Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 5

The search for (ever)greener pastures

As November draws to a close, I thought it was time to talk about my plans for the upcoming year, both about my work and about my online social presence. On the work side, it’s been so long since I’ve released anything that you could be forgiven for forgetting that I write fiction. On the social side, unless you were on Twitter, you probably wouldn’t know I exist without a lucky hit on Facebook or Google’s search results. A lot of that is on me, so let me start with a modern mea culpa. My bad.

The thing with deciding not to publish is, during the earliest days of the COVID lockdown, I saw a lot of writers with traditional publishers struggling to sell new books because readers were facing months of financial uncertainty, and even a cheap ebook was becoming a luxury purchase. So I decided that since I had a job editing and very rarely writing for a trade magazine, we would be all right if I just hit the pause button and dropped out of the book trade until the worst of this mess blew over.

Then of course, COVID refused to blow over, and instead blew up into so many variants that there will never be a post COVID world. This fucker is with us along with the cold and the flu for good.

But I digress, even once folks got back on their feet, I procrastinated about coming out of my hiatus. I needed to find more places to engage readers than just my blog and Twitter, and Facebook hasn’t been the alternative approach for self-promotion since long before I’d metaphorically shuttered the storefront. It’s been great for reconnecting with past contacts. (Though not so much when many sought me out with news that friends and family younger than me have died. How’s that survivor’s guilt going? Pretty strong now, for someone who didn’t believe they’d live to see twenty.)

Then of course, there was Elon Musk, a rich guy I formerly knew jack and shit about, and had only a vague impression that his companies were trying to do good things for the world. But then he went and bought Twitter, and he had to make absolutely certain that not only was he not a Nice Guy, but that he considered me and people like me to be personal enemies. Then he went and turned Twitter into X

X gonna give it to ya!
Bugs?
Gonna give to ya!
Trolls?
Gonna give it to ya!

Ahem…I cannot stress enough that Twitter  has been a real home for me going back to its early days in beta. Instead of just being a place to sell books, it quickly became a place where I could curate all my nerdy joys in one place, pour in a healthy dose of world news, and add that heady high of occasionally talking to world famous writers WAY above my pay grade, and having them reply to me. (That one never gets old. It’s like, Oh, my GAWD, they know I exist now!)

The hiatus made it easier to avoid diversifying my social platform, because hey, I’m not selling anything. I just need a few minutes per day to read the news, catch up with friends, and then get back to what I was doing best, gaming and napping. (So, so much napping going on up in here.)

But then Elon turned Twitter into X

X gonna give it to ya!
Racism?
Gonna give it to ya!
Literal fucking Nazism?
Gonna give it to ya!

Right, so with the writing very clearly on the wall, you would think that would have been my clue to get my ass in gear and scout out new places to park my digital butt. To a certain extent it was, but I wasn’t much enamored of alternatives like Tribel and Mastodon, which seemed distinctly niche, not to mention most Mastodon groups feeling very strongly opposed to self-promotion. (And as such, not a great place for a fiction writer to feel welcome to hawk their wares.)

Just a few months back, I also made the choice to slowly start getting back to writing new stuff, and I came up with two shiny new ideas, typing the first two chapters for each and then sitting back to let them stew for a bit. My logic was, one or the other would be ready for NaNoWriMo, and I was right. At this point, I’ve technically won by reaching fifty thousand words on one story, (not including those two chapters written in advance) but that’s really only the first half of the book. Still, I have a stronger idea of where the second half is going, and more importantly, I get up feeling excited to put words on the screen and get back to the thing that gave me joy before the rise of COVID and Elon Musk turning Twitter into X

X gonna give it to ya!
Hate?
Gonna give it to ya!
Doom?
Gonna give it to ya!

That’s the last one, I swear. Where all this is going, is that I already had finished books in the queue before I put the brakes on sales and on writing new projects. I’m just about ready to dust off the sales top hat and put myself back on the market, but that means also investing time in finding new ways to reach out to folks.

That can’t just be to set up a robot constantly posting “BUY MY BOOK!” I was told way before I published my first book that the real secret to success was to establish myself as a person first, and a writer second. To let people get to know me, so when I did put a book out, they’d see a person rather than an ad to scroll past. That advice led to some of my early successes, and I still think it’s important to approach each platform in the same way. I want to sell new books, yes, but I also want to use those platforms to meet people, learn about their interests and hobbies, and maybe sort out if we’re all part of the same clan of weirdos.

On that note, it’s time to roll out the partial list of places you will find me posting and promoting in the months ahead. This is not a complete list, as I’m still looking into renovating a very old digital home for a new run, and there’s another service that, while intriguing, isn’t available to us dirty Europeans just yet. So the new social platform squad is:

BlueSky – Currently available by invite only, BlueSky feels closest to Twitter before its fall from grace. What makes it different is that in addition to a followers stream, BlueSky offers topics curated into tabs that users can navigate through. It’s all nicely organized so I can get what I need in a ten minute session, and then get back to work. I really hope to make BlueSky my new main platform, so hopefully when it goes fully public, it can catch on and bring in all the folks doing the mass exodus from X.

Instagram – I don’t even know why I hadn’t thought to get an account before. I love taking pictures of stuff and sharing them online, so it should be a perfect match. But I was lazy and figured, why post the same stuff in more than one place? The obvious answer now being, there aren’t that many people left in my pool of followers to enjoy my dog in a new fake leather biker jacket, or my latest culinary creations (shot in terrible lighting, and frequently plated in such a way as to look like a drunk’s last meal after hitting the head.) And every once in a while, I can slip in a new book cover, like subliminal advertising of the 70s. It’s brilliant. Or at least I hope it will be.

LinkedIn – The only social platform where all my posts are promotional. I post updates for blog reviews and book releases, and nothing else. Part of that has to do with the site itself assuming I’m there to look for work or hire someone. (It’s even asked me randomly if my company Freelance Writer is currently hiring.) Probably the place where I spend the least amount of time other than to check the message center (full of spam) followed by the notifications before getting on with other more interesting social sites. It’s like a visit to Grandma’s house, but without the Danish butter cookies.

Facebook – Expect this one to be much less updated than the other entries. I’ve never much cared for the crowded screen space of Facebook to begin with, and it’s got a tendency to bury most attempts at promotion under its precious algorithm. But as I said earlier, it is the place where a lot of old contacts know me, so it couldn’t hurt to let them know that yes, I’m still alive, and occasionally ask if they want to buy my book. I mean, really, it’s not as bad as my last resource…

X gonna give it to ya!
Spams?
Gonna give it to ya!
Scams?
Gonna give it to ya!
(Sorry! (Not sorry.))

X – Because let’s face it, I can’t bring myself to pack up and leave until it’s well and truly burnt to the ground or so overrun by assholes as to make Rosie’s Shithouse a preferable hangout. There’s still some fine folks in my followers list who aren’t on BlueSky, and I get invite codes so slowly that I couldn’t commit to offering them out to anyone until I’ve saved up a small stack. So for now, we’re stuck with each other, till death do us part. (Really hoping it dies first, though. *fingers crossed*)

That’s it for now, but I plan to post more updates like this as I add new platforms, and also as I get new books ready to publish. For now, know that you can expect an eclectic mix of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi, all blended with my special ingredients, sass and love.

Once again, thanks for reading my stuff, and hopefully soon, I’ll have something for you besides just another review. (Though we are still doing that, too.)

Game review: Divinity: Original Sin II for Steam

It’s rare for me to mention how much time I played a game before reviewing it, but I think saying upfront that I played five hundred and thirty nine hours of Divinity: Original Sin 2 can help back up some of what I’m going to say. This is because for as much as I loved a lot of the game, I also hated it in equal measure. In fact, I can’t think of a single game that challenged me more to wring enjoyment from it while it in turn tried to aggravate me to the point of wanting to break a controller.

Oh, fair warnings are in order. This will likely be a long post, and there will be spoilers. So if you wanted the short and sweet, spoiler free version: great combat systems cannot balance out terrible enemy AI, nor can it absolve the schism between Pratchett-like humor and grimdark world building, and it cannot overcome not one, but two terrible control schemes.

So, spoilers and long-windedness after the cut m’kay?

Right, so Divinity: Original Sin 2 was supposed to be a litmus test on whether I should try Baldur’s Gate III because I’ve never played any Larian games, OR any Baldur’s Gate entries, either. I figured I might run through it with a rogue and bang out a review in a week or three.

That was back in early September.

I first ran into personal problems just trying to pick a class that clicked for me, restarting eight times without finding anything I liked. I then swapped to using mouse and keyboard briefly to see what I thought of it, only to discover that I could edit the characters’ starting spells. Using a controller, the ability to edit is not as simple as seeing an edit button to click. That’s because the UI from one control scheme is VASTLY different from the other.

But let’s set that aside, because I continued to play my way into the middle of Act II, only to decide I wasn’t happy and restart to build another new character. I didn’t even get to the big twist of the game until I’d played two hundred hours of the first two areas, Fort Joy and Reaper’s Coast. By the time I actually did find a character I liked, I understood the combat system so intimately that I knew exactly where to place my crew for maximum damage to the enemy and reduced area of effect damage to my own people.

You’ll note I’m not touching the story yet, and there’s a reason for that. First, I really want to cover why I stuck with this so long, even when hubby and my sister-in-law were asking why I didn’t just drop it if it made me so mad. The answer to that is, regardless of what class you pick, or what other characters and classes are in your party, every single fight in the game can be overcome so long as you look at them as very complex puzzles.

In addition to variables like odds (the ratio of enemies to party size), available skills and items, the environment must be taken into account. There might be hazards on the ground like pools of oil or poison, both of which are flammable. There might be water, which can become shocking with lightning spells, or vaporize into steam if a fire spell is cast on it. Even a puddle of blood, yours or the enemies’, can suddenly because an unaccounted for hazard by casting the wrong thing at the wrong time.

It’s these puzzle elements that kept me coming back, because rather than trying to brute force a fight like I might do with games like Dark Souls or Skyrim, I actually needed to develop strategies for every fight, and then be able to adapt if my carefully crafted plan went tits up mid-fight because one of the enemy enchanters decided to ignite the whole battlefield, covering friend and foe alike in flames and setting a timer of attrition on everyone.

This would be even better if the enemy had to deal with the changing environment rules the same way the game enforces them on my party, but now we get into cardinal sin number one: the enemy cheats. My characters cannot fire spells nor arrows through steam or smoke no matter how thin it is, but enemy units can fire away with no problems. Similarly, none of my people can fire over waist-high railings or stair handrails, but the enemy units can. They can fire from elevated positions at player characters close to the wall underneath them, where as a player character aiming from the same spot will get the warning “Path is interrupted!” The enemy can teleport to places the player cannot, can make shots that are straight up impossible, and are often allowed way more turns per round than any player character, even with the Lone Wolf talent adding more action points for that character.

Which leads directly into problem number two: the enemy has to cheat because they’re so painfully stupid that their mistakes often become comedy gold. I lost track of the number of times an enemy might throw a flame grenade, only for it to miss my whole crew and strike only their buddy positioned behind my folks. And yes, that is hilarious almost every time it happens.

But it’s not so funny when enemy troops ignore one of their grievously wounded comrades to cast healing spells on my undead mage. (Undead in this game are wounded by healing spells and potions, instead healing from poison, which has a whole separate rant attached to it real soon.) It isn’t funny or fun watching the AI make dumb mistakes, only to correct them by employing some cheats to get back on track.

Eventually, I took this behavior into account by initiating battle with only one character, drawing all aggression toward them while the other members of my crew were free to move in real time. All the enemy units are forced to hold still and wait their turn while I set them up for mass murder. Cheesy? Sure, but if the game’s going to cheat to this degree, I don’t feel bad finding ways to break the rules myself.

Adding to these issues is enemies able to use spells indefinitely. Examples include a magister casting a spell called Shackles of Pain in a hostage situation. This spells lasts for three turns for players, and is meant to inflict damage onto ONE linked character each time the player takes damage. This mini boss is chained to three hostages, and it is impossible to rescue them, even if I have my people heal the hostages after every attack. Even twelve turns later, they’re still affected by the spell. It’s bullshit.

Other examples include enemy troops who can permanently cast wings, avoiding all elemental ground effects like fire and poison, or assassins who cast invisibility spells or drink potions that last indefinitely when they should only last around five turns. There are more, but trying to catalogue all the ways the game fucks over players by letting the enemy troops cheat is mentally exhausting.

Then on top of that, there’s a lot of spells that I feel like a character’s stats ought to determine whether they take effect or not. A character of high intelligence should be less prone to being charmed or suffering madness. A character of high dexterity should have a better chance of dodging incoming spells, and a character with high constitution and strength ought to be a lot harder to knock down. But all of these status effects landing come down to what clothing the character is wearing, and whether or not it still has magic armor. I got so tired of seeing “Blinding blocked by magic armor.” It doesn’t make any sense that a blinding light should somehow not be debilitating just because a dude was wearing a certain robe.

While the environmental interactions are interesting in theory, the game makers made some really bad or downright dumb choices. Water makes steam? Okay. Water and fire makes flaming steam? Uh, dafuq? Also, there’s four different flavors of fire, most of which cannot be extinguished with water magics like Rain or Winter Blast, and two that prevent the use of healing spells or potions. Poison is also flammable, so imagine being an undead character trying to cast a pool of poison to heal in, and it instead ignites and makes the situation worse.

Compounding this interaction issue is that a lot of traps involve surfaces coated in flammable and explosive materials, but give no indication that they are. I might set up a character to fire from what looks like a safe position, only to learn in the first round of combat that they are in fact standing in something flammable that they won’t be able to get clear of without burning two turns worth of action points.

I could actually spend a lot longer nitpicking all kinds of infuriating scenarios where the game feels designed to blow up in your party’s collective faces, but I’d much rather move on to the next complaint, the controls. I spent a lot of time playing this on a controller because years of FPS games on a mouse and keyboard left my right wrist in such a bad state that I didn’t have any choice but to move to controllers. So after years of using different control schemes, I can say that this is easily one of the worst I’ve had to suffer through.

The “pointer” for the controller is finicky and inaccurate. It will often wander from one attack to another on the same enemy. If you don’t reposition it every time, look forward to one melee attack, and two wasted action points as the character walks around the enemy rather than fight them. What if you’re fighting on a platform over the ground? Get ready to experience the joy of the camera and pointer abandoning the battle to give you a tour of NOTHING FUCKING USEFUL.

“Duh,” you say, “just used the mouse and keyboard.” Yeah, I tried that, and there are no movement keys. Both WASD and the arrow keys control the camera, and the controls to rotate and pan the camera are all over the place on the keyboard, preventing me from just leaving my hand in a single comfortable pose.

Even better? Every manipulation of the camera unlocks it from the player. So, you rotated the camera to see a hidden door? Well, to move and have the camera follow the character, you have to lock it back on with another key press, which goes back to the rotation and orientation you didn’t want. You can’t have both the angle you wanted and the ability to have a camera lock. That’s not just dumb, it’s a terrible design choice that every isometric dungeon crawler I’ve ever played avoided. Oh, and all of those games put movement keys on WASD.

Finally, finally, we arrive to the story. It opens with your character waking on a ship bound for Fort Joy with a magic collar around their neck preventing them from using Source magic. The ship is sunk by an evil witch trying to murder all the *shudder* Sourcerers, and after being revived by their god, the player awakens on the shore of Fort Joy.

Tasked with recruiting a party and escaping, Fort Joy essentially serves as the tutorial island, as well as being the introduction to the magisters, or as I took to calling them, Magi-Nazis. The name certainly fits, with an army of fanatics carting men, women, and children to a concentration camp to either die of disease or starvation, or literally volunteer to a “cure” that involves removing their fucking soul, leaving a husk that is still alive, but lacking in any personality or will of their own. Many are happy to torture and murder Sourcerers with little prompting. There’s even an evil magister performing grisly experiments like Dr. Mengele.

During this tutorial, the player meets with the god representing their race, who explains that they are Godwoken, and that they must ascend to become the next Divine and replace the last Divine, who was supposedly murdered by his son for reasons that are absolutely legit.

Now, I could do a beat by beat rundown of the plot, but instead, here’s the spoiler heavy Cliff’s Notes version. One, the previous Divine, Lucian,  isn’t actually dead, and the magisters are working off of his plan to “save the world” by stripping every person capable of becoming Godwoken of their souls. Men, women, and children, all effectively dead. 

Lucian also mass murdered the elves with a magic called Death Fog just to eliminate a rebel group hiding in their lands, and then had his second in command mow down all the ancestor trees in their land, which are elves who died and grew into these trees. He then had her carve up these elf ancestors to make magic enslaved boats. He’s got his people planning to murder all the lizard people next, I guess because when you’re on a roll, why stop at just one genocide?

And the people of the world fucking love him even knowing all his crimes. He’s like Hitler and the Pope got merged into one person, and the Catholic church collectively went, “WOW, HE’S EVEN BETTER NOW THAT HE’S OPENLY EATING BABY FLESH!”

The character learns that there’s a massive threat coming, the Void, and it’s a danger to the seven patron gods and to all of their children, who were created in their likeness. But depending on whether you ask the right questions or not, it comes out that these seven gods are actually an elder race known as the Eternals. They stole power from the seal binding the Void, and then they sacrificed most of their own people to the Void, leaving them free to pose as gods and create a shared garden to play with mortal toys and feed on their source when they died.

Then the players learns that the king of the Eternals is breaking the seal on the Void to bring back their people, punish the seven false gods for damn near destroying the Eternal races, and oh, also wipe out every living thing to start over with a new world suited for his people.

So, it takes most of the game to realize that there are no good guys in the game. There’s barely any morally grey people, unless you choose to play your character that way. In the end, you have to choose whether to prop up the reign of the seven mass murdering false gods, support Lucian McNazi and let him go through with his wretched plans (and be loved even more for it), or to support the Void King and say fuck all of creation.

And yes, there are a few more endings. I know because I played all the way through to get two of them. But after feeling dissatisfied with both, I looked up the rest, and I didn’t care for any of them. I’m sure some folks liked the grimdark setting, but to me every ending could be summarized as, “Yes you won, but fuck you anyway. See you in the sequel, biyatch!”

To reiterate, I know a lot of people love the setting and all the endings, and some might argue with me, “But isn’t this more realistic, given how people are?” My answer is, I don’t want my fantasy gaming to be more realistic or more grim. I want escapism. I don’t need to be the chosen one, either. I just want a game that lets me use fantasy trappings to get away from how awful the real world is, not find a game that makes me think how eerily analogous the fantasy and reality settings are. Because really, that’s depressing, and I don’t play games to feel depressed.

Coming down to a score, and factoring in all of the things that drove me nuts, I really want to drop an angry 2 and walk away. But I did play over five hundred hours, and I did love the battles. (Even though I also hated them.) So by the same token, I can’t give this a 5 or 4. I’m stuck at 3 stars, and I guess I have to accept that because I don’t do half stars.

On a final note, I’m still not sure if I want to play Baldur’s Gate III. I understand it’s the same general underlying combat systems with an added layer of D n’ D rules, including actual dice rolls for saving throws. That does sound like something I want to play. But I’m also hesitant to go down that rabbit hole. Maybe I’ll end up in the same loop of resetting until I find the right class for me. Maybe I’ll find the same flaws in the game that I did here. And maybe I’ll feel just as frustrated by the story that starts out promising “consequences for my actions,” but quickly funnels me into the same tunnel as everyone else, dumping me out at the end for a handful of endings, all of which make me go “Meh.”

As for who I’d recommend this for, I’d say strategy gamers who like unfair odds and grimdark settings. If that’s your idea of a good time, then this could definitely be your jam.

Game review: Lara Croft Go for Android

Ages ago, back when I was using a Windows Phone because of the Zune music service (another great idea Microsoft abandoned even though they had the better service over Spotify AND Apple Music) one of the first mobile games I paid to play was Hitman Go, and I very much loved it. It was set up like a board game on a diorama with little plastic figurines, and while there was some light puzzling to it, I didn’t have too much trouble breezing through its levels. Even so I came away feeling pretty positive about it aside from some finicky control issues.

When Lara Croft Go came out, I put it in my Want To Play list, but as so often happens, I forgot it existed until it recently got pulled off the market. When it got put back up for sale a few months later, I said, “No, this time, I’m going to buy it.” So I did, and I’ll say right upfront, this could have been a 5 star game. It loses a star for stupid greedy reasons, but I’ll get to that in due time.

The first thing to know about Lara Croft Go is, the designers altered the formula to be less of a board game, and more of a puzzle game. And let me tell you, some of those puzzles are real brain ticklers. I played several levels where I had to put the phone down and come back to it with fresh eyes the next day. One level near the very end had me so perplexed I surrendered and went to watch a YouTuber try it, and seeing them fail the same way I did actually made me realize what I was missing, so I closed the video, went back to the game, and nailed the solution on the first (twenty-first, is more accurate) try. So when I say this game is a joy for puzzle lovers, I mean, this is going to really test whether you are paying attention or not.

The story is unimportant, just Lara going into a ruin to look for a treasure. There’s no dialogue to explain this, just a few short cut scenes to establish the basic plot. If you’ve played any of Lara’s games, you already know the drill. She’s going to fight ridiculous monsters, evade traps, and find mystical artifacts that make zero sense. None of this is a complaint, by the by.

Lara is pursued by a giant snake monster for the better portion of the game, but along with that, there’s traps, cobras, komodo dragons, and giant spiders. They all have their own rules about how they move on the level, and to counter them, there are spears, torches, moveable columns, or just using the traps against the enemies. All of this is wonderful, especially because the game sometimes puts in false flags, or stuff not relevant to the puzzle, but that might make you think they are. So you spend ten, fifteen minutes trying to work with this element before going, “Duh, this is a red herring!” I loved it.

Then there’s the gems and artifacts to collect by finding hidden jars in each level. Oh, my God, these are so tricky in some levels. Like I had to play them over and over until I finally realized, No that isn’t a column, it’s a treasure jar. And this is the brilliant design choice that I both love and hate. The game says, “Oh, sure, you solved the puzzle to reach the exit. Good for you! But…BUT, you still missed all four treasures.”

And sure, I could just move on and get to the end of the game. But if I go back and find all the artifacts, Lara can get a new bomber jacket. Who doesn’t love bomber jackets? I know I do. So yeah, they got me on the hook to hunt down every treasure and gem, just so I can collect a couple more digital doodads.

There’s not really much music aside from occasional stingers, so the sound design is really just ambient noise, but that also works to the game’s advantage. It’s one of the few mobile games where I never turned the volume down, and that’s a massive accomplishment.

What doesn’t work so well is the controls, which can occasionally decide that a swipe to the left was more downward. A LOT of levels require getting movements set to a very exact sequence, so if the input is misinterpreted, there’s no back button to erase a mistake. It’s an instant restart, and I suffered through many levels where I knew the solution, but had to restart several times while shouting “How was that left swipe a fucking step to the right!?”

But now we come to the cardinal sin. I think I was in the second area of the game, trying to sort out a saw trap, and I just kept fucking up the timing. Then about the tenth time I died, a little white exclamation point in a red circle popped up over the light bulb icon in the lower right corner. I assumed it would be offering a hint, like, “Be sure to pick the right path through the saws.” But no, instead it said, “GIVE US €2.99 AND WE’LL PLAY THE LEVEL FOR YOU.”

What?

WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK?

First of all, I’m playing a puzzle game because I want to be challenged. This game accomplished that in spades. It had me replaying the same level ten times just to look for a jar I missed. I would have liked a hint nudging me the right way, particularly in the back half of the game when almost every level had me wandering away and needing time to sort out what I was getting wrong. But I just wanted a hint, like “Try moving the columns around.” I did not ever want to have the game play itself and make me pay extra to stop playing.

This is exactly the kind of greedy cash grab that is poisoning the gaming well, and it’s even more tragic this time because Lara Croft Go is an expertly crafted work of art. Someone looked at this superbly designed puzzle and decided that they should shit all over it by asking players, “Give us more money, and we’ll play the game for you.” THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF MAKING SO MANY GREAT PUZZLES IF YOU’RE GOING TO RUIN THEM?

Ahem.

I mean obviously, I didn’t go in for that scam, and I have nothing but love for the game itself, the sometimes wonky controls notwithstanding. I adored every level and felt pleased with myself every time I finally found the solution. But if I failed to nail a solution before that little hint light bulb lit up with an exclamation point, it would remind me that someone, probably a stupid fucking middle manager, couldn’t resist meddling with a brilliant game, all in the name of prying a few more bucks from paying customers.

As disgusting as that is, I can’t ignore how much I loved the challenge of these puzzles, and although I ranted to hubby that I would give Lara Croft Go 3 stars, in the end, I’m giving it 4. It could have achieved the highest score from me, but between the controls screwing me over and the occasional prods for money to not play the game, it loses a star.

It’s still quite good, and if you like puzzle games, this should keep you busy for a week or two.

A Vampire Survivors: Whiteout update

Before we get into the  reviewy stuff, I should apologize for missing updates and explain. I was rushing to get reviews together from a book I’ve been loving, a mobile game I have mixed feelings on, and an RPG that’s damn near broke me. All of them were close to the finish line when my dog Toffi died. It’s been close to two weeks since then, and I’m still waking up and looking around for her. The husband is still calling for her when it’s time to take the other furbabies out for walkies. So, yeah, we both needed time to process, and we’re not really done with that.

On top of that, I’m using November’s NaNoWriMo as the kick in the ass I needed to get back into writing books like I used to. I’m making steady progress there, but that means I might be a little light on reviews because I was too busy trying to plan crimes most heinous for my characters to solve. So if I miss a few posts, just bear with me, and I promise the new book is going to make up for my lack of reviews.

With all that out of the way, I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that it’s rare for a review to be the final word on most games these days. There’s constant tweaking and balance changes for some that can drastically alter a game for better or worse. Otherwise there can be added content, either as paid DLC or as free updates. 

The vast majority of the professional review sites rarely revisit games to offer new reviews in light of these changes, but to be fair, most have been struck from the lists for early review copies for daring to call game publishers like EA, Activision-Blizzard, and Ubisoft out for their shitty policies. I respect them for that, but it means they have to buy games on release day, and then play them as fast as possible. It’s a race to see who can put out the first proper reviews, so they don’t have a lot of free time to pick an old game back up and try out the shiny new toys that got added after their review.

I however, have lots of free time, and given that Vampire Survivors remains high on my list of favorite games to chill out with, a recently released winter-themed update boasting a new character, weapon, relic, bonus level, and character morph sounded like the perfect excuse to get back into the senseless slaughter of thousands of rampaging monsters.

So, first of all, the new character, She-Moon Eeta, is a blast to play. Armed with the new weapon, a spear called Glass Fandango, she is good to go for a single weapon challenge run, or for just picking up random weapons and evolving them. The Glass Fandango will focus attacks in the direction She-Moon is walking, but it can also chain attacks in a star shape around her. When paired with classic items like the Empty Tome, Candelabrador, and Spellbinder, it can turn into a powerful star of death when She-Moon is standing still, or it can act as a wedge to prevent enemy build-up from halting her progress. (Which is a huge problem for some of the lower-tier survivors.)

As a defensive character, She-Moon also has one more fun trick up her sleeve. When her health drops below twenty-five percent, her weapon freezes time, just like the orologian items do. This can only be used once before She-Moon needs to recover to full health to reset it. But it’s damned handy to have in the closing minutes of a run when the screen fills up with much more powerful monsters.

Unfortunately, the evolved spear, Celestial Voulge, suffers from the same problem as Queen Sigma’s evolved Sole Solution: visual vomit. The graphical effects when time freezing is triggered blot out the level, so I can’t see the terrain or obstacles, and I can barely see the enemies. Of the two effects, Sole Solution is definitely worse, but I still think a lot of my future runs with the spear will go without evolving it to make sure I can see where I’m going.

Oh, also, the spear is good to add to certain characters who have holes in their attacks. Folks like Antonio, Pugnala, and Zi’Assunta will find early mobs less stressful as a result, and if they do get overrun, that time freezing ability is a literal life-saver.

The new Whiteout level is also pretty nice. A bonus level, it only runs for twenty minutes, and it features a lot of icy foes and snowmen to plow through before dropping some annoying kitsune on you. Much like the hydra from the Lake Foscari level who stretch their necks to attack across the screen, the kitsune can whip their tails for long distance damage, and they hit real fuckin’ hard. Without investing in defensive items like the Armor and Laurel, they can quickly end a run for anyone whose eyes glazed over from a dopamine high.

The music is good, but that’s no surprise given how solid the whole soundtrack is. What else? Ah, right, there’s a new relic called the Chaos Altemanna, and it’s hidden on the Tiny Bridge level. Collecting it will allow the dog survivor O’Sole Meeo to morph into a pretty flower boy and evolve their Celestial Dusting weapon into Profusione D’Amore. It’s nice, changing the spray of flowers into a kind of tidal wave of leaves and flowers. But if I’m being honest, the morph for Cavallo was more impressive in terms of damage and visual impact.

As part of the announcement of the new update, the developers also mentioned Adventures, which sounds pretty intriguing. It promises to remix elements from each level and create new ways to play and progress. This sounds like a huge improvement over the current random event feature, which has a tendency to keep rolling the same events over and over. (Flower Wall for the fourth time in a row? No, thanks. It’s not even challenging, just tedious.)

And eventually a new co-op mode is coming, and I might have to hunt down an online friend to test it, or to force my husband to play. (He hasn’t been too impressed by the game, so that’s gonna be a hard sell.)

In any case, these new additions will also be free, like the Whiteout update, and I am definitely looking forward to both features when they come out.

In the end, I’d say the Whiteout update gave Vampire Survivors a shiny new hook to pull me back in for several days of “just one more run.” If you already have Vampire Survivors, go ahead and load it back up to try out the new stuff. And if you don’t have the game yet, you really should try it. It’s cheap, it will likely become your favorite way to unwind after a busy day, and you’ll be paying some lovely people and encouraging them to make a new game. And we DO want them to make a new game, y’all. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s gonna be brilliant.

Game review: Suika Game (for browsers)

I know what you’re thinking. A browser game? Really? Yes, but what got me looking at it was a review for a Nintendo Switch game of the same name Suika Game, or Watermelon Game. The review said, “There’s also a browser game, but it isn’t as good.” And then I said, “Well that may be so, but I don’t own a Nintendo Switch, so let’s try this bad boy out.”

That was around 2 PM on Monday of last week. I looked up at what I thought was a moment later to see it was 6 PM, and I’d yet to go out to get the shopping done for dinner. So I said, “All right, one more game, and then I’ll quit.”

That should be all you need to know to understand this is going to be a glowing endorsement from me, but I’ll go ahead and do the full review.

Before I get to that, those of you who do own the Switch, be aware the game is in Japan only, meaning to play it, you need to make a different account for that region to get it. Or, you know, play the inferior version that can be played in any browser, including all the Android and Apple browsers. I used Chrome on my phone for the first time to test this, and I played in the bathroom until my ass fell asleep. Not me, just my ass. Walking back to my desk with a sleeping ass was really difficult.

The game is easy at first. Match two cherries and you get a strawberry, and two strawberries makes a grape. The first goal, and the real win of the game is getting a watermelon out of all these matching pairs. You know it’s the win condition because there’s confetti and a round of applause for getting that sweet melon. But for a lot of folks, the real goal is reaching a score of 3,000. Speaking as someone who got 2,700 ONCE, all I can say is, good luck, suckers.

Why? Because each merged fruit is larger than the last, and once you’ve got a couple really large fruits in the game, physics stop making sense. What might have worked in the early game is now more likely to fail, as small fruits bounce far from where you wanted them, and large fruits act like they’re filled with helium. It is entirely possible to collapse a huge stack of fruit on the right side of the level, only to have the larger resulting fruit push the stack on the left over the limit. So you can be winning, and still lose.

Also, the oranges are traitorous bastards who will fuck up every carefully constructed plan every single time. They don’t just bounce away from where you want them. No, they can also start spinning for no reason whatsoever, and that rotation will churn all the fruit around them, altering the field and screwing your plans in real slow time.

But, I’m not playing this for realistic physics. I’m playing this because I got close to 3,000 points once, and I know if those oranges will behave just once, I’m going to reach Fruit Nirvana. Because of that steadfast faith, I’ve already played around thirty hours in one week. I’ve played on my computer and on my phone, and every time I lose, I hit replay, ready to keep going even if I’m supposed to be cooking dinner already.

It’s addicting, and for all the best reasons. Winning and getting that applause for the watermelon feels real good, and losing doesn’t hurt so bad because it’s not my fault. It’s that godforsaken orange’s fault.

I’m giving Suika Game 5 stars. It’s free, and it’s at this link. Go now. Play it, love it, hate that rat bastard betrayer, the orange.

Red Bull limited edition flavors and some other stuff

Boy howdy, this week’s review of all the so-called Limited Edition Red Bull drinks promises to be hard to judge. They’re all just so good, and unlike Monster’s candy-inspired flavors, they taste like real fruit juices got added to a can of regular Red Bull. The new summer edition with Juneberry is certainly delightful, but is it better than dragon fruit, watermelon, or apricot mixed with strawberry? Yes sir, a hard competition indeed.

Or, we could review Death Stranding, which I finally finished. That’s on me for getting tangled up with two massive games at the same time and failing to juggle them right. (To be fair, I suck at real juggling, too.)

If you’ve followed me long enough, you know I’m not really a fan of Hideo Kojima. I’ve played several versions of the original PS1-era Metal Gear, the PS Vita remasters of Metal Gear 2 and 3, and the PS4 release Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. In all cases, Hideo’s penchant for overwriting by way of repeating the exact same information twice or even three times rubs me the wrong way, and it gets in the way of what I really want to do, play the games. In all these cases, I’ve ended up repeating a similarly worded lament, “Dude, if you want to talk so much, write a movie or a book!”

Obviously, I skipped out on the release of Death Stranding. No positive review could get me to play a postal worker simulator with Norman Reedus, and that’s not because of the game itself, but with who made it. I ain’t a fan. But then Epic Game Store gave the game out for free, and I thought, Well, if it sucks, I can just delete it and move on.

Knowing me and my tastes, it may come as a surprise that I liked Death Stranding after all. Not really the story, though there was a plot twist that took foreshadowing cut scenes and then dropped a bombshell reveal to cleverly subvert my expectations of where the story was heading. But apart from that, the vast majority of characters are flat and stereotypical, and there’s still Kojima’s penchant for repetition that grinds my gears (Solid Metal Gears, if you will.)

But the actual game, the job of delivering packages to remote locations, really clicked for me. It’s a surprisingly Zen experience, punctuated occasionally with some nervous tension, and despite some missteps here and there (one of them involving a misstep off the side of a cliff in a blizzard, so that one was my bad), it ended up being one of the most satisfying games I’ve played this year.

Let me try to wade slightly into the story in a way that I hope will avoid spoilers. A supernatural event wiped out most of the human population and left the remaining survivors stranded and separated. The remains of the US government set up an expedition called BRIDGES to try and link these people together, and they ran into resistance from terrorists, who blew up a city to stymy the government’s progress.

Somewhere in the midst of these proceedings, a courier by the name of SamPorterBridges (Play the game for even two hours and this is going to make perfect sense) struck out on his own to make deliveries without dealing with his mommy issues. Which sounds derogatory, I know, but his mother is revealed in the opening moments of the game to be the US President, and she’s dying of cancer. After she dies and Sam is contracted to deliver her body to an incinerator, her right hand man *shudder* Die-Hardman *shudder* convinces SamPorterBridges to rejoin BRIDGES for a second one-man reunion tour to link all of these outposts and Make America Great Again.

(By the way, there are a lot of people in this game with asinine names, given out with explanations that make Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four naming scene seem almost cerebral. “They call me Mama because I’m a Mama.” Ugh, feh, and meh.)

To reconnect all these outposts, SamPorterBridges is given a necklace with a bunch of magic keys to connect everyone to a super-fast wireless network that will let them share information and even print equipment. It’s like the internet, but supernatural.

So SamPorterBridges goes out on his tour of the Pygmy US, where walking two kilometers is enough to cross from one state to the next, or even to cross two in some cases. The game falls into a kind of rhythm, with SamPorterBridges making a delivery, maybe unlocking new gear, and then taking another job to go somewhere else. Sometimes a new route will unlock a new song, and that’s a bonus because the soundtrack is a great collection of melancholy songs that fit with the world and the themes the game is covering.

I’ll break away from the story to cover controls, which are a little different than most games. A lot of the time, you have to keep holding down the triggers, which control SamPorterBridges’ hands to grip the straps of his pack. Otherwise he has a tendency to stumble and fall, which damages his packages, and breaking cargo is bad, mm’kay? And sure, it’s a weird hand position to keep hold of for long stretches of the game, but once I got used to it, it wasn’t all that different from a driving game or an FPS. Once I got used to it, the grip itself became part of the chill out experience.

Then, the tension comes in. Throughout the world there are pockets of ghosts floating around in the rain, and if they catch SamPorterBridges it turns into this whole struggle in supernatural tar to get away from dead people and dolphins and giant squids. (If I make it sound dumb, it’s actually visually stunning the first couple of times to see it in action.) I’m told that if I got dragged down into the tar, it would cause an explosion big enough to wipe out the entire area, including all the settlements. I wouldn’t know, because I managed to escape the tar pits each time with some expedient jumping and screaming. (I’m pretty sure the screaming helped.)

These moments of tension are reduced to routine gate checks once SamPorterBridges gets access to Hematic Grenades, blood bombs that can exorcise ghosts and let SamPorterBridges get on with his job. At first, just having five grenades can lead to tension if I miss with one or two in a particularly dense haunting. But then SamPorterBridges gets a backpack upgrade allowing him to carry a LOT of grenades. No, like A LOT of grenades. So, so many.

Let me pause here and explain how much this upgrade trivializes the threats of the game. The first time Super Terrorist Higgs (winner of the least dumb character name in the game, while still being pretty dumb, award) shows up to drop a boss monster on SamPorterBridges, there aren’t enough grenades on hand to deal with this new threat. So SamPorterBridges has to leap from one building to the next to hunt for more grenades and finish the job. It’s very tense and scary, yes?

Right, but by the time Higgs shows up for round two, SamPorterBridges can just stand in place and chuck grenades until the boss goes back to the beach it was summoned from. Oh sure, he might have to dodge roll once or twice if the boss gets frisky, but what was genuinely terrifying becomes routine with just two equipment upgrades. (The boss monsters all look cool, though, so there is that.)

There are also some bad guys who like to steal packages for reasons so dumb it hurt my brain to think about it. These guys seem like a threat right up until the games sends SamPorterBridges into a camp to steal back some Very Important MacGuffin. Then once I realized how easy it was to beat them up and steal their stuff, I actually went around their camps like a third grade bully stomping through an unsupervised kindergarten playground. It’s a great way to get spare materials when an outpost is running low on printing supplies, or when a section of highway is in need of repairs. Later on, there’s an equipment upgrade that can shut down their security system, so I was going in all Metal Gear style to sneak up on them and knock them out before they could cry to their buddies for help. Yes, it’s terrible, but it’s also loads of fun.

There are vehicles to unlock, three-wheeled motorcycles and big ass cargo trucks. They’re both nice for certain kinds of deliveries, particularly if you put in the effort to rebuild the highways. But a lot of deliveries still go to places littered with rocks and deep waterways, making the use of vehicles more of a menace than a convenience.

Plus, regardless of vehicle type, all the wheels have less traction than freshly greased Teflon. Try driving on even a slight incline, and they’ll all slide down sideways faster than a stripper doing a pole dance with a fully oiled body. So even after getting wheels, sometimes the best answer is going on foot, usually with some robotic leg attachments to make carrying heavy loads less taxing.

Near the halfway point in the game Mads Mikkelsen…sorry, Clifford Unger (what!?! A character with a nice normal name?!?! What sorcery is this, Hideo Kojima!?!?) enters the game with a flashy introduction that gets SamPorterBridges trapped in a battle with lots of boney dead soldiers led by Cliff, who keeps shouting “I want my BB back, BB back, BB back!” like he was in an old Chili’s baby back ribs commercial.

Now, each time SamPorterBridges previously connected with BB, there’s been a flashback of what Cliff was like before he become a scary boss fight. In this way, he is the only character in the whole game that I could relate to, even as I’m having to empty another shotgun shell into his exquisitely rendered face. Nobody else gets the chance to develop the way he does, not even SamPorterBridges. That’s a tragedy, because I would have liked to know more about Deadman and Heartman so I could connect with them instead of waving my hand while they talk and lamenting, “Ugh, can we get on with it already?”

That’s my biggest complaint, really. Cliff is given character in these little flashbacks that last maybe a minute at most, and everyone else has to talk and talk for ten minutes about the next job, or the next invention. None of them can relay any information that makes me care about them. You’d think Mama explaining her condition or her connection to her sister might get some emotional response from me, but all it really did was make me roll my eyes because it’s lazy writing that falls back on one of the most overused tropes in fiction. I want to say more, but it’s a massive spoiler, so I’ll move on.

Finishing up the game, there was nothing of the story that left an impression with me, but through it all, what kept me going was the job, simple as it was. Look at the delivery, decide if it goes in a vehicle or on foot, and then go do the job. There was a kind of satisfaction in that loop that kept me going right to the very end.

If I have any other complaints, they’re minor but notable. Item durability is shoved into the game mechanics thanks to “timefall,” or rain and snow that will cause stuff to age rapidly. To illustrate this, grass and flowers are constantly moving in a rapid life and death cycle, and equipment and even the roads can break down ridiculously fast because of this effect. Yet for some reason, all the trees in a forest remain unchanging. I’m guessing animating the life-death cycle of a forest would have made even the best CPU and GPU go “fuck it” and explode in a rapid overheating death. In any case, it’s a pain to have to stop playing the game to go around collecting metal, ceramics, and crystals just to keep the roadways from breaking down again.

Second is, the game finally gives real guns, and not a hot second later, here’s Hideo heavily intruding on my fun to say, “Now don’t kill any people with guns, cause that would be bad, mm’kay?” I get it, it’s a staple of his writing to avoid gun violence. But if the game has actual nukes alongside magic ghost bombs, I’d like to use a gun without Kojima sternly wagging a finger at me for being the bad guy. And maybe it’s just that the typical nature of games is to make a gun the easiest solution to most problems. But part of it is also that the game goes on a long time making up poop and pee bombs before going “Oh, yeah, I guess we could re-invent guns, too.” It’s just dumb.

And finally, what the fuck was up with all the Monster Energy Drink branding? Was Hideo close to bankruptcy and needed that sweet Monster money? Okay, that’s fine, but why was it the only corporate branding? There’s literal pizza delivery missions in the game, so why not get in on some Pizza Hut cash? Or have the private room stocked with Taco Bell and KFC, and have SamPorterBridges singing jingles while he eats? Why did Monster get so much love? Is…is Hideo Kojima a Monster addict?

But I can still set aside my complaints and give Death Stranding 4 stars. The tasks it gives are mundane and yet beautiful at the same time, and I’m glad I finally gave it a chance and didn’t miss out. Who knows? I might even one day become a fan of—

Great, now that you’ve got this weather station online, you can see predictions of timefall. Just look on your cuff for the weather report.

Dee deet dee deet dee deet! Hey, Mama here. Great news, Sam. Now that you’ve got the weather station online, you can see predictions when and where timefall will occur. Just look at your cuff for the weather report.

Dee deet dee deet dee deet! Hey Sam, Die-Hardman here. Good news! Now that you’ve got that weather station online, you can see predictions for timefall storms. Just check your cuff for the weather report.

Nope, still not a fan. (‘>_

CRPG ≠ RPG

Right, first of all there’s still no review for Death Stranding, but in my defense, the reason is that another game has absorbed my attention like an absorbent thing found in all the oceans. I’m sure there’s a name for it, but that isn’t important right now. What is important is that I’m about to say something deeply controversial and divisive to the gaming community at large.

Ahem.

Computer role play games are rarely role play games. Oh sure, they all wear the label like Buffalo Bill would slip on a lady suit had he succeeded in his plan to flay a senator’s daughter. But most are rides on rails that offer illusional choices in the guise of actual role play. But getting four dialogue choices that all steer the story in the same direction does not equal role play.

Some of you may argue for your favorites, like good ol’ Skyrim. “Look here, asswipe, “ you say, “I can walk away from the story and do whatever I like.”

Yes, you can do that, and I have indulged in the same free-form frolicking within Skyrim’s frosty but lovely world. The problem is, no matter what role you take, the game will not deliver a narrative experience tailored to your choice. Skyrim doesn’t care if you chose to become the premier armorer with a special degree in dragon bone armor. It doesn’t care if you went to the bard’s college and want to sing to the masses at the most important wedding in the land. It doesn’t give two shits if you’ve opted to become a merchant of flowers and butterfly wings. No one in the game is going to ask you, “Hey Wing Vendor, how’s the butterfly herd this season?”

See, what you are doing is choosing not to engage with the plot, because if you did, you’d be forced to admit how little a role you have in the story. Should you engage with the plot, you reach a point where the lady who works for you tells you to kill the only good dragon in the world. If you refuse, Bethesda writers prove that they never understood what a chain of command looks like, as your sworn protector says (paraphrasing), “Fuck you, bitch, now go and kill that hero for me.”

Skyrim, and many other Bethesda games, are not RPGs. Pumping up the numbers on stats is not role play, it is simply leveling up. These kinds of games are fantasy sandboxes to choose what flavors of tasty death you want to inflict upon the local scum. This does not mean they aren’t loads of fun, so put down your replica Dawnbreaker and stick with me through another more recent example.

Divinity: Original Sin II. Boy howdy, has this game been lauded over and over as a quintessential RPG experience. With the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 causing many a head to explode, I thought I might finally look into this much loved RPG.

IT IS NOT. AT ALL. AN RPG.

It is a tactical fantasy game with a huge pool of powers and spells available to solve its many combat-based puzzles. It has a delightful treasure trove of unique talents to let you experience the world in your own special way. But when it comes down to the actual meat and potatoes of the plot, your input is not needed.

“But no,” you scream, “you have multiple endings to choose from!”

Yeah, so does any bog standard FPS or third person adventure game. Collect enough Items of Great Import or do enough side quests, and you can access the Good Ending, as opposed to the Okay Ending or the Definitely Not Okay Ending.

A real deal RPG will let you change the story itself at any moment, to the point that the DM has to throw out their script and join the improv group who are cheerfully fucking up their carefully crafted world. Very few computer games will let you get away with that kind of fuckery.

And, that’s okay.

Before we continue down this rabbit’s hole, let me be clear: just because a game isn’t a True RPG does not mean it’s a bad game. I have happily spent hundreds to thousands of hours (not hyperbole) in several so-called RPGs that were not befitting of the label.

Diablo is not a role play game. Dark Souls and its kin are not role play games. World of Warcraft…can be an RPG if you hook up with a group who insist on staying in character for all interactions. But if you only go online to type “LFT,” and then go kill the latest raid boss to make your numbers go up, that’s still not an RPG. It is a shared fantasy gaming experience, and it’s awesome. But that’s beside the point.

All of these games should have been called something else, but the bigwigs who lack imagination latched onto some low hanging fruit. Plus, it’s easier to label something an RPG rather than “tactical fantasy game,” “fantasy action game,” or “online isometric dungeon crawler.” They just don’t roll off the tongue in the same way.

Let’s get back to Divinity: Original Sin II. The tutorial sets you up nicely, thinking, This is it! This is the True RPG! Except it isn’t. Yes, you can take certain paths that make you feel like you are in control of your destiny. But even before you’ve left Fort Joy (great name, BTW), there are situations where your abilities are hampered by a DM who is more intent on their plot than your actions.

Early on, there is a character who is grievously injured, someone who has a well-developed tree of dialogue for you to explore. And yet, no matter how you interact with this character, their injuries never heal, nor can they ever realize you aren’t as bad as they believed. Their dialogue never strays from the script. Your actions are inconsequential, unable to change the encounter even if you have high persuasion.

This sort of script-heavy gaming continues into the main game. Sure, you might be a healer with three flavors of Save Yo’ Ass. But if the game wants someone to suffer, then you can cast all your healing love and the narrator will still say, “Ooh, that bitch is on death’s door.” You can’t change the plot because your role is fixed. Any attempt at role play on your part is simply ignoring how little agency you have in this world.

In conclusion, I need to reemphasize that none of these games are bad. Many of them are incredible, amazing, and mind blowing. But adding extra customization mechanics does not make any game an RPG. To do that, I need control of the script at every step of the process. Because if the writer keeps stepping in like an angry DM to silence player choice, that’s not a True RPG. It can still be a great game. But it’s wearing the wrong label strictly for the sake of marketability.

Versus series: Monster battle!

This week I’m doing something a bit different, probably because I’m playing Death Stranding and all the Monster Energy Drink branding is getting to me. (And definitely not because I’ve failed to finish Death Stranding on time for a review this week.) I’m ranking every sugar free Monster flavor I could get my hands on to tell you who is the bomb, and who is the barf. (Literally!)

But before I begin, I should mention two things. First, because I drank uncarbonated taurine drinks as a morning beverage of choice for a few years, I actually like the taste of plain old Red Bull. Lots of folks can’t stand it, and I can understand it is either something you love or hate. Personally, I love it, so that’s my baseline flavor profile for all other brands.

Second, I’m not sure why, but at a certain point, energy drinks lost a lot of their power over my sleep habits. I’ve been known to drink one before bed and still get a good night’s sleep. I think part of this is my choice of drinking the sugar free versions, as I’ve sometimes randomly gone for the regular editions and ended up pulling an unintentional all-nighter. What I’m saying is, I can only review these based on taste, and not on how much “kick” are in them.

Also, know that I sampled all of these over the course of weeks. If I drank all these ultra flavors in one sitting, I’d probably unlock my own ultra-instinct.

Right, so going from worst to best, here we go…

Ultra Pipeline Punch
No lie, I threw this one up. I think that alone should say a lot. It’s way too sweet, and I can’t even tell what I’m supposed to be tasting. Once I got it down, my stomach decided it didn’t like this stuff either, and it came right back up without changing the flavor in any way.

Zero
Somehow this manages to be sweeter than the full sugar version, and that confuses me. The added sweetness drowns out the taurine taste, which I suppose might be the point, but I’m not a fan.

Super Dry
I don’t know who named this, but they have clearly not had many dry drinks like wine or tonic (or any kind of Martini) Much like Ultra PP, I can’t tell what it is I’m supposed to be tasting, and all I get is this nauseating sense of sweetness, followed instantly by sweetener aftertaste. Hard pass, thanks.

Ultra Fiesta Mango
Probably named by the same guy who came up with Super Dry, this bears little resemblance to Mango or a Fiesta. This one, however, is just on the right side of appealing that if I got a can for free, I wouldn’t say no to it. I’m just not up for spending money on it, is all I’m saying.

Ultra Golden Pineapple
A slight step up from fake mango is fake pineapple. I can almost pretend that I can taste the pineapple candy flavor this was aiming for, but then it gets lost in the sweetener aftertaste. Another can to go into the category of “I wouldn’t turn down a free one.”

Lewis Hamilton Edition
Oooh, okay, now we’re talking about a flavor I would seek out and pay for.  It’s a combination of peach and nectarine, two of my favorite summer fruits. As an added bonus, there’s less aftertaste. During testing, I’ve bought and inhaled several cans of this, so I’d say it’s a personal favorite.

Ultra
I admit I was wary of this one, coming in a white can with no other hints about what flavor it was. So I was pleasantly surprised by the combination of lemon and grapefruit notes that I got out of it. Another version that I’d had multiple cans of during the test.

Ultra Watermelon
This is the top tier of the sugar free drinks for me, which is funny because it doesn’t quite nail down real watermelon flavor. Instead, it’s like a mild sour watermelon candy, and for some reason I can’t explain, I ended up loving this and going back to it until I got an upset stomach from drinking a second can too fast.

There you have it, my listing of all the Monster Energy drinks available locally. Or rather, all the sugar free versions. On that note, we only recently got the lemon-flavored version of Rehab, Monster’s tea beverage. There’s no sugar free version, but I figured I’d just try one to see how it is, and then I later bought another, just to see if I got the same impression. I did, and it’s weird how my opinion changes from the first few sips to the last. At first, I’m thinking, Oh no, this is too sweet. But by the end of the can, I’ve come around and decided it’s actually pretty good. Maybe the sugar bombardment is so powerful that half my taste buds are numb by the time I finish it?

Anywho, thanks for checking out this week’s post, and hopefully next week I can put up a proper review of Norman Reedus Simulator: Monster Energy Edition.

Game review: Steam World Heist for Steam

I realized moments after starting Steam World Heist that I’d played the games out of order, or sort of out of order. Hand of Gilgamech is an odd entry in the series, as it could be a prequel that comes before the first Steam World Dig, or it could be a sequel taking place long after Heist. In any case, Heist is meant to follow the two Dig games, being a sequel that takes place a hundred or so years after the previous entry.

Before I get into the plot or mechanics, I will drop the early verdict and say that this was the least enjoyable of the games thus far. Like, it’s okay, but not really great or bad. The shift to turn-based strategy combined with the idea of pillaging ships for resources could have been the best pivot away from the resource management of the first two games.

Instead, this entry in the Steamverse also got shackled with resource management for the dumbest of reasons, and with a burden of a required grind with every new character introduced. But if it were just these two factors, I might still be forgiving and regard it as a good game. Instead, Steam World Heist continually makes choices to bury any hope of fun under a pile of terrible ideas.

Let start with the plot, which as mentioned follows the ending of Steam World Dig 2. The Earth blew up, or rather, the surface of the planet blew up, leaving the core and a bunch of shards still floating in a near-core orbit. The moon is still orbiting the core, and the robots all inhabit ships and stations scattering among the shards of terra firma left in orbit. Some of them are moisture farmers, harvesting water from space somehow. The story picks up following a crew of space pirates who are suddenly finding competition from a growing group called the Scrappers. The Scrappers aren’t just content to take water. They are also taking robots and, as their name implies, scrapping them in service to their queen.

The game starts with two Cowbots to use in raids against Scrapper ships. The captain, Piper, and her former whaling steam-bot Seabrass, use different classes of weapons, making each of them better suited to different tasks, in theory. Each new crew member is also supposed to serve a different role, but mostly they can all be used in the same ways. It’s only their handicaps that change how easy or hard it is to use them.

Take the first new recruit, Sally. Sally can use a regular handgun or an SMG. Unlike Piper, who has the benefit of a laser sight to indicate where her shots will go, with Sally, players have to guess where her gun is aiming, and then pray the weapon sway won’t change the angle too much. Then, unlike Seabrass and Piper, Sally’s preferred SMG rounds don’t ricochet. So if she misses all her shots, there’s not even hope for something to come back as a stray bit of damage.

Then comes Ivanski, a strong man who has to remind players of his former profession by always shoulder pressing a dumbbell. It’s absolutely stupid, but not nearly as bad as arming him with a grenade launcher and discovering all the ways that he can fuck over himself or other members of the crew thanks to badly aimed grenades. Later on, another heavy hitter can take over for him, Beatrix. While she doesn’t do any stupid animations like Ivanski, she picks up a skill while leveling up that can launch a second grenade. In the entire time I played the game, that worked in my crew’s favor ONCE. Every other time, that second round either struck Beatrix in the face, or one of the other crewmates.

You get a sniper named Valentine, whose preferred weapon can only shoot if they haven’t moved in that turn. It doesn’t seem so bad at first, but later ship designs ensure that for almost every mission, he can’t shoot anything and just becomes a liability to the rest of his crew. Thankfully, he can be given scoped pistols from Piper’s class, so he can still be useful, even if his damage is frequently nerfed unless you can find a way to park him in a prime sniping location. (He does more damage on turns where he doesn’t move, and as he levels up, that damage gets bonuses.)

Then with the DLC, you get Fen, who is making a comeback from Steam World Dig 2 as a cobbled-together steamboat with some pretty decent enhancements. Fen charges their systems with every successful enemy elimination, and those charges can power a bolt that shoots through any obstacles between them and the enemies. As an added bonus, it also pierces enemies to shoot multiple bad guys. When that isn’t needed, Fen can also effect self-repair without carrying a kit. What this means is, Fen quickly becomes the MVP of any raid.

There are more characters to unlock, but they’re all duplicates in the way that Beatrix and Ivanski are. Yes, they develop different skills, but the weapons they use are all the same. What makes all this bad is that each new crew member has to be taken back to the starting area to level up until they catch up to the rest of the crew.

In early raids, only two robots can be taken along, and the ships are all pretty easy to navigate. It’s okay to just have the two remain together, so if Seabrass misses his shot, Piper can cover for him. But very quickly, the game introduces a countdown timer, and each time it reaches zero, the “threat level” rises. I call this adding another layer of bullshit. I mean, it’s fine if a ship has turrets that activate after a hostile force is detected. But these ships with supposed skeleton crews are hiding clown car-like numbers of bots that can infinitely spawn in larger and larger numbers.

Which, again, would be fine if the ships stuck to those logical designs. But they soon start involving platforms that require constant backtracking to reach a ladder and jump to a disconnected platform. Each bot has a limited number of spaces they can walk per turn, so every backtrack can take as many as three turns, and again, there’s that timer just waiting to drop another load of bullshit into the mix.

Eventually, the game recognizes that every player is going to end up with crewmates who are too far under-leveled to be any good, so every region has a ship for a single bot to do solo runs on. Sounds good, right? It’s not, and that’s because to make this work for under-leveled crew, those single-bot runs are dull as dirt. So, what could be more fun than taking multiple characters through the same agonizing grind, just to make them useful on missions? Literally anything else.

Eventually, I gave up on hiring new crew members and just powered through with Piper, Fen, Sally, and Seabrass, occasionally swapping someone for Valentine when I needed an extra sharpshooter. I pushed through the three regions run by the Scrappers, the Royalists, and a Surprise Special Guest who won’t be a surprise if you played the first two games. While there were a few times that I was having actual fun, usually when I was allowed to run a four-bot crew, the vast majority of the time I was just muddling through for the sake of getting a review out. Most everything else became a blur of missed shots, dull battles, and unwanted grinds.

There’s two standout failures I should also mention, the humor and the music played in bars. First I’ll cover the music and clarify that the tunes playing during fights is decent stuff that gets the job done well. But even though all the robots talk in the standard video game “Hur-dur-dur-DUR-hur “ style that so many indies use to avoid paying for full voice acting, for some unfathomable reasons, the game makers decided that every bar in every region should have a band singing exactly one song with actual lyrics. Aside from one bar where I admitted, “All right, this isn’t too terrible” (damning with faint praise, indeed), in every other bar, I just wanted to run in to fulfill whatever goal I’d been given, and then run back out before the actual singing stated.

Keep in mind, I’m about as open-minded as anyone you’ll meet when it comes to music. I’ll listen to country, pop, rock, hip-hop, R & B, rap, folk, techno, emo, classical, whatever. So when I say these steam-punk attempts at cramming a theme into various styles of music and they almost all fail, that’s not a music snob being snobby. It’s a music lover crying, “DEAR GOD, WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?!”

Then there’s the jokes. Whether it’s in dialogue or in item descriptions, every single joke lands with all the impact of a broken whoopee cushion. Again, I should point out that I love puns and dad jokes. So when I say this stuff is bad, I mean it digs down past the most rotten of dad jokes and mines the bad humor coal and oil seventy-five miles below the barrel of dad jokes.

I want to find something positive to end with, but all I have is that there were a few times where I was having a little fun, but I already mentioned when those few moments were granted to me. I guess the boss fights were mostly okay. But even there, the two big boss fights from the second and third region were filled with padding that didn’t add much to the difficulty and only increased the length of the fights.

So in the end, I find myself unable to give Steam World Heist anything higher than 3 stars. I’d like to give it 2, but it just barely cleared that bar. If you’ve played the two Dig games and want to know where the story goes after that, maybe get this on sale with the DLC to take advantage of Fen’s capabilities. But if you just want a strategy game to have fun with, look elsewhere. There are lots of better options to fill your time with.

My GTA VI wishlist

Believe it or don’t, but I’m actually ahead of my blogging schedule for once, with a few reviews already queued up and good to go. Finding myself with free time on my hands, I decided to go back to Grand Theft Auto V to finish up the last of the story. Unlike my run on the Xbox, this time I chose to spare Trevor because even if I still don’t like him, the idea of getting rid of Steve Haines and Devin Weston was more appealing after putting up with their crap a second time around.

I’ve actually been playing GTA V a lot on PC, though I’ve frequently restarted without getting very far beyond the second heist. This is because I’m not really playing the game like other folks. I don’t go in for crazy stunts or skillful getaways from higher level police pursuits. I watch folks do that on YouTube, and of course I find it impressive. But mostly, I play to chill out.

I might get in a car and cruise around the highway while listening to the radio. Other times, I like to play golf with Franklin and his golfing buddy, Castro Lagano, or play tennis with Michael against his wife Amanda, or against a random dude at the public courts. (Though I prefer playing random strangers because Amanda was working on her backhand almost as she was on her reverse cowgirl with her tennis instructor. She’s set me up with that cross court backhand so often, I’ve had actual nightmares about it.) Sometimes, I like to steal the faster cars and get on the highway late at night to get a mostly free length of road for a real test run. And sometimes I just go for a walk to take in whatever is happening around my character.

I don’t run mods, and I’ve never really been a fan of GTA Online. But I love Los Santos and all the possibilities that any visit can offer. Once I get tired of chilling out, there’s always someone whose pockets are a little too heavy and need lightening.

Obviously, hearing the details on GTA VI from the leak have me intrigued, but I tried to keep away from the larger pools of information because I’d like to go in mostly blind like I did with GTA V. I do know the plan is to make a Bonnie and Clyde couple, and that sounds good to me. I also know that there’s some features I’d like to see in the next game, and I’d like to share my thoughts with y’all. Don’t think of these as my list of demands, or even requests. I’m sure that even if nothing I want is in the game, it’s going to be an experience I’ll want to immerse myself in for a long time. So, let’s dig in, shall we?

Better companion AI
One of the main features of GTA V was swapping between Michael, Franklin, and Trevor during missions and heists. While it could be cool in some places, it often led to moments in firefights where I was doing alright clearing a wave of cops, (or gangsters, usually to save Lamar from his terrible schemes) only to have one or the other of my crew shouting that they needed help. So I would swap to them to find that the AI had run them into a circle of gunfire, then left me to mop up the mess.

If I’m meant to swap between the two characters in GTA VI, I want the AI to be better about sticking to cover and letting the waves come to them. This is assuming that like its predecessor, GTA VI will let me level up my character’s skills. So if I don’t put in the work and they’re inexperienced enough to run into an ambush, that would be on me for not putting in the effort to train them. But if all my character’s skills are maxed like they were with the GTA V trio, then I expect them to be slightly less stupid about firefights.

Better car/aircraft handling
While I love driving in Los Santos, it’s generally only in low traffic or low speed drives that the experience is truly relaxing. Any time I’m looking at a chase with multiple cops on my tail, trying to get away in cars that handle like a bar of soap on a hotel shower floor can seriously be a buzzkill.

It would be nice to see better handling, particularly on those super cars at the top of the line. Smaller cars should still handle well, of course, but they shouldn’t be so unbelievably fast. Each vehicle should feel more like their particular class, kind of like how it is in racing games. So yeah, a van will still be a nightmare to slalom, but a high end sports car should feel a lot smoother.

On a similar note, I’d love to be able to fly without having my aircraft swaying all over the place because the slightest push on the analog stick sends the craft halfway into a diving barrel roll.  I especially hated having to pilot helicopters in GTA V because the slightest tap of the shoulder button to maneuver with the back rotor would cause the craft to pivot fifteen to twenty degrees instead of the four or five I wanted. Just try getting one to go forward at a slow speed without diving and having to constantly hold the right trigger to gain altitude.

The whole thing would be so much less stressful if I could push lightly on the stick and get a slow forward movement, like how so many games will let characters walk with the same nudge, graduating to jogging and then running depending on how far the stick travels. Give me more control so I can stop looking like a drunk stole a jet or chopper for a joyride.

Better traffic
This goes hand in had with my last request, as I’ve frequently been driving at what I thought was a legal-ish speed, and then I had to take note of how terrible the AI drivers are. They’ll make sudden lane changes, only to swerve back into the lane they came from. Drivers will pull around my car to rush into the intersection if I leave so much as half a car length between my car and the next. I used to wonder why the cops didn’t bother with me making illegal turns right in front of them, until I noticed the number of illegal turns made by the AI that led to vehicular manslaughter.

Even with the crappy handling and me going three times the speed of the other drivers, I can still dodge pedestrians with ease. So these supposedly law abiding drivers need better coding so they’re more capable of following basic traffic laws. I don’t expect them to use turns signals, since no one does in the real world, either. But it would be nice if they’d leave the vehicular manslaughter to the professionals.

More interactive locations
Before my PS4 started acting up, I got to play quite a bit of Judgement, and what I absolutely loved was being able to go into the fast food places and eat all the foods for XP. While I’m not asking for the same XP boost, I would love to be able to go into an Up n’ Atom, or get lunch from the traveling taco trucks. I want more clothing stores to check out, and even more convenience stores with more products I can carry. Let me go into a shop to pick up a beer and nurse it on my way to my next mission. I mean, I love the city of GTA V because it feels so alive. But the next city would feel even more alive if I could go into the shops and restaurants to further live out that fantasy of being a part of this world.

More (and better) movies
Okay, honestly there was more than enough TV shows to keep me entertained anytime I turned on a TV with any character. The same goes for radio stations, as I loved everything except for the talk radio channels. But I saw all the movies of GTA V, and while I get that they were supposed to be parodies, they weren’t very good.

I’m not asking for award winning material, but give me something at least on par with the cartoons on the TV, you know? Give me more reasons to visit the theaters in the city, and make it feel worth the ten minutes I’m sitting there instead of debating which film was the worst of the bunch. (It’s a hard call, because they all sucked really bad.)

Eighteen-hole golf course (Or two separate nine-hole courses)
I can’t tell you how much time I’ve put into trying to perfect Franklin’s golf game. I’ve got him up to a near perfect par run, but getting an Eagle eludes me because I always botch the putt on hole five, and holes eight and nine are a nightmare of sloppy swings and slow rolls into the rough.

I still love it, and while it’s a long shot that golf will be in the next game, a girl can dream, right? So if I’m dreaming, I want to go big. Either give me a full proper course, or give me two different courses with radically different layouts to really test my virtual golfing skills. (But do keep that one guy randomly yelling “Gah! I missed the fucking putt!” Because that line is comedy gold right after I just missed my putt a second before he did.)

Smarter saves
This one is a sore spot for me, so I need to provide examples. I’m doing a mission to recover a film canister, and knowing I need to slip through traffic quickly, I decide to send Michael on a super-fast motorcycle. But I end up crashing while chasing Devin’s assistant and have to retry the mission. But then I reload to discover that the motorcycle isn’t where I parked it. So I reload from my save file to discover the bike isn’t even back at his garage.

Another example: I sent Franklin to steal a train as part of the final heist of the game. The next segment has Trevor flying a helicopter, and of course I crash it. (See my previous request on aircraft.) So the game reloads, only now it’s Michael at the train station. I get that there are a lot of variable ways a mission can be done, but I’d like if the game could at least remember what choices I made from one retry to the next.

For that matter, I’d like it if the game would remember what outfit I put on a character. I swear, I go to all the effort of getting Trevor into something from Binco that looks nice, and one character swap later, he’s right back in blood-covered sweatpants and a puke-covered T-shirt. (Or worse, just his stained underwear.) Just try to remember what I’m doing in the game, and stop making random swaps.

Oh, and when I steal a high-end sports car and park it in a safehouse garage, it’d be really swell if the game remembered that I parked it there the next time I load my game.

Fewer Mountain Lions
Dear God, please let there be less mountain lions. Seeing my guys get mauled to death is a traumatic experience I could do without, or at least see it a few less times. Please.

Well, that’s about it. Again, I’m okay if none of this stuff is addressed, (except the mountain lions, please) but even having a few additions would elevate the next GTA into the perfect time-sink for me, and I’m sure most other players would like to see these changes made as well.