#yourgamesucks

[gamewrecker-blog]

Because this one is going to be so easy, I was hoping for one of your famed long rants. Do Destiny plz!

Wow, three requests for this bad boy. This is a great one to crack into as a comeback!

Destiny (video game)

Background: You are a Guardian, one of humanity’s last defenders. In the past, something called The Traveler arrived on Earth and turned human civilization into a utopia, but everything changed when the Fire Na– I mean, when the Darkness attacked. Basically, humanity got rekt. So, you and your fellow Guardians are tasked with defending what little humanity has left, which somehow boils down to running the same missions over and over ad nauseum.

Review: Let me clarify that I’ll be talking about Destiny as it currently is, not from its inception. I can’t cram that many loot cave jokes into one column.

“It’s totally not Halo, guys, seriously!”

That’s true. It’s not Halo. It’s always-online, MMO Halo. World of Halocraft. Except WoW was fun at one point.

Frequent readers of this column know I’m big on writing in games. Needless to say, Destiny has the worst writing I’ve seen this side of Kingdom Hearts. You don’t even get access to any lore in-game – you have to unlock “Grimoire pages” on mobile or online without any indication from the game itself. Oh, and you get bonuses for unlocking Grimoire Pages, which is also left unmentioned. Yeah, that’s not scummy at all, Bungie. I bet some readers might not even have known about this. That’s how stupid this idea is.

Anyway, once you’ve jumped through the hoops to find out about Destiny lore, you become sorely disappointed. It’s a bunch of vague drivel about the Traveler, what humanity lost, and something something Darkness something. Come on, Bungie, you fell back on the most generic terms possible for your “good” and “evil” with the Light and Darkness thing, and you still somehow let me down with your lore. That being said, the Books of Sorrow that came with the Taken King are actually pretty sweet… if they had any relevance whatsoever to the game you’re playing. Instead, they’re decently written entries about things that happened in Destiny’s past that mean nothing to its present. Nice.

I can’t rant much more about Destiny’s writing because it’s hard to fill paragraphs about a thing that doesn’t exist. So let’s move on to gameplay. Of course, by gameplay, I mean grinding. Oh yes, Destiny is just like every other MMO – the actual fun parts of the game are like the world’s worst parfait, thin layers separated from each other by endless expanses of boring, repetitive actions indistinct from each other. First, as usual, you have to level up to do the cool things you were promised. Fair enough, that’s normal, though usually level up missions at least try to be fun. But then the real fun begins once you hit level 40, the cap. Now you get to start grinding for gear!

Gear grinding has always been the most frustrating part of MMOs. At least in Guild Wars you can craft your own endgame gear pretty easily. In Destiny though, you are a slave to the chest drops, and if you’re like me, the chest drops will be nothing but armor. Armor for days. It’s like Oprah did an armor giveaway to me as her sole studio audience member, except the armor I get is always inferior to what I already have. Wonderful. Sure, you get to break it down into crafting materials, but have you seen how many you need to get to turn them into anything useful? You might as well take the time you spend breaking down your armor and just do another run, in which you will certainly get more armor.

It would be easy for you to think I’m being hard on the loot system when the point of the game is to actually play the game, and you’d be wrong. I’ve played my share of MMOs – the aforementioned Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, etc. – and Destiny has, despite its genre shift, managed to have the most boring endgame I’ve ever experienced. Maybe it’s actually because of the genre shift. There are only so many things you can do with an FPS without making it heavily stylized like Team Fortress. Boss encounters invariably become “shoot thing to make enemy vulnerable, shoot boss, keep trash under control.” While these are basics known to any MMO player, Destiny never does anything to put a twist on them. I’m used to bosses with unique positioning and gameplay mechanics requiring a diverse raid group to use their class abilities to their fullest extent, but instead I get nothing but an endless supply of gear checks. You know it’s bad when even the endboss of the Taken King is a friggin’ gear check. I guess it’s Bungie’s attempt to keep things accessible to people playing without dedicated groups, but frankly, that’s bogus. At least some endgame content should require strict coordination and cleverness from an organized group. Stop diluting your game to the lowest common denominator.

The worst part about this is that I never feel fulfilled. When my raid team took down Deathwing in WoW, we let out whoops of joy. Excitement was part of the atmosphere even though none of us could see each other in real life. We felt we had accomplished something spectacular. But no matter how hyped a boss was supposed to be in Destiny, I always emerged with a shrug. This might be paranoid, but I suspect this as a ruse from the devs. The Skinner Box never pays out with quite enough to satisfy you so that it keeps you playing. This kind of design isn’t just bad and stupid. This kind of design is dangerous. This is the kind of design we see with predatory freemium mobile games, except this one you already paid for up front. Next time you go to boot up Destiny, think about that first. Do we really want to reinforce this behavior?

True Feelings: The last paragraph isn’t parody for once – it really sums up what I think about the game. It’s not bad per se, but it’s poorly designed and implemented. It’s a grindfest with little to reward you at the end. Take that as you will.

Oh, and “Become Legend” is the worst tagline I’ve ever heard. Even Tarzan is ashamed of that grammar.

[gamewrecker-blog]

Dark Souls!

Okay, I need a break from studying. Let’s do this.

Dark Souls (video game)

Background: You are, well, some guy who became Undead. Being Undead sucks because you get wrangled to an asylum and eventually lose your mind and kill everything around you. Thankfully, you’re the “chosen” Undead and embark on a pilgrimage to take down the source that’s corrupting the world and causing the Curse of Undeath in the first place. And you die a lot along the way.

Review: Dark Souls is the video game equivalent of an abusive relationship – you know it hurts, but you keep telling yourself that if you could just get better, maybe it will change.

Well, it won’t. It’s not you, it’s Dark Souls.

Dark Souls is made to be punishing and difficult, and I can respect that. I’ve played enough Touhou to like and embrace brutal boss encounters with ridiculous attacks while you have practically no defenses. The difference is that in Touhou, you can see everything coming at you. In Dark Souls, it’s completely trial and error. Granted, the end result of most difficult bosses in all video games boils down to “trial and error,” but I don’t see how it could even be theoretically possible to beat the first boss demon without any prior knowledge of how he works. Come on.

Anyway, the world around you sucks and has fallen into disrepair, which makes me wonder – who the hell lived here? We’re told it was once a nice place, but everything around you is either a fellow Undead, a demon, or some other kind of monster. Where the hell did you even come from and how did they manage to get you all the way to the Asylum through this crap? Where did all of these (impressively designed) bosses come from and how? If the demons here are THAT strong, why haven’t they gone out and struck at the rest of the world already?

Central to the game are Humanity and Souls. They’re currency in an attempt to be as 3edgy5me as possible, and when you die, they all disappear. You better go back to your corpse – er, bloodstain – ASAP because if you die again, you’re boned. And you WILL die. Lots. However, the exact nature of how these work is handwaved. Come on, if you’re going to give me a grimdark excuse for currency, at least flush it out a bit.

Combat is actually pretty fluid, and the choice of weapon actually matters, which is nice. However, even the most powerful attacks don’t mean jack against bosses, who are pretty much all health sponges. As a result, your defenses and especially dodging mean more than any offensive power you can muster. Again, I can respect that – Touhou – but the “endurance” system is aggravating.  Your best evasive moves share what amounts to a cooldown bar, the idea being to force you to use them wisely, but the result is that you get forced into exactly one “correct” option to avoid most bosses’ attacks. Creativity takes a backseat to efficiency to an absurd degree.

While your choice of weapon matters, your armor really doesn’t mean jack. It’s the equivalent of “will this boss 2-shot me or 3-shot me?” – a distinction that possibly matters, but not one of critical importance. Shields, on the other hand, are essential. I can’t begin to describe how much my shield saved my butt. This seems like a strange phenomenon to me though – how can the shield in one of my hands be so vital but the armor over my entire body is useless? Because Dark Souls said so, I guess.

The PvP system is really hackneyed. The “invade” mechanic just doesn’t make sense, and the game was very much not designed to have players fight each other.  It is kinda cool that combatants have an unspoken agreement to bow politely before a fight, but “fight” is too generous a word – either one person blows the other away with magic or lag happens and you find yourself being backstabbed from the front. Not a thrilling experience.

The most disappointing part of the game is without a doubt the ending. If you usher in the Age of Dark and stop the Curse of Undeath, you become the ruler of a dying world, and that’s honestly pretty badass. There was a lot of design space for this. However, if you kill Gwyn and replace him, nothing has changed. Period. All the stuff you did meant nothing. What a great conclusion to my arduous quest. And thanks to the sequel, this garbage ending is the canon one. Why go through the process of being dynamic when you can rehash the exact same ideas and sell it twice?

True Feelings: This game is very good. Again, my criticisms are valid, and that ending was stupid as hell, but the sheer variety of boss design is worth playing alone.  Also, what few characters exist are memorable – “Praise the Sun” and all that. If you have the patience and the dexterity to git gud, this is a great game to play.

[gamewrecker-blog]

Feed the Machine

I haven’t got anything in my inbox! I’m too swamped with school at the moment to research Dwarf Fortress the way I want to, so I’m counting on you readers to use that “Got a Game for Me to Wreck?” button so I can give you new content!

[gamewrecker-blog]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution ~ But I'm not sure how you could do that since that game is perfect in every conceivable way!

Man, my very firstupdate last week and I missed it.  Better make up for it with adouble-header!

Part 1: Deus Ex: HumanRevolution (Video Game)

Background: You are Adam Jensen, head ofsecurity for a biomedical company in Detroit where your scientist girlfriendworks.  After a bunch of mercenaries trash the place and beat the hell outof you, your boss uses the fine print in your contract to save youby “augmenting” you with the company’s technology. Then there’s a bunch ofangst and xenophobia about the Augmented in the world (which you don’t help byleaving a bunch of corpses in your wake), convoluted reasons to travel acrossthe world a few times, a stereotypical ruthless PMC, and a plot from thehonest-to-god Illuminati to harness augmentation to control people as they’vealways controlled them. Oh, and hidden “tests of character” that areincredibly obvious.  Finally, you have a deep and meaningful relationship with airducts.

Review: The original Deus Ex is widelyconsidered one of the game-changing moments in video game history, right upthere with Street Fighter II, Half-life, and Final Fantasy VII.

Then there’s this crap.

One of the most important parts of Deus Ex wasthe variety of ways you could approach a problem. Stealth past the baddies as amoonlighter, charm through social engineering, or just blow the joint; all wereviable options.  Human Revolution gives you stealth and combat, but eventhe stealth options still involves knocking them out as opposed to avoidingthem. If you can get through a level without putting any baddies in achokehold, you are a wizard. Combat inevitably becomes “what happens when youscrew up the stealth.”

For a “moral choice” system, the gamesure does weigh it in one favor – surprisingly, the non-lethal option. See, you have to get experience to unlock all your augmentations (becauseheaven forbid you actually get to use all the tech that’s already built into you), and your augmentations, previous angstaside, are pretty sweet. One large source of experience is getting rid ofdouchebags in your way, especially up close. But putting someone to sleep gives you 10 more exp than flat-out killing them, which is often double. Sure, it’s technically the harder of the two options since other baddiescan revive sleeping buddies, but if you’re hiding the bodies like you should be(like, say, throwing them 50 feet down a building) that’s not an issue.  Plus, the “kill” option is apparently loudand often alerts the enemies to your presence, making you want to use it evenless. Hell, you even get knockout guns as well as the lethal kind. 

Speaking of which, let’s talk weapons. The first thing hilarious about weapons is that you can sell weapons tovendors. Why is this amusing? Well, every single enemy that matters dropsweapons upon death/sleeptime.  So if you want to break the economy, justkeeping taking a few down and running off and selling the loot. You can’t keeptwo of the same weapon though, which would make sense except that it’s bad atdetermining that an upgraded version of a weapon isn’t the same weapon – sothe game refuses you take a sniper rifle ammo from a sniper rifle to refill theammo for your silenced sniper rifle. Butlet’s be serious, you’re only ever going to use the pistol that ignores armorand the one-hit-sleep tranquilizer rifle.

Air ducts. I sure hope you like air ductsbecause you’re going to spend a lot of time in them.  Every building on Earth has the exact samesize of air ducts that can somehow both support your cyborg weight and you cancrouch-walk through wherever you want. They also seem to have an amnesia fieldattached to them because your enemies will see you go into one and completelyforget where you went. To be fair, they still remember you exist for about 15seconds, but air ducts aren’t made of adamantium; shoot through the sheet metaland ventilate that Jensen dude!

The story bounces youbetween Detroit (which they put surprisingly good research into and don’t treatas a wasteland like everyone else does), some place in China, and some otherplaces, culminating in Antarctica.  Itstarts off looking like a corporate espionage version of smash-and-grab is whatwrecked you and killed your girlfriend. Then you break up some radical anti-augment group and find out they werebeing controlled by someone in the shadows. You bust into where you think the shadow dudes are, uncover some weirdplot, and kick a boss’s ass (whether you want to or not – nice moral choicesystem!)  Then you get shuttled to China,where you break into the main pharmaceutical company that’s behind it, but thatturns out to be kind of a sham too.  Thenyou find out it’s the Illuminati, and your boss refused to join them, so now he’sbeing punished for it.  Then you’reconvinced your girlfriend’s alive, then she actually is and working for theIlluminati without knowing it, then all the augmented people go crazy becausethe founder of augments made them do it in order to stop augments ever again…

If that was hard tofollow, well, welcome to the club.  Theworst part is, the big “moral choice” of what to broadcast to the public(through the news agency that’s actually a robot – seriously) determines theending, but now there’s apparently a sequel coming out, so your choice didn’tmatter. Nice job.

And you still didn’tget your girlfriend back.

True Feelings: I actually had a fun time with this game and plan on getting the sequel. The misgivings in the review are still mostly accurate, though the story is a bit better handled than I indicate.  The ambient dialogue is especially well handled, though I have no idea how the ending deciding whether you were a good or bad person worked.

[gamewrecker-blog]

First Post: Kingdom Hearts (video game series)

Just so you know what you’re getting into, here’s a sample:

Kingdom Hearts.

Background: You’re (sometimes) Sora, a dude with shoes way too big for his feet using a weaponized key to hack apart these globby things called “Heartless.” Later on, we just kind of forget about the Heartless and take on other baddies. Gameplay is like Devil May Cry: a spectacle fighter without quite as tight of controls. Also, Disney characters. Also also, Squeenix characters.

Review: First things first: It's very, very clear the creators never intended to make a sequel, let alone five. (Is it five now? I've lost track.)

The original was actually fine as a self-contained story. It knew its audience. The story had a beginning, middle, and end, while not being particularly exciting. It was kinda neat to play a real-time action/RPG thing alongside Disney characters I grew up with. I could rip it to shreds on its own, sure, but what’s to come are far juicier targets.

Then 2 came along. Suddenly the writers were grasping at straws to make a story out of whole cloth when the conclusion to the first was just fine. Characters were unacceptably hollow, the "twists" were predictable and boring, and the Disney and Squeenix tie-ins were tortured.  Organization 13 was the Secret Evil Council of Vagueness, twirling mustaches and with a hand-waved “goal” in mind.  Any amount of depth they could have had was wrung dry. Mechanically, it was “deeper” than KH1, which is to say that it was needlessly complicated and confusing with a high possiblity of accidentally killing yourself with the wrong input. Think of a cartoony version of DMC that hit its head three times falling down the stairs.

Still, if it had ended there, I could swallow it despite not liking it, much like the first time you taste German chocolate after being raised on Hershey. But the writers learned from last time, making a sequel hook as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head.

Which leads us to the non-numbered “spinoff” sequels. Sweet lord, the spin-offs. I got suckered by one of my friends into playing Birth by Sleep, despite my suspicion that it would be garbage. Lo and behold, it was trash. The mechanics were subpar, but the "story" is was got me. I suddenly realized that modern Kingdom Hearts writing isn't just bad writing. It's the most insidious form of bad writing: ass-pulls that try to put on the veneer of being deep and meaningful (incidentally also present in all the recent Final Fantasy games). I felt like Quagmire witnessing Brian's eighth-grade analysis of Catcher in the Rye, but that analysis had become a story in its own right. It was awful. News flash: Just because people don't understand your writing doesn't make it deep; it could just be a massive pile of BS. You are not Ralph Ellison.

At the core of much of this is that being a Keyblade-wielder in KH1 was special. It made you unlike anyone else in that world, like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. Now, it's like Oprah's in KH. "You get a keyblade! You get a keyblade! Everyone gets a keyblade!" Talk about cheapening the previous experience, the only experience that was worth remembering in the whole series.

No, I didn’t play any of the others, though I know a few of their names: 358/2 Days (aka “We suck at fractions”) and Dream Drop Distance (aka “Look at how clever we are making our title ‘3D’ for the 3DS”).  The only way I’d play them is if I were forced to do so Clockwork Orange-style, strapped into a chair with my eyelids strapped open.

This concludes my breakdown of why Kingdom Hearts is terrible and you should never play it.

True Feelings: Seriously, this series is god-awful. The first is fine for a nostalgia sort of thing, but don’t go beyond it. You’ll be left holding a sack full of disappointment and regret that you can never shed.