Gaming With HonestAbe

Hey all, I'm HonestAbe. I'm a game reviewer, a journalist, and an advocate of games for the people. I try to post something every week; anything from reviews, to editorials, to pointless rants that serve no other purpose than to make me feel better about something.

[abes-games]

XCOM 2 Review

XCOM 2 is a good game, but I don’t feel comfortable calling it more than that. It’s core game-play is really fun, but unfortunately it’s held back by terrible pacing and numerous bugs. I had a lot of fun playing it, but I don’t have any real drive to go back to it any time soon. I’m sure that, after the patches and the mods come in and fix my major gripes, I’ll pick it up again and probably enjoy it even more than the first time. For now though, it will just have to sit in my steam library. 

Apparently we lost the war in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which makes a lot of sense to me, seeing as I never actually got around to finishing it. 20 years later, you join the rag-tag resistance as they fight to regain control of the planet before the aliens complete the mysterious Avatar Project. I found myself really compelled driven by the plot, despite the somewhat simple concept. It’s certainly something you should experience yourself, free of spoilers. I’ll just say that the twists and turns the story takes had me on the edge of my seat for most of the campaign. 

Combat is really great. Like, really, really great. The alien types are varied and extremely interesting to fight, the level layouts are extremely cool, each lending to a completely different strategy which made me really think on my toes. Each of the soldier classes are diverse, and bring a huge amount of depth to your squad. As your squad members level up, they earn points to unlock special ability's from two separate trees of skills. Soraka, one of my support characters, can use her drone to heal and revive teammates, while Smulf Boogans, my other support, can provide more direct combat support with his. In the end, it really just boils down to 2 sub-classes, but it feels a bit deeper than that. 

As you can probably tell, character creation is is a real treat. You can customize each one of your soldiers appearances with alarming variation, and I was able to create myself, my friends, my girlfriend, and characters from other games with ease. It’s pretty hilarious to see Duke Nukem laying down covering fire with his mini-gun for John Cena, while The Dude from the Big Lebowski and Bob Ross deal out massive sniper damage. Couple this with the fact that death is permanent, and gear that dead soldiers who are left behind is lost, and you start really caring when each of your soldiers is wounded, and shouting in anguish when they die. 

But here’s where the problems come in. The game is buggy: both game breakingly so and otherwise. My version of the game crashed several times during my play-through, loosing sometimes hours of game-play. Almost every mission I had at least one visual bug. There’s nothing more immersion breaking than having a soldier stand to fire, facing the wrong direction, only to shoot through their own body to hit a target. 

The performance is abysmal as well. My framerate dropped bellow 10 fps for seemingly no reason as the game tried to figure out what to do. There were sometimes 30 seconds to a minute of down time between animations where literally nothing was happening. Loading screens sometimes took five minutes just to load my home base. I don’t have a monster of a rig, but I’m well above the minimum requirements, and it was chugging even on the lowest settings. 

I want to love this game, I really do, but unfortunately it’s bogged down horrendous performance and some of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a “AAA” game. Once they patch it, I’m sure I’ll be able to recommend it to the high heavens, but I have a policy: I don’t recommend games if they aren’t complete. These bug fixes and performance issues should have been ironed out well before I shelled out sixty dollars for a brand new game. 

[abes-games]

Series announcement: Atmospheric perspective

Atmosphere is a largely overlooked element of games. All games build some kind of atmosphere, intentionally or otherwise, and this series is going to be about praising the ones that shine while calling out the lazy ones. Grab some popcorn and plant a few trees, because this is all about the environment.

[abes-games]

Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires REVIEW

After playing through Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires twice, I’m pretty sure I didn’t like my time with it. On one hand, the fast paced hack and slash combat feels really good; there’s just something about cutting my way through hundreds if not thousands of enemy soldiers that puts a massive grin on my face. Maybe it’s the simple yet rewarding combos that look so dam flashy, and are so dam effective, or maybe it’s the ridiculous, borderline campy hair metal that plays constantly over everything you do. 

On the other hand, that’s about the only thing that’s rewarding. The empire management is poorly explained, poorly presented, and abysmally dull. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING in the empire management is rewarding. It’s all just meaningless numbers and empty ideas that just barely make up the discarded shell of an empire simulator. Even doing stuff that should be fun or rewarding, like upgrading your weapons, is as simple as browsing through a few options menus (not clicking, because of course it doesn’t support mouse functionality) to build an armory and buy a new item. The item doesn’t have any new or interesting combos, unless you buy a brand new weapon, which is extremely inefficient, because each character only has a few weapons that they’re actually any good with. 

Battles could have had wide and varying objectives for each area. There are so many god dam areas! So much room to try new things and branch out. But of course, it’s just the same boring objectives against the same boring enemys on slightly varied maps. I remember playing DW4 and loving the hugely varied maps, unique and interesting objectives, and of course, the balls out combat. DW8E just didn’t deliver. 

I can’t, in good conscience, recommend a game that doesn’t feel the need to record, or even reuse, English voice acting after tons of previous games had it, or can’t integrate even the most basic mouse and keyboard functionality, or spend the time to put in the simplest of tutorials. It’s sad that the DW name keeps getting dragged through the muck with shite games like this. It’s already got a terrible reputation Koe/Techmo: Why do you insist on making it worse?

[abes-games]

Abe’s 5 Favorite Games of 2015

2015 was an absolutely stellar year for gaming, black sheep not-with-standing (cough Arkham Knight pile of shite cough) and while I didn’t have the time nor the dosh to play all the good stuff that came out this year, I certainly did pick out a few new gems for my steam library. Here are the five that stood out to me the most. 

Number 5: Downwell

This little IOS game really surprised me. I was looking for some cheap fun for my phone, and after I heard a few good reviews, I picked the game up at an absurdly low price. To date, I’ve poured a number of hours into it while I’m waiting for the dentist or on a road trip. The fast paced action and quick decision making required put it a cut above the rest, and it’s stellar yet simple art style is a nice cherry on top of a very polished game. If the IOS version wasn’t hindered by abysmal Iphone controls, It would be higher on this list.

Number 4: Dirty Bomb

An objective based shooter with a myriad of colorful and unique classes, Dirty Bomb takes the best of TF2, CS:GO, and CoD and blends them together into an utterly delicious milkshake. It takes far to long to buy new characters, but seeing as the game is totally free, and the free rotation switches up fairly often, I can’t complain all that much. Whenever my FPS bone starts itching, I reach for Dirty Bomb to scratch it. 

Number 3: Warhammer: End Times- Vermintide

That titles quite a mouthful. Verminetide ended up being something I couldn’t quite put down this year. I’ve been a massive Left 4 Dead player for many years, and when I realized that there was a medieval L4D clone set in one of my favorite fantasy universes, I was sold. But Vermintide does what L4D never could: It manages to make melee combat meaty and meaningful. It’s such a shame so few people are playing this anymore. 

Number 2: Bloodborne

I only picked this up after Christmas, and it’s already become one of my favorite console games of all time. Bloodborne managed to take Souls combat, which I’ve always considered to be pretty shit, and actually make it fun. Rather than punishing you for aggression, Bloodborne let’s the player revel in it, with extremely fast paced combat and brilliant new mechanics. The universe is dark and enthralling, the fights are chaotic and frantic, and the environments are rich and beautifully designed. Simply brilliant. 

Number 1: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

To say that the Witcher 3 is good would be a shameful telling. No, the Witcher isn’t good, or even great; It’s borderline perfect. I’m hard pressed to to find a single thing wrong with it, other than a few enemy designs that I found on the dull side. The music is so good I could cry. The visuals pull me in so much that I often forget that I’m not currently in Nilfgaard. The combat is some of the best that has ever existed in the history of third person games. The plot is enthralling, the characters feel real, the city’s feel lived in. It’s not just my favorite game of 2015: It’s one of the best RPG’s ever made. 

[abes-games]

HonestAbe321

Trying to play Elite

Come check out my stream again! More Elite: Dangerous

[abes-games]

Steam Sales Ate My Wallet

Oh god. 

The Steam sales...

They were so good...

I forgot to do a post on them...

But my wallet is empty now...

[abes-games]

Elite Stream Going LIVE!!!

Come on down and check out me stream some Elite: Dangerous. I really have no idea what I’m doing. 

[abes-games]

Love ‘em or Hate ‘em: SEGA

I God-Dam Hate SEGA. I know this series was supposed to look at the goods and the bad’s of something so you people can decide for yourselves whether or not you like it, but in this case I’m just going to have to make an exception. I’ve had a love hate relationship with SEGA for a while now, due almost entirely to the Total War series. I basically grew up playing these games, and Rome Total War is still one of my most played games of all time. It’s a phenomenal game in a phenomenal series. 

But SEGA can’t just be happy making a great game, and thusly making a ton of money. SEGA want’s to put in the same amount of effort and make ALL of the money. The latest Warhammer Total War preorder bull is not the first time they’ve tried to get away with something like this, and it certainly won’t be the last. Ok, calm down Abe. Let’s start at the beginning. For me, where did SEGA go wrong? 

The Shining Force scandal a few years back was strike one. SEGA decided that, rather than building hype for their new game with a good trailer and clever marketing, they would simply abuse the system. They copyright claimed the top video’s related to old shining force games (Gameplay videos, reviews, even just people TALKING about them) in order to get search priority for the trailer of the new Shining Force game. Copyright claims screw with peoples Youtube channel in a number of ways, and several channels were taken down completely, just for committing the horrible sin of talking about a game. 

The second strike was Total War: Rome 2. I had heard how broken the game was, so I held back from buying it for a long time, despite how much it hurt. The first Rome was amazing, and I was craving an updated version. After about a year, I saw it on sale, from $45 down to $20! What a steal! I picked it up in an instant. To this day, I have been unable to play it. A common bug from launch, never fixed, that crashes the game on launch has plagued my game. I’ve tried talking to customer service four times now, each time resulting in a thread of emails with a representative, each time being abandoned by the person helping me when they couldn’t immediately fix the problem. It seems to me that SEGA doesn’t care whether or not their games work: as long as I’ve given them money, their job is done regardless. 

This is strike three. The only way to unlock the Chaos race in Total War Warhammer is to either preorder the game or fork over an extra few bucks. For those of you that don’t know, Chaos is one of the six core races of the Warhammer universe (The Empire, Elves, Orks, Dwarves, Undead, and Chaos).As if paying $60 dollars wasn’t enough for a full game, SEGA decided that it was necessary to peel off core bits of it and resell them later. It’s not some random bonus bit of content, it’s a core race! It’s like selling you Call of Duty and then asking an extra few bucks to use assault rifles in multiplayer. 

“But Abe” I can hear some of you saying “Just preorder the game! It’s no extra!” To which I will reply, “Fuck that noise!” The last FIVE Total War games have been buggy, broken messes at launch (Empire, Shogun 2, Napoleon, Attila, Rome 2) so why would I ever, EVER trust them to get it right? Companies need to earn my preorder with good business practices and great games. The Witcher 3 earned my preorder. Dawn of War earned my preorder. SEGA has not, and doing stuff like this certainly isn’t helping them. 

[abes-games]

SEGA RANT INCOMMING

Don’t worry, the bull shit Sega is trying to pull with Warhammer Total War has not gone unnoticed by your founding father of gaming. 

[abes-games]

Love ‘em or Hate ‘em: Nintendo

Love ‘em or hate ‘em is a series where Abe looks at game series, game features, companies, and individual developers and discusses what he likes or doesn’t like about them. 

Nintendo makes some kick ass games. Those of you that know me may be surprised that I’m starting out with that sentence, and Nintendo has always been on shaky ground with me, but it’s true. I absolutely love a lot of the games Nintendo makes, even if I don’t spend all that much time playing them. Hyrule warriors was great fun, and the three or so times I’ve played Splatoon has only left me wanting more. In an age of ravenous console wars, where Microsoft and Sony wage a seemingly unending war, and fanboys murder each other on the internet for pretty much no reason, it comes as quite a shock to me that Nintendo is actually WINNING this generation. 

That’s right, I did just say that Nintendo is beating both the PS4 and the XBONE. They’ve got  the market cornered on nostalgia, they appeal to family’s, and as I’ve mentioned earlier, their games are mostly top notch. In fact, they’ve got the strongest lineup of games right now in my opinion. Seems like they’re doing really well, right?

So why do they keep fucking it up so badly? 

The Nintendo Creators Program is the single worst thing to happen to gamer’s on Youtube in a long, long time. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but it shocks me how many people still know nothing about this new policy. For those of you that still don’t know, this is Nintendo’s way of trying to make as much money off of Youtubers work as possible without actually having to do anything. If you want to make a Nintendo related video, you have to agree to give Nintendo 45% of the revenue made from said video. If you want to register your entire channel and make ONLY Nintendo related videos, you can register it, and Nintendo takes *Cough* steals *Cough* 25% of your revenue. 

I think you can see where I stand on this. Youtubers make close to nothing off of ads since google reduced the amount of money they receive by roughly eighty percent a few years ago, and now Nintendo is going to claim even more of the revenue? Nintendo did nothing in the creation of these videos, so they deserve none of the revenue made by them. Simple as that. 

How do you all feel about it?

[abes-games]

STALKER: Call of Pripyat Review

The stalker series has always been very near and dear to me, and I’m not entirely sure why. The games are good, sure, but they certainly don’t deserve nearly the attention I’ve given them over the years. As of writing this review, I’ve completed CoP four times, once with the legendary mod MISERY, and yet I still haven't the slightest idea what keeps me coming back. Has my brain been addled by the sheer amount of sugar I consumed as a child, or is there really something to these games? Let’s dive right in, and find out together. 

The STALKER universe’ centerpiece is Chernobyl: a nuclear reactor that went critical and exploded in the mid 1980′s. The explosion did some odd things to physics, and gave once ordinary objects supernatural properties. Scientists jumped on this, realizing what these “artifacts” could do for the world. Unfortunately, these artifacts weren’t the only things created by the explosion and subsequent fallout. Fluffy little creatures morphed into face munching monsters, and this became a huge problem for the scientists. That’s where the STALKER’s come in; mercenaries contracted to retrieve artifacts. Now I’m only scratching the surface of the lore in this game. It’s rich and deep, involving several factions all vying for control of the zone, different mutants screwing with the settlements of STALKER’s, even the military getting involved. Needless to say, I got lost in the lore for hours and hours on end. 

CoP’s plot revolves around your character, a major in the military, investigating the disappearance of a few helicopters. After finding a few, it becomes very clear to the major that there’s far more going on in the zone that just artifact hunting. I never really found the plot all that engaging, but it serves it’s purpose nicely. It gives the player a perfect springboard into the universe, and guides players through the different areas of the game perfectly. It provides just enough freedom to let the players run free, explore, and complete side missions, while at the same time reminding the players that there’s more important things to do. Groundbreaking? Far from it, but certainly adequate. 

The combat’s not much better, unfortunately. CoP is a fairly standard first person shooter with some meaty weapons, infused with unique RPG elements. Sometimes combat is tense and heart pounding, like every interaction with a certain mutant known as the Bloodsucker, but sometimes it’s frustratingly easy, like almost every combat with human enemies. More than once I found myself easily mowing down a squad of bandits that were too dumb to hide behind cover only a few feet away. The game tries to fix this by making your character made of paper at pretty much every difficulty, with bullets absolutely shredding you extremely quickly, which is both successful and frustrating. Thankfully, there are a wide variety of mutant enemies, which are far more fun to combat. 

Combat isn’t everything though, and there are plenty of side quests to complete, interesting characters to meet, loot to collect, gear to find and upgrade, and artifacts to hunt for. The artifacts are where the RPG elements come in, as each one has it’s own effect. Maybe you’ve got one that makes you sprint faster, but it also emits radiation, so you need another one that absorbs that radiation so you don’t get sick, but THAT one makes your hunger increase faster. It starts a frantic balancing act as you try to get as many positive effects as possible while dealing with the all the negatives. Some may choose to simply cash those artifacts in for better weapons or armor, which is just a viable. 

So what’s so great about this game? Why am I so in love with it? 

The environment is top. Fucking. Notch. Until the Metro games were released, the STALKER series had the market cornered on immersion. The universe feels like a real place: a once normal city that went through through this catastrophic event. Buildings, while abandoned now, seem like at some point there were people living and working there. Similarly, the environments have this way of sucking me in. I could almost feel the world around me, could almost feel the radiation slowly seeping into my body as I fought tooth and nail for one more payday, one more artifact. Some of the most memorable moments in my gaming life came from this game, and the world played no small part. 

I think I realized why I love STALKER. Of all the games I’ve played, few can immerse me like these games can. I really feel every hit I take, really cringe every time I hear the screech of a mutant or the shout of a bandit spotting me. The game tries, really tires, to make me care about every little aspect of the world, and I feel like so few games succeed at such a monumental task quite like CoP does. 

According to Steam, I’ve gotten over ninety hours of enjoyment from CoP alone. It’s a relatively cheap game, and I can say with absolute certainty that it’s more than worth the twenty dollars I spent on it. 

[abes-games]

Been a long time, eh?

Hey all, long time no post! There are plenty of reasons why I wasn’t posting, not the least of which being that I’ve started playing League less and less. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game, I just don’t play it as much. As a result, I’m going to be shifting this from a League focused blog to more of a gaming focused one. I’m going to be trying really hard to post something every week about what I’ve been playing, some kind of controversy, or a review. I want to get more into general games journalism. Hope you’re all cool with that!

Abe

[sarahseeandersen]

[abes-games]

Another DIG article!

http://team-dignitas.net/articles/blogs/League-of-Legends/7148/bot-lane-power-picks-the-marksman

This marks my official induction into the Dignitas team! I’ll be posting stuff on this blog again very soon. I wanted to wait till I was ACTUALLY a member of DIG before I continued it. Thanks for all your continued support during the dead times.

[abes-games]

BIG NEWS

I was going to wait a bit longer before announcing it but...

CHECK OUT MY NEW ARTICLE ON TEAM DIGNITAS’ WEBSITE

http://team-dignitas.net/articles/blogs/League-of-Legends/7116/beating-your-enemies-with-the-power-of-music

I’LL POST MY OTHERS IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS

[abes-games]

I've been working on generally "weaker" junglers- my favorite being Evelynn. Sometimes I'll ask the top laner to take a bit of aggro on Gromp (not enough to constitute the use of a health pot) so that I can survive my blue. Is this an unfair request? I'm finding it difficult to clear my blue on good standards without that small bit of aggro rotation. Tips?

There a million things I could tell you, but here are the big ones: start strong side (the side with a duo lane) for a harder leash. Watch pro jungles and learn how to juggle agro by yourself so the creeps miss auto's. Get better runes and masteries. Depending on the top laner, it's usually not something that they will or should do; you are, after all, there to help them, not the other way around.

[meli-lusion]

The full strip is here. I don’t really mind about the accuracy of that shit. I know that self esteem ins’t a bad thing and stuff… It’s just the way i feel. I first made it for myself and feel better now :) Sorry for my bad english by the way.

[martininamerica-deactivated2016]

oh jesus christ

[supersoftblue-deactivated201809]

I forgot this shit isn’t normal

[samwellwinchesterthebrave]

It’s that little voice in your head that never goes away. And its so hard to fight against it because that little voice knows everything about you and how to get under your skin

[abes-games]

Yup...