

I give The Last of Us: Left Behind 4 stars. It’s a nice addition to mess around with after playing the full game, but it’s only useful if you reached that final chapter of the main game and wanted to know more about the best friend that Ellie lost.

Game review: Transistor for PS4

I wasn’t a fan of Supergiant’s Bastion, but Transistor’s featured game mechanic of pausing time to chain together attacks was very similar to Dragon Age: Origins, and I hoped that perhaps the company might move away from the “always on” narration that drove me nuts in Bastion. To a certain extent, they did, because the eponymous sword Transistor does not actually narrate. However, he rarely shuts up, and so a frequent mantra for me while playing this was, “Will you please shut the fuck up?”

My feelings for the game aren’t helped by the fact that beyond the one nifty feature the game has, there’s very little to keep it interesting to me. The many locking arenas fill up with enemies that all look pretty much the same, and to up the challenge merely means facing the same evil robots with new upgrades. Toward the end, the game introduces an enemy called Man, and after fighting two of these, the games simply clones the same Man and makes me fight three and four of them in the same arena. It’s all very bland, and I never really felt engaged.

The story is pretty thin weaksauce. You play Red, a pop singer in the future who is attacked and somehow has her voice stolen. Her biggest fan steps in front of the Transistor sword, and he’s sucked into it and becomes the smooth, dull, droning voice that follows you through the games. What makes this premise such weaksauce is that seconds after picking up this sword, Red is wacking enemies with superpowers like she’s Corbin Dallas, and we just never got told about her extensive history as a wandering knight before she started her music career. And yeah, I know the game world could use a few more women characters, but Red’s about as bland as a glass of skim milk. Her weak story and lack of personality makes it hard enough to connect with her, but having her be the voiceless avatar makes her even less interesting. Really, the game could have been made with a man and the sword as an inanimate object, and the game would still be the same.

The graphics of the world are pretty good, and the music is too, but the enemy design is repetitive and dull, and worse, it’s all rather uninspired. I feel like I’m seeing some placeholders the art department cobbled together until they could come up with real enemies, but no, this is as good as the game gets until you face the final boss.

The game does have an interesting system for upgrading and swapping out attacks, in that each attack has a slot, and each attack can be slotted into another, or into a space as a passive ability. The relatively sad Ping attack doesn’t do anything on its own, but slotted into bigger attacks, it can reduce the casting cost, allowing you to stack other attacks. I did like that concept.

I was less enthusiastic about how the game handles failure. Instead of dying and starting over from a checkpoint, the game removes one of the attacks and gives Red a refilled health bar. The problem with this is, some enemies, like the robot dog Fetch, can quickly wipe out health and strip Red of all her attacks. At those points, I had no choice but to hit retry and go back to the last checkpoint. The game is generous enough with the save points, but honestly, I would have preferred plain old video game death over a slow death by way of tactical restriction. This is why most of the time, after losing two abilities, I just said screw it and hit retry.

Also not impressing me was the other item you can collect by leveling up, Limiters, which make the game tougher with the added reward of a miniscule amount of extra XP. I did try these out, but the risk simply isn’t worth the reward, in my opinion. When enemies like the robot dog can already strip my health without help, why am I going to use a limiter making their attacks much stronger? Yeah, no thanks.

And then there’s the ending. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but it’s very much a typical indie ending, the kind that rewards all your efforts with “You win a giant bunch of NOTHING!” And it’s kind of a depressing nothing at that, something that might irk me if I haven’t already seen it so many times with indie games. These days, I’m actually surprised when an indie game doesn’t have a lousy ending. It’s a bit like watching an old martial arts flick where the hero lives; it’s the exception rather than the rule.

The controls weren’t bad, and any mistakes I made with my fat thumb syndrome was easy to correct thanks to a back button to erase my incorrect input. But I would have liked to use the right stick to control the camera, especially in certain areas where I just needed to nudge the screen a little one way or the other to see the enemies and hit them with a long range attack.

There’s nothing that makes this game next-gen, and it could have been released on the PS3 or even the PS2 looking about the same. The control scheme doesn’t require anything more than a D-pad and the four face buttons, so it doesn’t stand out as anything special. This is the sort of game I might have rented as a kid, played for one weekend, and walked away from it without it leaving any lasting impressions. Like many modern games, once you beat it, there’s an option to go back and play it over with harder enemies and all your items remaining in your inventory. But I’m not inspired to play it again, and I can’t see coming back to it unless I was really bored. And even then, I might choose to take out Spelunky or some other game instead.

I’m giving Transistor 3 stars. It’s not a broken game, and the levels and music are pretty good. But I can’t recommend it as a must have title. It’s just something to mess around with between better games.

Game review: Infamous: Second Son for PS4

I’m going to be making a lot of comparisons between Infamous: Second Son and Prototype, and also to X-Men, because those are the two things that constantly came to mind while I was playing this game. Okay, there’s quite a few differences that help Infamous stand on its own, but time and again, I’d either make an observation that something was like Prototype or X-Men. This is not really a bad thing, and I quite enjoyed playing this game. I liked it so much, I played it to 100% completion, and then played it again to see the bad ending. I even got 90% of the trophies, something I rarely do with most games.

Infamous: Second Son takes place seven years after the first Infamous, with the conduits now being labeled as bio-terrorists. Most are locked away in a special prison called Curdun Cay by a government branch called the DUP. They’re run by a conduit with concrete powers, Agustine Brooke, who in many ways reminds me of Magneto for her ideals and the level of power she displays throughout the game. The story starts off with a military transfer of prisoners from the DUP to the Army, a transfer that goes awry and leads to the escape of three conduits near an Akomish reservation.

The game opens following Delsin Rowe, an Akomish rebel who expresses his creative side by tagging billboards. Delsin gets caught defacing a billboard by his brother Reggie, who is the local sheriff, and their argument is cut short by the Army’s transport crashing. While Reggie runs off to chase after two of the escaping conduits, Delsin rescues Hank Daughtry from the fiery wreckage and ends up absorbing Hank’s powers. When Hank attempts to escape, he is captured by Augustine, leading to the first moral choice of the game. This will lead Delsin down the path of good or evil depending on which choice the player makes. On my first playthrough, I chose the good route. On my second, I chose evil, just to see how it changed the story. I’ll talk more on that later.

The game quickly moves through a short tutorial to Seattle, and here Delsin finds out how much control the DUP can exert to contain the bio-terrorist threat. This is also where he begins to pick up more abilities for his first power, the inaccurately named Smoke. Really, it’s a fire power, but eh, whatever. The thing is, once you have that first collection of powers, the city of Seattle is opened up as a playground for you to run around and blast DUP officers and/or police and civilians depending on your moral inclinations. DUP command centers are scattered around various neighborhoods, and after destroying them and lowering the DUP’s control in a neighborhood, you can unlock a district showdown and force the DUP’s control of a neighborhood down to “zero”. This is not entirely true, though, as you’ll still run across APC patrols and the occasional guard on the rooftops. In any case, freeing the districts is not the real point of the game. It just gives you a way to upgrade your powers and raise your fame or infamy.

The real point of the game is in the story missions, where you will track down the other two conduits, Fetch and Eugene, and absorb their powers much like Rogue from X-Men. You’ll also confront Augustine a few times before the final showdown in the top floors of a skyscraper, and that final fight is a bitch, let me tell you.

Before you get there, you have lots of chances to play with your various powers, smoke, neon, and “video.” (You get concret at the end of the game, and only get to use it against the DUP after the end game. Which is kinda lame.) I like video the most, but I think it’s goofy how this power is really centered around a very limited interpretation of video. Which is to say, all your abilities seem to center around a single video game. But anywho, the powers are neat, and I’ll try not to nitpick too much.

Just like Prototype, this is the kind of game that gets more fun once you’ve spent a few points building your abilities. Initially it’s a bit of a pain getting around town, but once you open up some extra abilities, it turns into an open playground for you to bounce around and engage the enemies when and where you choose.

One place where Infamous: Second Son is different from Prototype is that you could upgrade Alex Mercer to take more damage before dying, and Delsin remains pathetically fragile throughout the game. If he gets overwhelmed in combat, your only option is to run away and hide until you recover. And yeah, Delsin can heal fast, but I still would have liked an option to upgrade my health, especially considering the increasing toughness of the DUP officers and their sheer numbers at certain command centers. It’s really annoying that even without taking over the city, I had an overabundance of spare shards to upgrade abilities, and yet no way to increase my hit points.

Let’s set that aside. I liked the game even with the constant ducking and hiding, and I think a large part of that had to do with the banter between Delsin and Reggie, and with the impressive cut scenes that helped draw me into the plot. There’s an early cut scene where Reggie comments about Delsin’s powers, and Delsin says, “Yeah, the only downside being…” He makes a thoughtful frown for a second, and then says, “Nope! Can’t think of anything. These powers are freaking cool.” Even hearing that a second time, I still laughed, and it’s as much the facial expressions he makes as it is the line itself that makes it funny. The story has several other moments like this, where the writing has a charming wit and it’s coupled with good facial animation. I really liked the story as much as I liked the game play, and that’s something I couldn’t say about Prototype.

Or rather, I liked the “good” story. My problems with the bad story aren’t that Delsin is being evil. It’s that there’s so little difference between the good and bad stories. In particular, I find it odd how Reggie is supposedly a by-the-book cop, but completely ignored Delsin’s criminal activities no matter what he did. There were some minor changes to the missions that Delsin took with the other conduits in choosing to corrupt rather than redeem them, but outside of those missions, the story really doesn’t change much. I was kind of hoping that going evil might result in a vastly different story, and what I got wasn’t different enough to warrant the second playthrough. The bad ending was kind of meh after having been through the good ending.

I also liked playing the good guy because of the reactions of the people around me. NPCs were always walking up and saying stuff like “I want to have your babies,” and that’s way nicer than, “Go home, you freak.” Having said that a few times the NPCs on the evil side still said something to make me laugh, like, “I’m too drunk to die!” or “I can’t die in this outfit!” One guy said, “I know martial arts,” and I shot him in the face, and then laughed and said, “So why didn’t you dodge that?” So it wasn’t a total waste of time. It just wasn’t as different as I was hoping for.

Overall, I like Infamous: Second Son, and I think it’s a good game to show off the PS4 as a next-gen console. But it’s got a limited replayability, and now that I’ve run through it twice, I have the feeling the disc will likely go on a back shelf to gather dust. I give Infamous: Second Son 4 stars, and if you haven’t played it yet, I recommend you give it a shot. It’s easily one of the best launch titles for the PS4.

Book review: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Let me sum this book up in one word: moronic. At this point, I think my continual efforts to read YA dystopias are like some kind of latent masochistic streak because the vast majority I’ve trudged through are painfully stupid. But The Maze Runner breaks all new levels of dystopian stupid. I stuck with it, but I can’t really say there was much point to doing so.

Setting aside all my other problems, the biggest problem I had with the book was the baby talk cuss words. Klunk, shuck, slint-head and so on. Every single time someone spoke in this ridiculous way, it pulled me out of the story. It doesn’t help that much later on, characters begin using proper faux cuss words like crap and freakin’, or the phrase “hurts like a mother.” Which makes me ask, if they could use those words in the first place, why in the fuck were they inventing words like klunk? (Which is explained as being a bad word because “that’s the sound poo makes when it hits the water.”)

I don’t even get why the baby talk was needed when the characters are mostly teens. It might be argued that the book’s intended audience is supposed to be the 12-13 boy’s market, but if that’s the case, there’s a lot of pseudo cuss words that could have been used, like crap, darn, dang, heck, and so on. So yes, this one thing bothers me even more than the gaping plot holes in the story. It’s even more grating because of the other words used later, and because the book gets so fucking gory in the final chapters. It’s a massive tonal shift that had me asking “dafuq?” every few pages.

But let’s talk about some of the bigger problems. First of all, there’s Thomas, who upon arrival to the glade just knows he’s meant to be a maze runner. He’s not interested in helping do any other jobs, and when given any actual work, he quickly collapses from fatigue. Yet during a rescue out in the maze, he suddenly gains super strength and the ability to haul someone bigger than him up the side of a wall and tie them up using vines. Then after this herculean effort, he’s still got plenty of energy to fight a monster and run the maze with another boy. No, y’all, I just don’t buy it. Once he’s a maze runner, he has amazing powers of recuperation that come out of nowhere. No, man. I Don’t. Fucking. Believe. It.

Aside from Thomas, no one else has anything resembling character development. Even Chuck, who’s Thomas’ sidekick of sorts, is given just enough lines and scene time to be established as a helpless nobody. Nobody else even gets that much. They’re all just paraded into the scenes for Thomas to form a rashly made up opinion about them, and then they’re gone again. Hell Teresa, who’s supposedly so vital to the plot, spends half the fucking book in a coma.

All these bland and uninteresting characters are tasked with solving this killer maze, but even after the secret of the maze is revealed, there’s really no point to it. The damn thing is a MacGuffin of the most annoying variety. The same could be said of the monsters lurking in the maze, the grievers, and with their toxin granting certain characters the return of select memories. I might not be so annoyed if someone among the creators could have at least spent a few paragraphs explaining the logic of how murdering children in a maze was going to cure all the world’s ills. Even then it would have been bullshit, considering how fucked the world is revealed to be, but I’d at least have appreciated some fucking effort, you know? But the ending is as clear as mud, and doesn’t make me want to continue on into book two.

The other thing that’s stuck with me is how all these boys selected to be in this maze are supposedly geniuses. But that’s not shown in the writing at all. The entire group, Thomas included, come off as incredibly stupid. But this I consider to be a staple of YA dystopias. The characters’ actions describe them one way while the story insists they’re really super awesome people with mad skills for survival. But in truth, I can’t see any of these dimwits lasting a week on their own. It’s only by the grace of god (AKA the writer) that these people can breath without written instructions.

The story concludes on some weak ass world building and absolutely no explanation for why putting these dumb asses in a maze would somehow lead to a cure for the world’s problems. Maybe there’s some brilliant answer in book three, but I can’t raise my give-a-fuck meter past meh and don’t really care what happens to these bland cardboard cutout morons. Or put in the lingo of this dreck, the book is a piece of klunk, and the slint-head who wrote it is a shucking moron.

I give The Maze Runner 1 star, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I feel like I wasted my time, and I want that time back, damn it.

Thoughts on PS4 Link thus far…

This is going to be a pretty short post for once because there’s not much to say, but one of the things I was looking forward to with the purchase of my PS4 was the ability to stream games to my PS Vita using PS4 Link. In advertisements, people were able to log onto a wifi hotspot and play their PS4 games “anywhere.” Of course reviews told me that this was not the case, but many gave me hope that I would be able to at least play games from my couch in my room.

This is not the case. First of all I should mention that our router is behind my couch. We’re talking maybe a foot and a half of distance between the wifi router and the device, maybe three feet depending on if I’m sitting upright or reclined. The PS4 is on a wired connection, so there shouldn’t be much lag in theory. In practice, things went badly.

My initial test took place in the living room while I was entering the security code to link the two devices, so that’s maybe ten feet away from the router. But no matter where I tried to link the Vita and PS4, I couldn’t get a stable connection to last more than a few seconds. And I use the term stable real loosely here. From the living room, it wasn’t even possible to use the system menus without lag making the screen unreadable with lots of grey blocks. Maybe fifteen seconds after I connected, the router dropped the signal. I went to my room next and sat up to get as close to the router without putting it in my lap, and then I was at least able to load a game and walk a few steps before it lagged out again. I waited a few seconds for the screen to lose the jagged blocks, took two more steps, and then waited again. And then the connection was dropped.

Perhaps a future update will address these problems and make the app usable, but for now, my wild pipe dreams of playing PS4 games on the couch have been horribly crushed. I am now full of woe. Or something. Possibly poop. And woe.

Anyway, it’s a good thing this was only a minor reason for getting the PS4, as I like a few of the games exclusive to the system. But really, I wish Sony hadn’t hyped this feature because it simply does not work as advertised.

Game review: The Last of Us Remastered for PS4

So…got my PS4 earlier than I’d planned. I’d said to hubby that my only worry about buying it in January was that the bundle with The Last of Us Remastered might sell out while I was waiting, and he said he’d front me the funds until my checks came in. So I picked it up on Saturday and got into the game after waiting an hour on updates and downloads. (Not all of that was system updates. I was also downloading all the cross-buy games that I’d purchased on my PS Vita.)

Before I get into my review, I should say that I’ve already seen The Last of Us played on PS3. Back when Naughty Dog was saying there would be no PS4 edition, I decided that since I was never getting a PS3, I might as well watch the game on a YouTube video. The version I saw was HD resolution, and it was just a hair over 6 hours long, skipping some of the artifacts and letters to just get the main story out of the way. I really liked the story and the great facial animation that helped create very subtle emotions in just the shape of the eyes, a slight furrowing of the brow, or little up or downward turns of the corners of the mouth. In fact, Naughty Dog’s facial animation has set the bar so high for me that it’s ruined games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim precisely because the characters have the same bland expression regardless of what their voice acting is saying.

But so anyway, I’ve seen the game played, and the story was spoiled in advance for me. What I was really doing with this game was playing it to see if it was fun or a painful slog. And because I’m an utter wuss, I cranked that difficulty setting down to easy for my first time playing through. Which is not to say it was easy, or that I didn’t die about a billion times. Sometimes I didn’t die, but I’d fucked up so badly that I’d restart the encounter to try being less of a dumb ass.

This was my first game playing with a PS4 controller, and I was worried that having been mostly used to the Xbox, I might have problems with a different layout. But I actually like the placement of the left and right sticks, and the D-pad is much better on the PS4 controller. Having said that, the most frequent cause of my dying or restarting had to do with me hitting the wrong button. Instead of grabbing an enemy in a choke hold, I’d punch them in the back of the head and bring down a whole army on my dumb ass. But I fully admit that’s my fault and the controls were not to blame.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the game itself. From the opening tutorial, I felt emotionally invested in Joel despite him being a bit of an asshole. He’s had to make moral compromises to survive twenty years after the first outbreak of the fungus that’s turning people into “clickers,” which are basically zombies under another name. They pretty much act like your standard zombies, although they’re a bit faster or jerkier in movement. Joel and his partner Tess are initially out to retrieve some guns stolen by another smuggler, and he’s sold them off to a group of resistance fighters, the fireflies. They’re approached by the leader of the fireflies, Marlene, who wants them to escort a young girl, Ellie, to another base, at which point, she will give them all their guns and a few extras for their trouble. Things don’t go as planned, and Joel ends up having to take Ellie all the way across the country twice before finally finding the fireflies. For roughly 75% of the game, Joel regards Ellie more as an obligation to Tess, and he’s gruff and unwilling to form an attachment to her. But near the end, she becomes his reason to keep fighting, and with the possibility of losing her forever, he makes some truly monstrous choices that felt both depressing and realistic at the same time.

I can see playing this game through again on the harder levels, and I don’t mind that the game is mostly linear tunnels. I think a lot of my enjoyment comes from the fact that after dying, enemy patrols change enough that I couldn’t predict where they would be. This is true whether I was facing human bandits or the clickers and runners. I might run to what I thought was a safe spot to plan out my route, only to discover that the enemy had moved to that safe spot. That unpredictability helps keep the game fresh even after playing the same sections over and over.

I like the crafting system because it allows me to create simple items that were mostly believable, and I liked how at times, all the items I needed were scarce and hard to come by even in Easy mode. I’d get all my weapons and supplies up to a full inventory, only to run into a tough patch that left me desperate to scavenge for everything all over again.

Finding bullets in particular was damned hard, and knowing that, I often worked to kill enemies using melee options rather than waste my weapons. My hoarding tendencies were strongest with my Molotov cocktails, which ended up being greatly helpful when I ran into the larger infected bloaters. Instead of wasting ammo trying to keep those bad boys at bay, I just burned them up. And because I never relied on my nail bombs, I had those in reserve to deal with the human armies at key points in the game. Instead of wasting bullets on armored opponents, I’d chuck a bomb up the hall and take out three and four enemies at a time. This was greatly satisfying when it worked out according to plan.

I can’t really say I noticed the improved graphics from this version to the PS3 edition. But I’m no graphics expert, and the game on the last-gen system was already really pretty. I only have a minor nitpick that certain levels look way too clean for being abandoned for 20 years. Certainly, there are some levels that look appropriately decayed, but quite a few look like they’d only been empty for one or two years, not twenty.

And while I’m nitpicking, there were occasional faux pas in the technical aspects, like Joel swimming underwater with his gas mask on. That filter’s not going to work after being waterlogged. There’s also the presence of a military turret-mounted machine gun that should have blown holes in thin metal garage bay doors, and didn’t even dent the surface. And lastly, while the first level has a mirror that reflects its surroundings, the other mirrors throughout the game are all blurry muck that don’t actually reflect anything.

These are minor complaints, though, and I really feel grateful to Naughty Dog for porting the game to the PS4. I like the story, the graphics, the sounds effects and the sparing use of background music. I LOVE the facial animations and their power to give a scene more emotional umpf. I like the controls, the game play, and the randomness of the enemy patrols. This game truly deserves all the hype and reward its received.

So I’m giving The Last of Us Remastered 5 stars. If you haven’t played it yet, you really should grab a copy and give it a spin. It’s easily one of the best stories in a game I’ve ever seen, and y’all know how picky I am about writing. So if I’m feeling all gushy and full of praise, you know that doesn’t come easy. Give it a shot. I think you’ll love it too.

Book review: The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Years ago, hubby tried to get me to read this book, but he’s not really all that good at pitching books, and within a few minutes, I was turned off and went to read other stuff. The we saw The Night Watch and Day Watch movies, and I decided to give the first book a chance. I noticed right away how very radically the movies changed the story, and I was curious to find out why. Put very simply, the movies changed to have an understandable conflict between light and dark. Because what’s going on in the book is the struggle of the agents of light against their malignant tumor of a boss. The creatures of the dark rarely show up at all, and they’re never more than bit characters. Time and again, it’s the boss of the light side, Gesar, who’s revealed as the real bastard.

The Night Watch is not one book. It is actually three shorter books taking place very close to each other. They bear some very slight resemblance to the movies in that there is still characters with the same names and certain plot points that still come up. But otherwise, they’re completely different animals. It’s like comparing dogs to wolves, in my opinion.

At the center of these stories is Anton, a magician who is just being put into field operations after several years working as a network administrator and systems programmer for the light side. He inept, flawed, and somewhat easy to relate to even when he’s making mistakes. Unfortunately, Anton works for Boris, AKA Gesar, who is not in any way a good guy.

It’s sometimes stated that the dark side use their powers for their ego, and the light uses theirs out of love. Only Gesar seems willing to do all kinds of greedy, petty things if it suits his agenda, and while he doesn’t come out looking too bad in the first book, at the end of the second and third, he’s a total bastard, and the leader of the dark side, Zabulon, doesn’t have anything to do with Gesar’s plots.

“Oh how bad could he be?” you may ask. He willing to let a child be murdered if it suits his needs. He’s willing to risk that same child TWICE, and both times, there’s not any evil plot he’s using this kid as bait for. He’s cooking up his own pathetic plot, and by the end of the second story, I started hoping for him to die horribly. By the end of the third, his manipulations wiped out any interest I had in Anton or the world building involved in this series. Gesar’s douche-baggery outshines everything else.

That’s why I think the movies are so different, because their story creates a more easily definable schism between light and dark. Zabulon comes across as an evil but very cunning magician, and his plots are only foiled at the very last moment in the second film. But in this story, the plots are all the so-called good guy’s, and the dark side actually has very little to do with this story. Anton may be sympathetic, but his boss rubs me the wrong way every time he opens his mouth. He talks about the greater good, but his actions are all about what’s beneficial for him, not for the whole. That’s true whether the whole is strictly limited to his army, or to the whole human race.

I can’t really say I have any interest in reading the rest of the books in this series, especially with hubby saying that this “struggle” is the central conflict Anton has in all the future books. I don’t care to see a story where the boss of the supposed light side spends all his time fucking his own people in the ass and claiming it’s for their own good. When I end up hoping the demon with with a spiked mace for a cock wins, there’s something wrong here. And I don’t think I’m wrong feeling that way precisely because the movies completely reverse that aspect so the boss of the dark side comes across as a bigger bastard than the boss of the light.

I’m going to give The Night Watch 3 stars. I liked Anton, and I think his solutions to the problems put in front of him were good given how little he supposedly had to work with. But I kind of hate the organization he works for, and I loathe his boss. So I can’t see going on with the series, and I’d be hard pressed to think of anyone to recommend this to.

Game review: Shovel Knight Steam edition

I got Shovel Knight two days ago, and I’ve played it about 18 hours before beating it. I was initially binging it because I just wanted to get the damn thing over with. However, going into the homestretch, my feelings…well let’s say they softened slightly. Very slightly.

Last month, I had to choose between Shovel Knight and Rogue Legacy, and I ended up getting Rogue Legacy first. But I figured I might as well try this, since I like older NES games, and I wanted to give it a shot. Before I get into the review, I want to say that I have beaten the game, and I’ve got 51% of the achievements unlocked, including a level with all checkpoints destroyed, and a level with no damage taken. So if you don’t like my review, please don’t tell me I haven’t given it a fair chance. I gave it lots of chances. I’ll likely even give it more chances in the future. But if you don’t like my opinion, by all means, start up your own review blog and post your own reviews. Lord knows the indie gaming scene could use a few hundred more of us helping them out. (And yes, even a bad review is a form of promotion they need. So I make no apologies for talking about what I didn’t like. I’m still getting the word out, yo.)

With that out of the way, how would I sum the game up? Motherfucker. Why? Because that’s what I said playing through several levels over and over. I’m willing to concede that part of my problem with the game is that I was playing on an Xbox for PC controller, and with the D-pad being as awful as it it, I was forced to use the analog stick to control the directions. Any time I had to press up and attack to activate a secondary weapon, it was a 50% chance I’d either not activate it or activate it facing the wrong direction. It must also be said that once I went into options and changed the firing of the secondary weapon to the right shoulder button, that at least alleviated a small part of my problems with the controls.

Shovel Knight is a tribute to the NES era, and there’s many references to classic games. The map world is like Super Mario Bros. 3. The game play itself is a fusion of Megan Man, Castlevania, and Duck Tales. There’s people in the side scrolling towns that remind me of Zelda II and Castlevania II.

But one thing this game does right is that it doesn’t just ham up the tributes. It’s doing its own thing, and at times this makes it an interesting, if frequently aggravating experience. The story goes that Shovel Knight and his partner Shield Knight were the best adventurers eva, until they found a cursed amulet that did something to Shield Knight. Heartbroken, Shovel Knight wandered off for a few years until he noticed the land was being taken over by an Enchantress and her army of Knights, collectively called The Order of No Quarter.

You start off in The Plains, stomping grounds of Black Knight, and this is a basic tutorial level to get you used to the basics. It’s pretty and bright, and while some jumps are a little tricky, it’s not too tough. The same goes for Pridemoor, home to King Knight. And the same is true again of The Lich Yard, although the boss, Specter Knight is a huge pain in the ass due to the size of his scythe.

But then the levels in the second part of the map ramp up the difficulty to insanely painful levels. Even after many, many rounds of practice and changing my button configuration, I was still growling motherfucker about every minute, sometimes alternating to fucking bitch or cheap ass bastard for the sake of variety. And other times, I never even made a proper word. I just strung together pieces of several cuss words because my capacity for rational speech was eradicated.

“Well but Zoe, the game is supposed to get harder,” you say. Well, that doesn’t hold for the later levels. I had single digit deaths on the first levels, and on the last five levels. But those levels in the middle took me out anywhere from 35-56 times. It wasn’t the boss that gave me trouble. It was the slog through the levels themselves. With the exceptions of Polar Knight and Specter Knight, most of the bosses only required a couple losing matches to find a pattern and get inside their defenses. But those middle levels. Oh fuck, man, those middle levels are like their own private circle of hell where the punishment meted out to sinners is fucking hand cramps and wrist pains.

The second to last level pits you against all the previous bosses except Black Knight in a marathon battle. But the thing is, the game gives you a health refill after each boss. So again, the only really tough parts are Specter and Polar.

And then there’s the final boss. Only one checkpoint is needed to reach her, and you face her on a platform that she blows chunks out of with energy attacks. It takes even less time to sort out a pattern for her, and after she’s defeated, she transforms into her “ultimate form” in classic style. You get an assist for the second fight, but wow, that helper is extremely useless for most of the fight. I can’t explain without spoiling the story, but suffice it to say, I was nigh-unimpressed with my helper.

I will give the game points for the ending. At first, I thought it was another indie “You win but you still lose” cop out, but after the closing credits, there’s a final cut-scene that gives the story a nice bit of closure. So I will give it points for that.

I’ll also give points to the graphics and sound. All the locations are pretty, and the music in every level is good stuff. There’s nothing to dislike here, and nothing to nitpick at.

Then there’s the relics, fired in Castlevania-style with the up and attack pressed simutaneously. These are mixed bag for me. Some are kind of cute, like the fishing line you can drop into bottomless pits for food (fish, big shock, right?) or treasure, or the alchemy coin, which awards extra gold and gems to every monster you kill with it. Some are really damned handy, like the propeller dagger, which will grant Shovel Knight a limited kind of flight to cross bigger gaps, or the chaos sphere, a bouncing green ball that can hit enemies multiple times before evaporating. Those really are essential for several boss fights. But then there’s the items that I didn’t see much point to using, like the Dust Knuckles and the Phase Locket. The phase locket SHOULD be useful, as it grants invincibility for a short time. Trouble is, it’s too short in most cases. I lost track of how many times I tried to use it only to have it wear off a half second too soon. And the dust knuckles, aside from a bonus treasure level, are never really needed. If they connect with a sand block or an enemy, they’ll keep you aloft for like half a second. So you have to keep punching to stay at that same altitude. The real problem is, their function is better handled with the propeller dagger, so aside from needing the dusters for that one treasure level, I never felt a need to take them out again.

Much like the relics, I have mixed feelings overall about this game. It sets out to be a modern NES game, and in this respect, it mostly delivers on its promise. But several levels were extremely aggravating, so much so that I believe I’ve broken my own personal record for the number of times I’ve said motherfucker in a single day.

But, here’s the kicker. Remember how I deleted Rogue Legacy unfinished because I thought it was tedious? Well, I don’t see myself deleting this game. In time, I can even see myself going in to explore the New Game Plus features, and maybe try to figure out where those last five music pages are hidden. Hell, I might even start a new game and do the whole thing all over again. There’s achievements that I’m sure I’ll never unlock, like completing the whole game without dying once, or making it through the game destroying every checkpoint. But maybe one day I can make it through the Iron Whale level without dying 50 fucking times.

So, I’m going to give Shovel Knight 3.5 stars. It’s not something I’d call loads of fun, and it frequently pissed me off. But it does what it sets out to do, and if you’re wanting to get a game that scratches that old-school NES gaming itch, it will certainly do that. Just try to keep in mind, some of those old school games were a major pain in the ass to play. This is too, in my opinion.

Time for another update…

Yeah, I’ve been away from the blog for a while. What’s happened is, I got called to do some editing work for the glass web site and the glass magazine. That’s still ongoing, and every time I think I’m reaching my last days with the web site, the bosses tack on another week. Not that I’m complaining, since it means I’m going to have a couple of great paychecks in the next two months. The longer they keep me on, the better that second paycheck will be. It’s unlikely that I’ll be needed much longer past next week, but if they somehow keep me on through the end of October, that will give me three paychecks. Either way, my PS4 is totally paid for now. So yeah, like I said, I’m not complaining.

Speaking of the PS4, expect my initial reviews to be mostly old games you’ve already played. I’ve got to catch up before I can look at new stuff. But hey, maybe some of you still haven’t played these games. My starting list is looking like The Last of Us Remastered, Infamous: Second Son, Journey HD, Transistor, and Resogun. Then once I’ve got caught up on those, I’ll move on to Dragon Age: Inquisition. That will take up a big chunk of my life, at which point I may stop talking to y’all, or to anyone else unless they bring food. Kidding! Oh, and lest I forget, I’m going to give Diablo III another chance because so many reviewers have said the patched up version on next-gen consoles is closer to that classic Diablo II feel, and I could do with some of that.

Getting back to the main topic, the extra editing work was initially hard for me to adjust to, so as a result, my writing time suffered for it. I’ve finally started making progress on the current WIP, which is looking like it’s going to be around 175K before revisions. And revisions will likely push it up to near 200K. It’s not like I didn’t think about cutting it short or compressing some parts. But the muse and the cast both seem pretty determined to turn this into a door stopper. But hey, Alan Moore is releasing a book with a million words. By comparison, 200K is a short read, right?

Of course, this is only book one in a series, and the muse is also pushing me to write the whole thing together so I can keep everything straight. With her attention span, I’m not real sure how that’s going to pan out.

While I’m going on about the new book, I really thought there was going to be a bunch of soccer scenes in this story. But it turns out, soccer season won’t even start until book 2. Even then, it’s likely to only be a small part of the story. I’m kinda disappointed about that. But then again, I thought the soccer was going to be this clever metaphor for packs and teams and what not. But the story’s gone in a very different direction now that I’m actually writing it, and the theme of the series is less about teamwork than I expected. The way it’s looking now, the guiding theme is more like “sometimes growing up means growing apart.”

One other thing that’s changed in the writing is how much science is creeping into this paranormal world. Like, the witch working for the werewolves is running a full medical lab in her basement. There’s a plague that’s infecting the “evil” vampires, and there’s valid reasons for the symptoms, and for the method of treatment that are rooted in modern medicine. Going forward into the series, I can see this becoming a theme, and the monster hunters will use a combination of old school methods and new science in their war with the vampires and werewolves. Even when the fae make their appearance, they’ll show that they’ve adopted science and blended it with magic. To me it just makes sense. How can we assume the human race has developed this far while our monsters are still moping about in forests and castles clinging to the past?

Anywho, moving along, the editing work and writing also gummed up my plans with putting books on Nook Press. I know I need to get back to that, since I’ve already made a few sales off the titles I have up there. But their method of uploading and formatting books takes a bit longer than KDP or Kobo, so I need to hold off just a bit longer before I get back to uploading my back catalog there.

Lastly, my scheduling issues means I took a ding in my reading time as well. I’m finally getting some time back with the books, and I expect to have reviews for Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch and James Dashner’s The Maze Runner. Already, I can tell you one of these is going to be mostly positive, and the other is going to be a ranty rant cleverly disguised as a book review. Folks following me on Twitter already know which is which, but I’ll leave you to guess which one I’m hating.

This last update is kind of embarrassing, but you know I’m always a fan of TMI. Last Friday, we got invited out to go club hopping. The first place we went to was an upscale gay bar, and the price of even domestic beers was ridiculous. So we had one beer each and moved on to another bar with lower prices. Everyone ordered mixed drinks, so I went with the flow and got something called a Bin Laden that had rum, tequila, triple sec, and cherry brandy. Turns out, that was a mistake. Minutes after drinking it, I was swaying. We left to get coffee, and by the time we’d walked two blocks, I’d gone from swaying to staggering. My vision started going wonky, I was walking into stuff and making a scene without saying a word. By the time we made it home, I was completely wasted. Hubby deposited me on the couch, and I barfed all over the place. I remember hubby complaining while cleaning me up, and then I blacked out.

The next morning, hubby commented how odd it was that I got so wasted on so little alcohol, and it was only then that I realized the rum had to be Bacardi 151. I’d had a similar experience in my twenties in Austin, when I’d had a single rum and coke at a club and end up staggering and violently ill minute later. I don’t have a problem with any other rum, not even other Bacardi rums. But something about Bacardi 151 gives me a nasty reaction.

Since then I’ve had zero desire to drink anything alcoholic. Tuesday, hubby suggested splitting a beer, and I had one sip and didn’t like the way it felt, so I passed him the rest and switched back to water. This too is consistent with my experience with Bacardi 151. It’s just something I’m not meant to drink, I guess. But anyway, here it is almost a week later, and when we went out for pizza, I ordered an orange soda. Even looking at hubby’s beer made me queasy.

The incident has also left me with a smaller stomach, so I’m only able to eat about half my normal meals. But considering my expanding ass and gut, this might be a silver lining. I did need to go on a diet anyway, so this is providing some unintended motivation to cut out extra calories. If the past is any indication, I should be okay by next week. But this is serving as an important lesson for me. From now on, no mixed drinks. I’ll stick with beer, since beer loves me, and I know to quit and move back to water after two glasses.

Right, I guess that’s everything. I’m sorry for the long spans of no posts, but paid work takes precedence. Hopefully after the work is over, I can get back to a more consistent schedule. We’ll see how it goes.