A lot of things, but not a lot of any one thing

It's been a busy weekend for me, though it may not look like I got a lot of any one thing done.  Despite that, I'm exhausted.  Physically and emotionally exhausted.

Megaman X: Part 5

Part 5 is up!

I'm kind of learning new things about myself as these videos come up.  I don't remember any of this.  It's like watching an alien wearing my skin.  At least I seem happy, LOL

Megaman X - Part 4

In this episode, I have peaked out on alcohol.  Everything is funny to me, I whisper to the camera, profess my man-love for Zero, and my eyes cross uncontrollably.  Enjoy my inebriation.

Also, so that I don't constantly bombard you guys with Episodes of First Person Shooter, I've set up another page on the blog (tab at the top) for updates on this project.  That doesn't mean that you won't occasionally see here as well ;)

First Person Shooters - Megaman X, part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of me failing drunkenly at Megaman X.  I'm apparently getting more hammered by the episode.  I don't recall most of this conversation.

X-Buster - PART 1 - First Person Shooters

So... a little while ago I was "talked into" doing a YouTube series in which we play video games while drunk.  First episode just went live today. 

Apparently I agree to anything if plied with enough drinks ;)

Papers, Please

Papers, Please is a game that I've been addicted to for some time.  Despite several story play-throughs I still find myself coming back, if even just to play in endless mode.  I don't know, there's something innately relaxing about mindless tasks.

Hyper Light Drifter

Came across another awesome looking kickstarter-driven video game: Hyper Light Drifter

"Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D Action RPG in the vein of the best 8-bit and 16-bit classics, with modernized mechanics and designs on a much grander scale.

Visions for this game have been fluttering in my skull for ages; something dark and fantastic, with giant forests to navigate, huge floating structures to explore, deep crumbling ruins to loot, massive throngs of enemies to rend, and behemoths both flesh and mechanical to overcome. I want it all to be as beautiful as possible, forging color with the dark and eerie wastes and intimidating landscapes. It plays like the best parts of A Link to the Past and Diablo, evolved: lightning fast combat, more mobility, an array of tactical options, more numerous and intelligent enemies, and a larger world with a twisted past to do it all in."

They have a pledged goal of $27,000 ... which they've already shattered on their second day.  Their stretch goals include additional features.  Let's push to $100k to get a co-op mode unlocked.

That was fast

Wow, it's been 2 days since Mighty No. 9 was put up on Kickstarter as a "spiritual successor to Mega Man."  Their goal is set at $900,000.  The goal has already been surpassed.  2 days!  That's insanity.

I'm definitely excited to see how this game turns out, it looks incredibly fun, especially the mentioned mechanic of swapping out parts for others, i.e. swapping out legs for tank treads so you can cross spikes.  If done right, this could be an amazingly fun and challenging game.

Stuff

I've been far more busy/active than it may appear from what posts are up lately... although a lot of that has been video games, so I don't know if one would call that "busy" LOL.  Video games, more comics, possible YouTube show, real-life work... you know... the usual.

Fix That Leak!

Based on FTL: Faster Than Light.

One of the things that always struck me about that game stemmed from the fact that your ship's evasion rate drops to zero if the pilot leaves his station (without upgrades, that is), but the same is not true of other stations.  This means that in a battle whenever shit goes down on the ship, the pilot is the last guy you want to send away from his station.  I often imagine him as a lazy asshole because of that, sitting up front, sipping his coffee like a goddamn jackass.

Faster Than Light

I was cued on to this game by a friend of mine some time ago on Steam.  It's a fun space-themed strategy game in which you control one spaceship and its crew.  Rather than fly it around like in a sim, you micro-manage the crew and systems in the hopes that you can overcome your obstacles and survive.

FTL has a bit of a reputation as being a brutal game in which you don't "win."  That was partly what encouraged me to try it out.  I love me some Dwarf Fortress every now and then, and trust me: you don't win Dwarf Fortress.  So the idea of a space version of that game seemed kinda awesome.

Skyrim

So I got the urge to play some Skyrim the other day (It's been easily over a year since playing it), and I always seem to find myself drawn in to some side quest or another to the exclusion of all else.  Last playthrough I ended up the Archmage of Winterhold and made it my personal quest to find all the legendary masks.  First time through, I literally followed the story quests without any sides.  Ended up being the least interesting route to go.  Flavoring the experience with some side quests seems to make things incredibly more fun for me, at least.

Here's an example.  I started my new game the other day... and after telling myself I'd play as something I'd never played as before, I ended up choosing a Nord and deciding he'll be a warrior who also casts magic (just like every playthrough except the archmage one, lol).  Upon reaching Whiterun, I thought "you know who I never really payed attention to?  The Companions.  Let's go see what they're about."

Game Review - Sid Meier's Civilization V

I only bought this game a few weeks ago (opening day of the Steam Sale, in fact) and I've already lost several days of my life to it.  It's addictive, and it's fun as hell.

As should be obvious from my obsession with Warhammer 40k and the like, I have a love of the strategy genre in video games as well.  One of my favorite older games was Age of Empires II.  I loved the diversity of choice you got in picking what culture you play as, with each getting some exclusive perks relevant to that choice.  Well, Civ V is the same... except better in every way.  The range of technology, units, eras of play, cultures, paths to victory, etc. are all very satisfyingly dense, giving this game some serious replay value.  I can't get through one game without already thinking about how I'm going to go about it "next time."

At the onset, you are asked to make a few choices to begin a game.  How fast do you want time to move?  Size of the world (and thus number of competing civilizations)?  Composition of the land (i.e. islands, continents, pangaea, or like our current continents)?  What culture will you take hold of?  I also purchased and installed the two expansion packs (Gods & Kings, Brave New World), so the amount of cultures to pick from was simply staggering.

Once actually into a game you start at roughly 4,000 B.C. with a settler unit and a warrior unit.  From relative simplicity, things will progress into the more complicated.  Choosing where to establish cities becomes key, as they expand your borders and gain you resource advantages if nearby.  This gets offset by a population happiness factor that is negatively impacted by higher populations and number of cities.  Finding ways to keep your population's happiness in check as you expand is vital mid to late game.  Early game typically is a mass land-grab by all the civilizations, if only to block off the others from resources, once the land is accounted for, war usually happens.  Different civilizations progress through "eras" at different speeds, depending on what they're researching, so you'll come across groups with varied technology depending on what routes they've taken in their growth.  This may seem simple enough, but then they throw "great people" and world wonders into the mix that give certain civilizations major benefits in specific areas, potentially rocketing them forward by large amounts.  Then come spies, which can monitor and steal technology from other cultures.  By late game, the focus intensifies with regards to the win.  There are a few paths to victory, but generally speaking you'll need to pick one and focus on it in order to gain any traction... and other civilizations are doing the same.

On my first play-through, I chose Harald Bluetooth of Denmark.  Map was largest setting, continents, time was normal.  I had the thought that I would beef up militarily and win by force of might.  As fate would have it, a military victory was not in the cards for my Danish vikings.  Copenhagen was placed on an isthmus separating a rather large peninsula from a much larger continent.  I would in later games discover this to be crazy-fortunate.  Blocking off the isthmus was easy, and allowed me to expand freely into the peninsula undisturbed.  With such a narrow land border, most civilizations flat out ignored me while they focused on shooting arrows at their immediate neighbors.  So I sat there for a couple thousand years amassing a huge army, building wonders, trading, and researching.

All of my actual confrontations with other civilizations ended up being strangely passive-aggressive as I wasn't exactly sure what the other leaders were getting at when they'd make demands or ask me for stuff.  The first of which was Venice, whom I discovered sending missionaries into my territory to start converting my cities to the Jewish faith.  Assuming this would have the effect of converting my unit to Venice (a la Age of Empires), I quickly started developing my own culture's faith, and founded the religion of Briantology.  I sent missionaries into his towns, some harsh words were exchanged, and we spent the rest of the game eyeing each other dramatically.

I have a Great Prophet within spitting distance of Venice, and he knows it

Past the Medieval era when technology really starts picking up, I found myself more and more at odds with Korea.  They had a spy in Copenhagen stealing my advances in technology.  My spies couldn't catch or stop him either; he was like some kind of legend.  Anything I did, Sejong of Korea knew... which meant any move I made resulted in an audience with Sejong's frown.

"I saw what you did there."

This was amusing for a while, but then upon reaching the Atomic era, one country in particular decided it had had enough of everyone's shit, and declared war on EVERYBODY.

I present to you Ghandi, Lord of chaos

Given how good the animations and voice acting were for the world leaders, I just stared slack-jawed at Ghandi declaring war on me from sheer shock alone; this was easily the last thing I expected.  Ghandi amassed his own army and bided his time until he could sow the largest possible amount of chaos and havoc.  Given that I was halfway around the world from him, I thought it funny and quite considerate of him to include me on the invitation to mass destruction... but after taking stock of where I was sitting in game, I realized that I had a good shot of winning a science victory if left to my own devices.  Especially if everyone else in game was focused on some major threat... so I secretly started sending Ghandi money and units.  There was no way he was going to last against all the others, united... but I had a ton of money and units sitting around.  So I fed him what he needed to keep them all at bay.

God, I KNOW that you know what I'm up to!  Shut up!

And so Ghandi became my Lord of chaos while I quietly built a spaceship and flew my viking ass into the cosmos to victory.

Any of you have good stories from Civ V playthroughs?  

Game Review - Assassin's Creed III

OK, I'm gonna come right out of the gate with this one.  I loved the first Assassin's Creed.  Not so much the third one.  There are some upsides, but overall, it felt disappointing to me.  Perhaps it was that my expectations were too high.  It's always hard to make a game worthy of being a sequel to an already good game.  It must draw upon the previous, yet also transcend.  Do more with the material.  In that light, Assassin's Creed 3 really just felt like it was Assassin's Creed 2 with a different texture pack.

Don't get me wrong, though:  I was SO on-board with this game early on.  A native american assassin?  Hell to the YES.  Unfortunately, I feel that the creators put a lot of thought into the settings, missions, and NPC personalities... and not a lot into the main character's personality..  Connor himself is rather bland and seems to go through his life saying things like "You want me to go where?... OK" or "No problem, I'll just murder that guy for you."

I mean, I guess you can be that callous in your life decisions when you can just waltz into a redcoat fortress and murder the entire regiment single-handed... seemingly without breaking a sweat.

Seriously, the game's tutorial for the first fort forced you to take it via subterfuge.  It was challenging, and because of that, awesome.  Then you get into the real game and the easiest way to clear a redcoat fort is to literally walk through the front door and murder them all in a giant burly-brawl right inside the courtyard.  Then just loot it and raise the flag.  Done.

...When the controls worked, at least.  The other thing that was irksome about even the first Assassin's Creed game was that your run button was also your parkour button.  Trying to run from guards and turn down a narrow alley was often a dangerous feat, as you're quite likely to derp against a wall by merely brushing against it in your turn.  You'd abruptly stop, turn 90 degrees to face flush with the wall, and try to run up it.  This was especially infuriating if the wall was too high, as often he'd try a second or third time before I could get him to face away.  Often by that point, the guards were on you.  In the first game this happened so often that we took to just screaming "ALTAIR!" in frustration... as if it was him being stupid, not us.  In our house, this carried over to other games.  The other Assassin's Creed games would often bring shouts of "ALTAIR!" even if he wasn't the character.  It happened a few times in Arkham Asylum too, lol.  By Assassin's Creed 3, I'd hoped they had made that a little smoother, but no.  Too often for my tastes, Connor would run along a rooftop chasing one of Ben Franklin's papers, and instead of hopping to the chimney-top right in front of him, he'd veer off to the left for a tree-branch then tumble to the ground as it wasn't the kind of tree branch that the game allowed you to stand on.  Altair would be blamed.

Of course, there were other weird-but-funny glitches too:

Coming back to an earlier point on how others' personalities felt so much more interesting to me than Connors' own (and I won't even get started on how little I cared about Desmond):  The Davenport Homestead missions.  I liked those missions more than the main story missions!  It felt like you were building something (and you were), and there was clear and obvious progress towards goals!  I ended up constantly coming back just to see if there was some new side mission to improve the homestead.

Anything for me to do, old man?

Knock it off

What a lovely party

Oh.  Right... these guys.

The realization that there was nothing left to do but go back to the main story missions was actually kind of depressing.  There was this whole crafting system at the homestead for building up supplies.  Wow, whatever for? -I would ask myself.  I looked through what was available for a bit and thought to myself what I would do if designing this game.  Shit, I'd have the Templars come and besiege Davenport, making your progress in the homestead missions affect the outcome.  I'd have the stockpile play a large role as well.  Having a high stock of military weapons would make sure more homesteaders would be armed themselves when the time came.  More medicine would make the homesteaders last longer against the enemy forces as you ran around taking out officers and breaking their lines... it can't ALL be there for trade, can it?

SPOILER ALERT: It totally doesn't culminate in some kind of awesome raid/mission on Davenport, and it totally can just be there for trade.  Seems all that crafting stuff is mostly just used for trade.  But why?  Why would I bother selling medicine or fine hats for some paltry amount of cash when the beaver pelts sell the most?  Seriously the pelts always fetch the best price... what's the point of the rest?  Why bother with a heavily tiered crafting system to culminate in items whose only use is to sell for less than a beaver pelt?  And even with the beaver pelts: to what end?  To gain a lot of money?  The only real place to spend your money is on the crafting system, crafting more items... to sell for more money... that crafts more items.  It's an endless loop that culminates in nothing!  Seriously, that felt like the biggest let-down of the game.  Such a missed opportunity.

And then there's the historical figures.  I get it, we're playing a game in a historical setting... but I can't help but feel put-off by how many you run into.  For a freaking assassin, Connor sure does keep a high profile.  When not fighting George Washington's war for him or collecting Ben Franklin's notes, you can be found rubbing elbows with Sam Adams.  Did you know Connor pretty much single-handedly threw all the tea overboard in Boston while fighting off the redcoats?  Or that Paul Revere rode on Connor's horse (behind him, even) while doing his "The British are coming!" shtick?  Seriously, when that scene came up, it felt like the game had finally jumped the shark...

But OK OK, enough dumping on the game from me.  You want to know what I liked the best?  The naval missions.

Ready the port cannons, lads, we're bringing her about!

Seriously the naval missions were FUN. AS. SHIT.  I played the hell out of those.  They were amazing.  Hell, I'd play an entire game of naval missions!  Maybe one where you're a pirate assassin...

OMG

Warmachine: Tactics

I'm far from the first to share around this information, but I still find it exciting enough to bring up.  Privateer Press is looking to make a video game out of their Warmachine universe.  It's up on Kickstarter.

The amazing thing is that they've already exceeded their goal, so it's a sure thing now... but there's still plenty of time to hop in on the exclusive offers and stretch goals associated with the Kickstarter event.  Some involve models, others involve including other factions in the game itself.

If you haven't already, give it a look over

Game Review - Catherine

So I finished playing Catherine about a week or so ago.  As the cover-art above is already telling you, it contains mature content... and is also disturbingly weird.  It's a game that came out in 2011 unless you happen to live in Europe or Australia.  For some reason, they had to wait another 6-7 months until early 2012...  but anyways, what I'm trying to say is I'm a little late to this game, I know.  It flew completely under my radar at release, and I didn't become aware of it at all until a friend of mine bought it for me as a gift.  I don't know what that says about how he thinks of me, LOL (my wife's name is Katherine, giving things a whole new level of awkward here), but he says it was because he wanted to give me a mentally stimulating puzzle game.  And that, it is.

"Mentally Stimulating" is a description that doesn't necessarily denote "good or bad" ... and it's an apt description.  The game itself has an interesting morality mechanic that doesn't just come down to good or bad, either.  There is a little more nuance to it.  As a character in the game says: "There is no wrong way to climb the tower."

The game itself comprises three parts: Anime-style cutscenes, interactive intermissions (in a well done cell-shading style), and the actual puzzle-oriented game.  The puzzle levels are what progress you further in the game, of course, but the interactive intermissions are where you gather information about what's going on as well as where you make your "morality" decisions which will affect the cutscenes and endings you get.  All in all, there's a ton of story here, to the point that it can feel more like an interactive movie at times with the actual "game" itself seeming underplayed.

You play as Vincent, an early 30's guy with a low-end job and a studio apartment.  He has a long-time girlfriend named Katherine, a group of friends with whom he regularly spends his evenings at the local bar, zero ambitions, and not much of a care in the world... until things get weird that is.

There are moments where I felt the game was surprisingly deep, and others where it felt predictably shallow... but it honestly exceeded my expectations, so in summary: I thought it was a good game when I finally beat it.  Note that:  It felt like a good game once I beat it.  Up until that moment, it was Frustrating with a capital F.  Vincent's life spirals into madness in a way you (the player) have absolutely zero control over and you're basically tasked with taking stock of your shitty situation and forging a path towards some semblance of happiness.  Depending on how you play and what choices you make, you'll get different conversations/cutscenes leading to like 8 endings, and not all of them end up with Vincent getting what he wants.  So even in beating the game, you might not get a kind of satisfaction to your struggle.  I get the feeling, though, that this frustration is what was intended by the game designers, as it is similar to what the main character is going through.  In that sense, well played.

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

From a story perspective, Vincent's life is thrown into disarray by the titular character Catherine, with whom he cheats on his longtime girlfriend Katherine (confused yet?).  Katherine was starting to broach the subject of taking their relationship further, AND reveals that she's pregnant...

Add to that, every night he has a recurring nightmare where he and several sheep people have to frantically climb a tower of blocks or they die in their sleep.  The storyline itself is frustrating.  It's frustrating in how events outpace Vincent's ability to manage them, in how he has so little control over decisions being made (some even his own) and of no one believing him when he tells about what's going on.  But again, I think that's what the game was going for.  Vincent (and thus, you) will try anything to get out of a desperate situation, your decisions at times made more desperate by the colossal mess around you.

And this same feeling is played out within the puzzle-game portion itself.  Vincent enters each night's nightmare equipped only with his boxers, a pillow, and a pair of sheep's horns coming out of his head.  With all the dangers thrown at him, it's a rather helpless feeling... and frustrating.  The puzzles themselves can get quite difficult at times, leading you to try almost anything in your panic to escape.  And if things didn't feel weird enough...

they get even more terrifyingly weird.

With 8 endings, and only 3 of them really "good" I would suggest figuring out as soon as you can how the decision mechanic works, pick a direction, and put all your chips towards that goal.

Dawn of War: Soulstorm

I know this may not be "news" to some of you, but it's new to me so I'm going to post it.

The third expansion of THQ's Dawn of War has released some information.  Mainly, that the new armies included are going to be Dark Eldar and Witch Hunters (Sisters of Battle).

I'm still waiting for them to implement Tyranids, but I'll take what I can get.  

The game is scheduled to be released in June of '08 and will allow for flying units and a third resource only available to Dark Eldar: Souls.  The Dark Eldar will be able to collect the souls of their fallen enemies to fuel some special effects driven by this resource.  It all sounds cool to me, and I can't wait.  The Witch Hunters will have a new 'Faith' system which is still being tweaked so there's not much information on that other than that it's there.

Just thought I'd share the love a bit.