The Neverending Backlog ARCHIVE

Go to the new NEBL!

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The Neverending Backlog has MOVED!

You can find the explanation for this move HERE!

You can find the new blog itself HERE!  (PS, it’s the same URL as before, I just changed things over to my primary blog here on Tumblr)

All of the posts here shall remain here in their original, pristine condition until further notice!

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (Part 3)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3

When I played the first Witcher for the first time, it didn’t go very well.  Almost everything about the game ticked me off in some way, like the timed battle system and the horrific NPC AI.  By the time I had reached the main city, I’d had more than enough and set the game to the side for a good, long while.  Eventually I picked it back up and played through the whole thing because I could tell that there was a really good game underneath all the stuff that was making me angry, and sure enough I was able to power through it and find that diamond in the rough.

Sadly, it looks like I’m going through the exact same thing with The Witcher 2.  There’s a lot of good stuff, I can tell, but only a very few things in the game don’t come with at least some small caveat, some little detail that is annoying the shit out of me.  The graphics are wonderful, but I hate the motion blur thing that happens when I turn around.  I love the expansion of Geralt’s armory, but the unintuitive inventory screen drives me up the wall.  So on and so forth, and then there are the things that I can’t stand outright, like the minigames I was bitching about in the previous part.

One of the only things that I’m 100% positive about liking so far is the voice acting.  I don’t know if they got a new voice director for this game or if the actors simply felt more comfortable in their roles this time, but the entire returning cast sounds way more natural and into their parts, especially the voice of Geralt himself.  All the new folks sound great too, so thumbs up all around on that!

But yeah, like The Witcher 1 before it, I am going to be setting The Witcher 2 aside for the moment.  I haven’t actually even touched it in several weeks, and it’s holding me up from moving on to other games.  Hopefully things will proceed like they did with the first game, leading me to pick this one back up about a year from now and enjoying the hell out of it.

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Hello Neighbor Pre-Alpha & Alpha 1 (Demo Mode)

A few days ago, the fourth alpha build for Hello Neighbor dropped for those who have paid for early access to the title.  Alas, being the penniless heathen that I am, I cannot afford to be one of those fortunates.  So instead, I decided to finally get around to something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and that’s try out the free pre-alpha and alpha 1 builds of the game!

The premise of the game seems pretty simple.  Guy moves into a new house, guy notices that his neighbor across the street is a little strange, and guy does what any rational person in his position would naturally do, which is break into his neighbor’s house to discover what weird secrets lay within.  To accomplish this goal, guy has to creep stealthily about the house, avoiding the paranoid neighbord and his nasty security systems while solving puzzles to ultimately open up the EXIT door in the living room.

These early builds only have one (pre-alpha) and two (alpha 1) floors each, but they already show that the house is going to be much, much larger in the final product and that it’s going to basically be one huge puzzle box that the player will have to peel away layer by layer until they reach the rich, gooey center.

The alphas hold very closely to many of the staples of stealth games, things like hiding in wardrobes and turning on radios to lure the neighbor away.  They do seem to show some promise of using items in other ways in future builds as well as the eventual inclusion of more as well as more complicated puzzles.  It certainly adds to the tension of sneaking around the house that the neighbor might pop in on you at any moment while you’re trying to figure a room out, and in fact that very thing happened to me on more than a few occasions.

And surprisingly, the game is pretty tense.  The art style - wonderfully beautiful as it is - doesn’t seem like it would lend itself to such, really, and aside from his weird house, the neighbor himself looks like a pretty regular guy next door.  I suppose, though, that this is exactly what the developers are going for, and it is pretty darn effective.  I certainly didn’t expect to have my heart jump into my throat upon noticing the neighbor stalking through a doorway on the other side of the room, but it happened almost every single time.

Another surprising thing is that when the neighbor does catch you, it seems like all he does is toss you out of the house.  Having played plenty of games like Outlast and Amnesia, I’m not used to having opponents that treat their respective intruders with such kindness.

This does not mean, however, that the game is planning to take it easy on players, however.  Oh my, no.  Instead, it sports a remarkable system whereby the neighbor takes action to shore up the defenses of his house, specifically working to block the points of entry that the nosey guy across the way previously used to get in.  More and more bear traps start appearing on the lawn, for instance, and doors that guy opened easily before are now jammed shut with a chair under the knob.  In these two builds these efforts are still a bit primitive, but I feel certain that the developers are going to be adding in all sorts of other nasty tricks to the neighbor’s repitoire, from simple things like boarding up broken windows to more complicated snares and misdirections.

The more you fail, the more dangerous and crafty the neighbor gets.  It’s brilliant, clever, realistic, and I was absolutely delighted when I realized that was what was happening.

The alphas are not without their problems, of course.  The screenshot above is from the pre-alpha and is one of the more amusing glitches I ran across.  I turned on the TV and then hid in a wardrobe in order to see how he would react, and it caused him to come a’running just as I had expected.  What I didn’t expect was that he would actually run through the TV and get stuck, but I counted myself lucky anyway because it afforded me the chance to go exploring around the house for a bit without fear of discovery.

I never did end up fully unlocking the door in the living room in either version, sadly, as the occasional to frequent crashes of the build started to annoy me enough to stop playing, but I of course do not hold these bugs against the developers at all.  These are super early builds, after all, and the documentation does say right up front that they are extremely unstable.  Given the very good quality that even these demos show, I have every confidence that the end product is going to be stable, gorgeous, and amazing.

And weird.  Wonderfully, delightfully weird.

Hello Neighbor Pre-Alpha and Alpha 1 are available free for download from the Hello Neighbor website

The full release of Hello Neighbor will be available for purchase from the website and Steam

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Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault Online (Part 2)

First Impressions - Part 2

So, pretty sure I’ve got enough game time under my belt now to actually make a detailed report.  I’ve unlocked three operatives, fully modded at least one of the guns to perfection, and have thus far pretty consistently hit the top three in my team most matches.  Still a crapton to accomplish, of course, but I figure it’s time to get to it.

First, though, I should mention that as of this writing, First Assault is still in beta stage, so naturally not everything I say here is going to be applicable to the finished product.  Instead a review, consider this more like a laundry list of what I feel they should keep doing and what things I would dearly like to see added/changed.

First, the good stuff.  First Assault certainly doesn’t lack for exciting, fast-paced battles, with the emphasis on “fast-paced”.  Everything in the game is geared to get players onto the field and blasting away as quickly as possible, and matches rarely go past five to ten minutes.  While there are things to be said in favor of more protracted battles, FA is very well suited to folks who want to get to get in and get to it.

One of the things that helps speed things along is the almost complete lack of healing.  I was, at first, ready to be quite unhappy about this omission, particularly since I tend to play healer characters in multiplayer stuff, but I have to admit that it’s kind of grown on me.  I mentioned in my first impressions that I tend to stomp up and down like a wounded beast whenever I die a lot in games, but FA has already gone great strides towards getting me over it.  Death in this game is going to happen.  Frequently, and regardless of how well equipped and/or capable you are.  So you pretty much have to get used to it or you simply aren’t going to be able to play.  It certainly helps to remember that everyone else is constantly dying too, so it’s not like it’s just you.  The trick is to make sure you take as many of the opposing team down too before you go, and the sting is further soothed by the fact that you’re generally back up and popping heads in less than five seconds anyway.  Overall, the constant death helps contribute to the speed and excitement of the game rather than detracting from it.

Aside from the speed and fluidity of the gameplay, the fact that it’s Ghost in the Shell is absolutely a major selling point for me.  I’m greatly enjoying seeing and hearing the great characters from the Stand Alone Complex series again, and the stages really do look like they could have come right out of the show.

This, unfortunately, is the swingpoint for the issues I have with the game in its current form.  While the action and set dressings are definitely Ghost in the Shell, the game lacks the other part of the GitS formula, and that’s the story.  There’s a short tutorial that plays upon initial game launch where Batou guides Major Kusanagi through the paces of testing out a newly upgraded body, and there’s the overarching theme that all the matches in the game are training simulations for members of Section 9, but past that there’s nothing.  I do realize that it’s an online shooter and thus story is never going to be the primary focus, but I think games like Titanfall have shown that we can have fast-paced multiplayer gameplay and story at the same time.  First Assault plays great, but it only feels like it’s half the game it should be without any deep philosophical discusions about politics, military strategy, or the human/cyborg condition.  I’m hoping that the developers will eventually add on a “story mode” of some sort so I can get my full fix.

Another issue I have - though, fortunately, sone that I am certain they will be addressing as time goes on - is the dearth of content vis-à-vis game types in general.  As it stands, there are only three modes: Team Deathmatch, Terminal Conquest, and Demolition.

Team Deathmatch is pretty standard.  The teams get points for taking out members of the opposing team, the winner being the first one to reach a certain point total or whichever has the highest number of points when the timer runs out.  It’s fun.

Terminal Conquest is a slight variation on the usual Capture the Point system.  Teams battle for dominance of computer terminals strewn across the battlefield.  The winner is the team that has captured all five terminals, has captured/recaptured five terminals overall, or has captured the highest number of terminals before the timer runs out.  This is by far my favorite mode, and the one I feel I do best at.  It’s also the only one in which players can call in tachikomas to help them out in battle, which is a feature that I would like to see further developed.

Demolition . . . ugh.  Bleh.  My least favorite of the three by far.  Each team is assigned to either protect two points on the map or blow these points up.  To win a round, they must either kill off all members of the opposing team or successfully set off/defuse the bomb.  Teams switch between attack and defense every five rounds, and the first to win six rounds also wins the match.  The problem with this mode, in my opinion, is that it loses a lot of the flow of the other two.  If you die in a round, that’s it.  All you can do is go into spectator mode and watch until the next round, something that can be particularly frustrating when you’re the first to die, usually because you happened to turn the wrong corner and walk into some bullets.  The pace of the respawns, therefore, is way way down, but the pace of the deaths continues along at it’s regular 100 MPH clip.  If, perhaps, the mode included heightened armor or maybe a way to retreat and patch your wounds, then it would be more fun to play, but as it is it all too often feels like the winner isn’t the team with the better strategy or faster shooting, it’s simply whichever team lucks into spotting their opponents first.

A lot of my other current complaints about the game at the moment really boil down to “I wish there was more.”  More game modes, more grenade types, more story, etc.  Past that . . . I like it.  I really do like it and I intend to keep playing it.  I dunno how often I may be putting up new posts about my experiences, but I’m sure I’ll come up with plenty more to say, especially whenever new content updates roll out.

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Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault Online (First Impressions)

First Impressions - Part 2

Okay, been working on modding some stuff, but it’s time to get back to work!

And by work, I mean shooting people.  Real people!  In a game!

Honestly, I tend to stay away from this kind of thing.  I did play Team Fortress 2 for a good long while, I had a fair stint on Loadout, and there was this very brief period where I lost terribly at Battlefield 3, but for the most part I just plain don’t play squad-based shooters.  Part of it is that I am an anti-social misanthrope, and these kinds of things are, more or less by definition, built around playing both with and against other people.  Largely, though, the issue I have is that when competing against other people, one has to expect to lose a fair bit of the time, and I’m something of a poor loser.

I mean, I don’t do things like blame my teammates or accuse the other team of hax or scream obsceneties over the voice chat, heaven forfend.  That would involve me actually interacting with other human beings in some way.  No, instead I just fume and rage and throw things within the privacy of my own home, some of those things being expensive electronics equipment that I don’t really have the money to replace.  I want to WIN, dammit, WIN, and if I don’t get that immediate gratifaction, I’m generally not a happy camper.

Then why subject myself to this kind of situation again by playing Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault Online, you ask?  Well, because it’s Ghost in the Shell.  More importantly, it’s Stand Alone Complex, which is my favorite iteration of the franchise thus far.  Playing around in this world is well worth the price of admission, which may be $0 monetarily but is very high indeed for my blood pressure.

I’ve gotten a fair bit of playing in the past couple of days, but I think I’m going to hold off on actually commenting on the gameplay until the next part.  For now, it should suffice to say that I am still in the honeymoon phase where getting my ass routinely kicked isn’t quite making my head explode just yet.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault is available free for download on Steam

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Saints Row IV (Final Thoughts)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Final Thoughts

Regardless of my drooling praise in earlier parts, the Saints Row games are not perfect, as a series or individually.  As a whole, for example, they have an issue with their storytelling in that they always seem to be imparting more information than they actually are.  Like, some characters have been presented as extremely important/dangerous/what have you, but ultimately it’s never really shown that they’re any of these things, and the Saints’ burning hatred for said characters seems very sudden.  Not inexplicable, mind you, given that they as a group tend toward sudden burning hatred and other violent, kneejerk reactions, but still.

Saints Row IV suffers from this as well as its own little issues, like the whole thing where it gives the player PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS for most of the game, but then shuts these powers off during many of its missions.  There are in-universe reasons given for these power-downs, fortunately, but it’s still a little bit of a downer to suddenly become something less than god-like all because the developers wanted the mission to be challenging or to follow a specific format.

That said, fuck my complaints.  Fuck ‘em right in the ear, ‘cause they don’t really matter.  Saints Row is amazingly fun, and SR4 is definitely the most bombastic and action packed one I’ve played so far.  SR2 is still my fave, sure, but damn if this wasn’t a hell of a thrill ride.

And a beauty of a ride, too!  I really enjoyed all the glitches and other touches that they added to the game to show the instability of the simulation the Boss is running around in.  A few times I found myself distracted and fascinated by the way the walls of the buildings shift and undulate, their textures seeming to melt and reform over and over again.

I also squealed like a fanboy at all the callbacks to the previous games in the series.  Most of them were for SR3, of course, but there were a hell of a lot for SR2 and even SR1, and it actually managed to make the whole series feel very connected despite each installment getting more ridiculously overblown than the last.  Making a story about a small street gang trying to clean up their city feel like it’s directly related to a story about the President of the United States getting trapped in a computer simulation by an alien overlord?  Not a small feat!

I love Saints Row.  Just thought y’all oughta know that.

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Saints Row IV (Part 4)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Final Thoughts

Steampunk Boss > You

Coming into the home stretch now, I do believe.  I’m just shy of level 50 (despite what the screenshot is showing), I have collected all of the clusters, I’m pulling in cache like crazy, I’m currently going through and getting gold medals on all the activities, and I’m fairly certain I’m at least 75% done with the main missions.  Of course, I’m also right on the verge of getting the last of the abilities that will put me in permanent God Mode, so the last 25% ain’t gonna be no thang.

Now, I do like a challenge.  Most of the time, the perfect gaming experience for me is in the Goldilocks region, where it’s not so frustratingly hard that I’m tearing my hair out but also not so ridiculously easy that I get bored due to there being no stakes.  Saints Row is one of the rare times I make an exception on the easy side because it is just so much fun.  Making entire armies of bad guys explode at the touch of a single button is very cathartic, plugging into the more primitive parts of my brains and pumping in the happy juice.

Sometimes you want the pulse-pounding thrill ride of scraping through an adventure by the skin of your teeth, and sometimes you just want to sit back and casually set the world on fire, y’know?

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Saints Row IV (Part 3)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Final Thoughts

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I have gotten, like, a crazy amount of stuff done since the previous part.  Just saved Shaundi and am about to start doing her loyalty missions, and in the meantime I’ve unlocked a lotta abilities, outfits, and so on while also continuing to get sidetracked by grabbing up collectibles.

And speaking of collectibles, one of the things I unlocked was the ability to see where they are on the map.  So that’s pretty much all over, dawg.  I am going to be hunting down every single one and quite possibly attempt to fully 100% the game.  I simply won’t be able to help myself.

PS, I totally saved Christmas.  So that’s a thing.

Anyway, back to Shaundi, it was nice to see her old self again in the simulation.  Personally, I far prefer the original version of the character from SR2.  She just kinda became Boring Pissed Off Chick after that.  It looks like both versions are going to be hanging around for this little adventure, tho’, so hopefully there’s some good interaction between the two of them as I work on their missions.

I kinda wish I had more to say about the game, but the fact is that it is just slack-jawed awesome and something that’s really best experienced first-hand.

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Outlast: Whistleblower (Shortplay)

First Impressions - Final Thoughts - Whistleblower DLC

Sweet zombie jebus, I’ve done it to myself again.  Both in the sense that I’ve just played yet another horror game set to put my every nerve on edge and that I’ve delved back into the world of Outlast once again.

I mentioned during my outing with the first game that this game isn’t really scary, it’s just really damn tense, but after giving it some consideration, I think I have to amend and expand upon that statement.

Outlast - and of course by extension, Whistleblower - is indeed scary, but in a very different way from what I usually categorize scary stuff.  Things like Amnesia: The Dark Decent, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame are mentally scary while games like Outlast Dead Space, and Alien: Isolation are physically scary.  The former works on the player’s psyche, making the fear more about the unknown and the fevered imaginings of their own mind.  They conjure up some dark shape in the shadows and then let us do the work ourselves as we either try to picture exactly what the shape might be able to do to us or simply stew in the fear of not knowing.

The latter, meanwhile, is more involved with things that may actually exist and could physically threaten our (via the player character) life and limb.  Even if the enemy is not something we could every fully comprehend - like an insane, knife-wielding maniac or a rabid, feral animal - they are generally still close enough to our normal experiences and knowledge for us to get a handle on.  It can also apply to a truly alien creature that we sufficiently know enough about via the game’s narrative.  Here the fear comes from the fact that we can adequately imagine just what the monster might do to us and we really, really, really don’t want it to.

Another major difference between the two is that one tends to rely more on subtlety, atmosphere, and the triggering of unsettling emotions, while the other has a lot of loud noises, action sequences, and yes, the dreaded and often-maligned jumpscare.  Unfairly maligned, I would personally add, as I do believe that jumpscares can be done right and that the reason so many people believe they’re cheap and not really scary is that jumpscares are so often done wrong.

Outlast and Whistleblower are, to me, prime examples of how to do it right.  The developers at Red Barrels know when and how to do quiet or noisy, light or dark, and action or dialogue.  The people that the protagonists of the game came across are all legitimately creepy, threatening, and generally pretty awful human beings, which helps lend to the immersion and taking them seriously.  It was made very clear at various points throughout that you could simply not fully trust anyone because you never knew when one of the less aggressive inmates was suddenly going to go full-on Hannibal Lecter on your face.  Even if you didn’t see anyone around, there might still be someone around, waiting in the shadows to lurch out and take a quick nibble.

More specific to this DLC, I gotta say that I think this was a very nice cap to the story in the main game.  It left a few major things open, mind, but hey, we’ve got Outlast II coming out in just a little over a week.  While it’s going to be focusing on a new group of characters, it’s also supposed to be taking place in the same world as the first game, so hopefully we get to see some more closure on the events at the Mount Massive Asylum.

Outlast: Whistleblower is available for purchase on Steam and GOG.com

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Penumbra: Overture (Final Thoughts)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Final Thoughts

Well.  That was a hell of a thing.

While I did already have some experience with Amnesia: The Dark Decent and thus knew that Frictional Games have a good handle on what they’re doing, I have to admit that I didn’t really expect all that much out of their first foray.  And though, yes, it does have a few oddities and frustrations, this was actually pretty dang good!

I greatly enjoyed the writing, and though there was only one voice actor, he did a wonderful job carrying it all on his own.  The story - both the self-contained arc of this installment and the overall mystery that has begun unfolding - is remarkably good, which you may have guessed since I just remarked upon it.  The gameplay was a very small tad underwhelming, but I chalk that up to being my own fault for expecting something a little different than what I got.

Ultimately, what few legitimate beefs I have with the game are more confusion than complaint.  For example, I find it kind of boggling how many light sources were thrown at me.  I could kind of see why the flashlight (to see what the hell is way over there) and the glowstick (to see what’s in a wider area but only directly around you) were included, but the additional supply of flares just seemed absolutely unnecessary.  As did the beef jerky, which I’m supposing were to be used to lure away monsters so I could slip by unnoticed, but I found it much more expedient just to bash them with rocks and barrels until they died, removing the need to worry about them at all afterward.

These and other little additions here and there just felt like they were trying to diversify the experience, but it honestly didn’t really need diversifying.  I just kept to using the handful of actually useful and necessary items to solve all the puzzles, and I enjoyed the adventure just fine.

Creepy and tense without being overly scary, a good mix of exploration and action segments, interesting puzzles (only one of which I gave up and sought an answer for), and certainly not bad lookin’.

I’m definitely looking forward to playing Penumbra: Black Plague next.

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Saints Row IV (Part 2)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Final Thoughts

Aw yeah, how ‘bout a bit of gratuitous sci-fi nudity?

So, I shoulda seen this coming.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I did see it coming but went ahead and jumped into it anyway.  Saints Row IV is pretty much occupying 90% of my brain right now.  I was already going pretty slow on my playthrough of The Witcher 2, but now I think I’m going to have to pretty much force myself to stop playing SR4 long enough to play anything else.

It is just so much got-danged fun!  As I said in my first post, there doesn’t seem to be much build-up from “This is what is normal.” to “HOLY CRAP WTF IS GOING ON?!” like there was with SR3.  Within an hour I went from learning how to steal cars to having full-on superpowers, making “HOLY CRAP WTF” the standard operating procedure..  And this was already after the whole, y’know, alien invasion thing had kicked off.  Hence the goop-smeared Boss toting around a giant sci-fi rifle.

Running around virtual Steelport with the super sprint and super jump alone is worth the price of admission.  I am constantly taking my sweet time getting to mission objectives purely because I’m having too much fun leaping and gliding around, collecting random stuff and causing massive destruction as I zig and zag across the map.  I’ve already played for 7 hours, and I’m pretty sure I still haven’t yet gone through all the missions that teach me how to do stuff.

I have, however, gone through all the “Enter the Dominatrix” DLC, and what a weird, fucked-up ride that was!  My favorite part was, of course, Nyte Blayde’s heroic sacrifice.  We’ll always remember you, Josh.

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Saints Row IV (First Impressions)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Final Thoughts

Saints Row holds a special place in my heart.  Specifically, the most immature part that likes to laugh at fart jokes and cheer at massive explosions.

I’ve never played the first game in the series, sad to say, primarily due to the fact that it has never gotten a PC release.  I do plan on playing it in the future, however, and in the meantime, I did watch a playthrough online so I could be up to speed on what happened in it.

A buddy of mine used to go on and on about how great Saints Row the Third was, so I eventually decided to try the series out for myself.  When I learned I wasn’t going to be able to play the first one without first buying an XBox, I decided reluctantly to move on to Saints Row 2, a reluctance which rapidly melted away as I got pulled along on one of the craziest thrill rides I’d ever been on in a video game.  I’m a huge fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, and this was like GTA with the wackiness factor turned up to 11.  My funny bone, I will happily admit, was tickled mightily while doing missions like committing insurance fraud by bouncing back and forth between multiple moving vehicles and stealing a sewage truck to literally paint the town brown.

Eventually I picked up SR3, and while I did find it to be a bit of a disappointment after SR2, it was only a very mild disappointment.  I was mostly unhappy that they moved off to a whole new city (thus abandoning the Third Street that the Third Street Saints gang was named after), that they pulled a whole “haw-haw, we’re taking all your stuff, oh wait never mind, here’s a rocket launcher” bit of nonsense, and that things seemed to get a little too wacky a little too fast.  But hey, those are all minor-ish complaints overall, and I still had a ton of fun riding around town with TV’s Nyte Blayde and beating cops upside the head with a dildo bat.

And now, at long last, Saints Row IV.

The pacing problem I had with SR3, I feel, is not going to be a problem here because SR4 starts off super-damn-wacky and looks to stay that way throughout.  The Boss, Pierce, and Shaundi help take out a terrorist cell in predictably violent fashion, which leads to the Boss becoming President of the United States (A supremely politically uncorrect buffoon and psychopath becoming president based almost purely on their flashy celebrity status?  Surely this game is unrealistic in the extreme!) shortly before Earth is invaded by aliens who trap everyone in a virtual reality prison all Matrix-style.  It may get crazier from here, but it’s hard to see how!

So far, I’ve managed to get past the introductory sections and into the open world of virtual Steelport proper.  Time to see what kind of damage I can really do!

Saints Row IV is available for purchase on Steam and GOG.com

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Penumbra: Overture (Part 2)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Final Thoughts

Ssssssh, don’t bother the sweet liddle puppy dawg.  He’s sleepin’.

Penumbra, so far, isn’t really all that scary.  The dog monsters here aren’t really that difficult to kill unless they gang up on you, and it turns out that once they’re dead, they do indeed stay dead, leaving me free to run around crazy as I like in the corridors they once patrolled.  There are also giant spiders, because of course there are, and they’re a bit more difficult to deal with, but now that I’ve come face to twitching, drooling mandibles with them, the scare factor has gone way down.

This is not to say that the game is not good, however, as it is.  The atmosphere is not particularly terrifying anymore, but it is still very tense, and as I mentioned during my Outlast playthrough, intensity can work just as well.  I may not be particularly scared of the dark in the outpost anymore, but I’m sure as heck ready to use a gas canister or a rock to bash the shit out of anything that comes out of it.

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Enhanced Edition (Part 2)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Part 3

Okay, so, in The Witcher 1, there are these two little minigames, poker dice and fist fighting tournaments.  The dice were awful, but at least the fist fights were decent.  You actually got to move around and block and pick the strength of your punches and so on.

In The Witcher 2, both of these minigames have made a return, and this time both of them are fucking terrible.  Where the fights actually played out like a game with direct control before, they have now become pure quick time events, pressing a button or a sequence of buttons to punch the other guy more better.  The interactive element has been shaved down to the bare minimum, and all shreds of strategy have been removed from the equation.  I’m not saying that QTEs can’t be done well (Telltale Games has ‘em on lockdown, that’s for sure), but I am saying that they certainly aren’t done well here.

Poker dice was always awful, mostly because there wasn’t really much strategy to it in the first place.  Roll the dice, pick which ones you want to re-roll, then roll again.  The winner is determined by what kind of poker hand (pair, three of a kind, full house, straight, etc.) they have at the end of it.  There’s no bluffing involved since both players can see what has been rolled.  Picking which dice to re-roll almost completely revolves around either sticking with the pair(s) you’ve got or trying for a straight.  That is seriously it.  90%+ of the “game” is pure blind luck.  They talk in-game about people having skill with the dice, but it’s ridiculous nonsense considering even the greenest of players has the exact same chance to roll a high straight or a five of a kind on the first roll as the most seasoned veterans.

This new version of dice, in contrast to the fighting above, has actually become more interactive, yet in this case it has actively made the game worse.  Now you have to manually roll the dice by using the left stick for positioning and the right stick for actually tossing them, and there’s a chance that the dice may roll completely off the game board, thus removing them from your hand entirely.  So, welcome to the frustration of trying to beat a three of a kind when you only have three dice to work with yourself, suckah!  Not to mention the fact that they fancied up the faces of the dice so they’re harder to read!  ARGH!

Seriously, it’s vexing enough that I’m seriously considering not playing either minigame at all anymore, quest rewards be hanged.

 . . . dammit, no, I’ll probably still do them.  Feh.

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Penumbra: Overture (First Impressions)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Final Thoughts

Frictional Games have made quite the name for themselves making scurry games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA, but before I move on to those games, I figure I should go all the way back to where it all started, the Penumbra Collection.  More specifically, the first part of that collection, Penumbra: Overture.

Dude’s long-estranged father dies and leaves behind a safety deposit box with some cryptic notes and a map, which lead dude to a long-abandoned mine/military outpost under the ice and snow of northern Greenland.  Dude then has to navigate his way through this dark, frozen underground installation to discover just what his father had been working on for so many years.  Naturally, it turns out the outpost isn’t quite as abandoned as he had thought, and thus the fun begins.

So far the environment is pretty creepy, being mostly a dark mine with the occasional blood smear and snarly monster in the shadows.  This is dampened somewhat, unfortunately, by the fact that the one monster I’ve had direct contact with was pretty easy to take out when I was a little careful about doing so.  Then again, its corpse disappeared while I was off doing other things, so now I’m left pondering if that was just a bit of resource-saving game mechanics or if it actually got up and wandered off while I was away.

Something to think about.  At length.  While jumping at every little sound.

Penumbra: Overture is available for purchase on Steam and GOG.com

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How to Survive (Final Thoughts)

First Impressions - Part 2 - Final Thoughts

My thoughts on How to Survive are a bit of a mixed bag.  I suppose it’s kind of similar to what I thought of the first Assassin’s Creed.  A lot of really good ideas buried under some fairly bad ones.

The survival elements in a setting populated by flesh-eating monsters is a good one, of course, which is why so many games have just that sort of thing going these days.  I greatly enjoyed crafting items to use, to the point that I was constantly trying to combine things to see what I could make, leading to me making several weapons and pieces of armor long before I found a recipe telling me how to make them.  Exploring the islands was fun, as was cutting down entire hordes of zombies once I got some decent weapons.  And the story and some of the characters were actually pretty interesting.

But the controls continued to feel wonky to me throughout.  I did finally get kinda used to using RB to shoot instead of RT like I would have preferred, but I still didn’t like it.  RT being the dash button didn’t feel natural, so there were a number of times I died purely because I didn’t think to use it to get away.  The quest tracking seemed very uneven, with some quests tracking accurately and well while others just seeming to leave me entirely to guessing where I was supposed to go.  Ran into a bug during this as well where some extras of items I was supposed to collect still showed up on my map as tracked even after I had turned the quest in.  The graphics are pretty good and I don’t mind the top-down view at all, but the placement of several buildings, trees, and other set pieces made certain parts of the map completely obscured.  I could understand it somewhat if the camera view was fixed, but several times the camera would tilt so that I could get a better view, so it’s very confusing as to why in some other areas it wouldn’t.

I did beat the game, and I did enjoy it, but after the credits rolled, I did ultimately decide that I wouldn’t bother going through the DLC areas or other modes.  I do intend to get How to Survive 2 eventually, and it’s my hope that like with Assassin’s Creed, the developers used this first game as a springboard to make truly good installments for the series.

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Fallout Shelter (Final Thoughts)

Looking Back - Replay - Part 2 - Final Thoughts

Welp, I’m not actually at the endgame, especially considering that, like most mobile games, there isn’t really an endgame as such.  But!  I am at a point where I think there isn’t much more new stuff to say about Fallout Shelter.  I only have one more room to unlock, and it’s just a merged upgrade of two other types of room.  The quests have some interesting variations popping up every once in a while, but otherwise all go pretty much the same.  All I really have to do now is keep things running, continue to gradually expand to take up all the available space, and keep grinding quests.

FS is fun and it’s free.  It’s got a wonderful aesthetic, it’s extremely engrossing, and the stuff that’s been added since its initial release have helped keep it interesting.  I’m gonna keep plugging along in it until I finally get bored with it, and in the meantime, I heartily recommend other folks giving it a try.