Late To The Party; Doom: The Dark Ages

 This was the moment when I knew Doom was jumping the shark:

Forgive the potato quality of the picture: the game wouldn't let me just take a pic of it. 

There's a lot of good in Doom: The Dark Ages. I found getting into the rhythm of the game to be easier than in Doom Eternal, and the jumping sections don't require you to do something precise or else die, which is good. 

Doomguy is a lumbering unit, every time he lands from a jump there's a "thoom" and ripple in the ground. It feels right. The combat sections even when they become a colorful wasteland of insanity are still engaging and, if you're putting some thought into your weapons and how they interact, feel good to fight through.

The map is well laid out too: Always offering enough detail to show you where to go, but not so much that you cannot figure out how to get there. They want you to find the hidden items, which feels good. 

There's also sections of the game where you play in a giant mech and these are...fine. They aren't complex, and you become a titan of destruction, wrecking buildings and giant demons with your metal fists. I can't say that they are incredibly fun but they do provide a nice break between other segments of the game and they feel correct.

That is; you are still Doomguy and you exist to fuck things up. 

The dragon, however...

As with everything in The Dark Ages, the dragon is metal. And by that, I mean the aesthetic and vibe. 

However, flying the dragon is not metal. I am not playing Doom to fly a dragon. I am playing Doom to take a chainsaw to demons. The dragon does metal things, like breathing fire down the neck of a giant demon, but the player doesn't do them.

And this is where we get into padding. The Doom reboot of 2016 was about as perfectly distilled as you could ask for. What did you do? You murdered every demon in the room until there weren't none. If you felt like it, cool; get some dollies. 

Now...you  have to drive a mech and a dragon. And I'm not saying that they don't have moments, but they do take me out of the primary gameplay look and I'm not sure what the upside is for the dragon elements. 

Still, all in all I enjoyed the game and had a good time. 

Late To The Party: Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

 I have, at long last, finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. It took me over 140 hours, and I wouldn't be surprised if I hit 150.

And I spent the last 20+  hours doing one thing: Fighting the final boss.

As a result, I have come away from a game that told a pretty interesting story, made some bold choices about what it wanted to do, and never left anything on the table, hating it.

After 130 hours in ANY game, I should be overleveled. I should be able to power through final bosses like a kid going through ice cream. 

But the final boss did several things that just ruined the entire experience. 

First; it was a multi-part boss that had no save points between them. You have to do all six stages of this boss in one roll and while there are checkpoints, so if you loose at stage five, you just start at stage five, but if you have to say, go to bed and try again tomorrow, you have to start the ENTIRE fight over again.

Second; It introduces a brand new character with new mechanics. You know when you shouldn't introduce a new thing? At the very end of the game. 

Third; it has an autodeath sequence, and autodeath sequences are BULLSHIT.  Third-point-five: it does a piss poor job of telling players how to avoid that sequence. Why? Because it introduces a new thing in the LAST BATTLE. 

Here's how that works; in battles, you have the life bar of an enemy, and a pressure bar that goes up the more attacks you made on that enemy. The more appropriate the attack, the further the pressure bar goes up: if you can max it, the enemy goes into a staggered state, where they can't do anything and you can just whale on 'em. 

The pressure bar is orange-except for in the last battle, when it is blue, and it is ONLY blue in the timer sequence before the autodeath move. 

Now, I hate the "pressure/stagger" element of fights anyway. But at least there would be some tactics involved with fighting enemies-or at least it would be if it was worth keeping all 230 enemies in your brain was worth it. 

However to change how that works in the last battle? WHAT IS ANYONE THINKING?

So when it was all over, instead of any sense of accomplishment, or vindication, I just felt exhausted and tired. Fuck this game, was my response. 

A few days later, I've softened my reaction but it's still soured. They failed to stick the landing, and I ended up feeling bad about the whole thing. 

Late To The Party: Evil West

 I finished up Evil West recently, having had it recommended back last year via the Jimquisition channel. 

I have to say: I dig it! There was a comment that Evil West was a bit of a throwback to the PS2 era and I can see it: the graphics are solid but not overly detailed, the gameplay is medium on it's depth, the locations are reasonably bite sized, and the enemy AI strategy seems to be: fuck it throw a lot of dudes at you. 

But the thing is? I enjoyed it anyway! A reasonably sized game executed reasonably well for a reasonable price. Call it a AA game if you like, but I found Evil West to be pulpy fiction and fun.

The controls were tight, and I was able to figure out different combos that fit a playstyle I enjoy. There were neat little rewards (just cosmetics) for collecting pieces of lore, there were just enough enemy varieties that I had to remember to change up my strategies when they showed up in different combinations. 

It wasn't perfect by any means; there were points of frustration that felt like I was being punished for not being perfect, and occasionally it felt like the controls were not as crisp as I would have liked. 

But all in all, a solid game!

Rebirth

 I've been playing plenty of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and I'm fairly torn about it. 

The game is clearly reaching for the stars; it's weird and the main characters are well drawn. The storyline feels both true to the original and wildly outrageous. 

But I hate the combat system. It feels so repetitive! And why, why, WHY are the mechanics all kept behind the obtuse menus and...hell why does it feel so complicated?

There so many different combat effects it might as well be a fighting game, and it's all layered under menus that leave me doing something I hate: not playing a game, but instead reading about it. 

Why do I even have to worry about aerial combat???

And none of my teammates seem to build ATB: I have to actively control them to get that to happen. 

This all feels like systems that are impediments to play, instead of flavor enhancers. 

Going to be taking the rest of the year off to play games & catch up. See y'all in 2025!

Remnant 2: Prism Edition

The final DLC for Remnant 2  (The Dark Horizon) came out and boy, is it good.

Not flawless, but damn good.

The good: An excellent, huge final level to explore. Boss Rush mode is a great bite-sized way to play. 

The bad: Prisms. 

For those who haven't played; Remnant 2 used to give you three slots for "shards" that you could use to give a small boost to your stats. The shards had an in-game currency you could use to level them up, so the bonus would get bigger. There were a ton of different shards to use so you could adapt them to whatever build or playstyle you enjoyed. 

The prisms are a drag. 

Prisms are a new item you can slot that give characters preset bonuses, which you can change by adding in the previous use of shards. Every time you level up the prism, you get a set of mixed new shards from what you already own to choose from. Then you can pick one and keep going, until you have 5 slots full.

I think that's how it works.

Which is the first problem: I don't understand how it works and they don't tell you. Are there videos online to explain them? Yes. But why do I need those now? Why should I need them?

The second problem: It's randomized. So I could be doing all this work to tilt the prism towards a build I enjoy and not get the shards I want. Which means I have to restart the whole thing over. But apparently when you make choices, you lose the shards forever, merged into the new one?

I think that's how it works. Please see the first problem.

I've seen enough videos to know that you can tilt the odds in your favor but this is just more bookkeeping.

The third problem: The benefits aren't measurable for the work you put in. I am playing this game to have fun: is stat keeping fun? Is getting a +5% bonus to critical hit fun? What if I spend time to grind things out and make it 10? 15%? Do I get to have fun then? What about all the time I spent before I finally got 15% bonus? Is that fun? 

What if I don't get the Critical Hit stat, and instead have to start over because I got Skill Bonus? Is disappointment fun? 

So it's a lot of time into an opaque system to give me outcomes I cannot control for benefits that are unnecessary to my enjoyment.

Because what I want to note is that all of this stuff? This isn't playing the game or even part of the primary gameplay loop! It's just busywork.  

Which is a bummer of an ending to what has been one of the best games of 2024. 

Late To The Party: Greedfall

It took me a long time to finish GreedFall. Part of that was that it was a RPG and those just take awhile but it wasn't the only reason.

The upsides: this game had a compelling story, a lot of ways to customize your character and what I felt were meaningful ways to impact the story, depending on who wanted your character to be. Gameplay was solid; combat encounters could be challenging but never got frustrating for me.

Though it helped that I decided I was going to be a gunslinger. You know what works REALLY well in arcane times? Guns. Guns are great when swords are the default.  

The medium stuff; the animation had the Mass Effect problem where faces didn't always match up to dialog, and dialog lines didn't always match up to the conversation. This was notable in the usual places; Greetings and farewells, but I feel like if you're going to play this kind of game, you have to roll with that.

Also; while the movement animation was pretty good, whenever my character would run up or down stairs, they looked like they were high-stepping which was hilarious every time I saw it. 

The bad: fast travel wasn't implemented well. 

GreedFall spends a LOT of time sending the player on conversation fetch quests, and hey, that's partly why I'm there. However, traversal became a genuine slog in GreedFall. Having to walk to a travel point instead of the game just sending me to the location meant a lot of hours looking at that movement animation. 

It also meant that I began to notice when I was playing a game and when I was just running errands. That's not a great thing. So the momentum that the game would build would start to falter, and I'd set it aside for something more immediately engaging. 

Still, I liked it overall; it's a solid game made by a small team and it executes pretty well! Give it a solid B. 

Late to the Party: Spider-Man 2

When Spider-Man 2 came out last year, people were crowing it as a game of the year within a day of release. I, as an adult with things to do, just finished it.

It's good! It isn't great.

The gameplay is as good as ever: traversal around NYC is still as fun as it ever was, and the fighting mechanics remain the same. The switch between Miles and Peter is easy and I understand why they kept things so similar. 

The camera occasionally gave me trouble, especially when dealing with uncounterable attacks. If you need to see the color of the attack to know if you should evade or counterpunch, then the attack can't come from behind you. However, this was mostly a little thing and more often than not I enjoyed the way the game played.

The story, however, is where Spider-Man 2 really falters. Spoilers ahead.

If the big bad is Kraven in his "last hunt" scenario then just make that the game. There's more than enough there and it is a story that could easily lead to the ending that Insomniac wanted: for Peter to retire and Miles to take up the mantel by himself. Venom being a b-story that they rev up for the final game-one that is obviously coming. 

Or, and this is really the better idea, make Venom the big bad and at the end of it, the emotional toll is what causes Peter to pass the mantel on. They storyline rolls easily into it emotionally. That's where all the actual beats are. 

Watching Peter go bad and Miles have to save him, then Peter have to save Harry? That is a storyline that leaves Peter tired and maybe ready to do something else for a little while. It puts Miles in a position to take the role, having saved his mentor. 

Then in the third game you bring in Kraven, one who becomes outraged that the Spider-Man he came to fight isn't the one he wanted at all. He instead starts to pursue the "real" Spider-Man, bringing in Electro and Vulture as extra mooks, enlisting Doc Ock and now you are two-thirds of the way towards a Sinister Six! Don't tell me you can't find two more villains, just because Mysterio and Sandman are reformed in the game. Maybe Sandman and Mysterio are fighting under duress, and you have Miles desperately trying to keep all these people away from Peter, or throw them off the trail. Or not tell Peter at all, afraid that contacting him might expose Peter!

Instead it feels like there is half of a Kraven game and half of a Venom game. But Kraven isn't fleshed out very well and there's a surprise c-story appearance adding to that storyline when 90% of the game is over! Kraven isn't even there anymore!

Venom isn't served well either, which is unfortunate. While I really like the story direction that was taken (which has the symbiote becoming the source of Harry's 'cure'), I was never clear if the symbiote coveted Peter, or was motivated by Harry. Does it want revenge or does it want everyone to join it? 

Plus, the peppering in of Peter's regular life isn't strong enough to get me to see why he'd want to hang up the suit. Everything about Peter in the game is about how sorry he is he hasn't done right by his loved ones and he will do better.

By...quitting the thing that partially defines him? It just doesn't track, emotionally and that's a problem for me.

However, a good game is still good. Playing it feels great, and that counts for a lot. 

Helldivers II First Impressions

I've put nearly nearly 14 hours into Helldivers II now and here's what I think:

They launched the game too soon.

There's good stuff here;  solid game loop (kill aliens, accomplish objectives, get out before time runs out), a fantastic vibe clearly leaning into Starship Troopers except taken up a notch (we are the bad guys, folks), and a progression system that has players feeling like they are a small part of a giant collective, contributing to the war effort.

So it's a real bummer that crossplay has had so many crashes. That the tutorial left me feeling like I didn't know nearly enough to play-and I was right. I fumbled and often messed up how things worked. That the chat audio frequently lead to feedback issues. 

Most damning for me, though, are the controls. They feel too lose: I don't reload a weapon when I feel like I should, and this game lives and dies on being able to reload your gun. I don't swap weapons like I should: I have tried to swap from a gun to a grenade and back multiple times and been frustrated that I hadn't and the game is terrible about letting me know what I'm currently armed with. Clicking the button to run doesn't happen sometimes and that's bad.

These are fixable things. But they should've been locked in on day one. I'm willing to give Helldivers a chance because there's already been a patch for a game that launched on Friday and there is always a learning curve to a game. If I threw it out just because I wasn't instantly having a good time, then I'd probably never play Magic again. 

There's also some interesting design at work: the game utilizes the d-pad more than any modern game I've played. But this creates a tension when I need to move and use the d-pad, since I only have one thumb, like most humans. My buddy's solution was to reach over with his right thumb to keep his character moving and use the d-pad with his left.

This is...not ideal. It is awkward as fuck. It's a design choice that was likely made for people with mouse and keyboard setups, and without consideration to those with handheld controllers. OR, it is a deliberate choice the game has made to make a specific kind of gameplay. The tension of punching in the d-pad while hordes descend on you is a choice to make.

In my experience it isn't a good choice and it might be the thing that breaks the game for me. If my options are try to call in support and just getting my ass kicked, or do this awkward movement with my hand every time just to play the basic game, how is that a good choice?

Still; it's just entertaining enough that I'm sticking with it, at least for now. But heads up: they hype is overdone. 

Late To The Party: Remnant 2

 All of my free videogaming time has gone into Remnant 2, since it was released in July. With the new DLC being announced yesterday, now is as good a time to talk about the game.

The opening statement alone should tell you something about how much they improved on the first game. It's primary gameplay loop perfectly in tact, the team at Gunfire Games focused on making a better experience overall, from the options to build your characters in interesting ways, to providing challenging but not severely punishing bosses and arenas to fight in...mostly.

The game is so packed with interesting secrets, it feels like I find something every week-which since I've logged in over 200 hours, is impressive. The game still feels not just worth playing, but challenging enough to be enjoyable. 

I'm given so many options and with some forethought and practice, nearly any kind of build I want to make is worthwhile. It is just fun to play. 

There are some drawbacks: the so many options part means that sometimes, the game's organization can be really challenging. There are over 100 different rings you can pick and while having them in alphabetical order is helpful, breaking them down into further categories would be nice. Unfortunately, there are so many options that I'm not sure that's feasible!

Armor is effectively cosmetic in this game and I'm hard pressed to decide if that's a great decision or merely an OK one. Fashion is fun to run on your characters, and having one less thing to think about for players is nice. We're already so focused on spec-ing out our characters for maximum value, adding defense doesn't really add much.

Still, it would feel nice to have a little more say in the character than weigh class & looks.

And, like many games of its type: Remnant 2 requires players to have access to the internet to really get the most out of it. There are so many secrets (as noted above) that there is just no way to find all or even most of them without guidance. 

Though I feel that's less of a negative and just a state of the industry right now. Guidebooks have always been useful but they weren't always necessary. Games like Remnant 2 make them required-if you're like me and want to dig into all that.

On the other hand, the game is also content to let you play through it as often as you like, and let you miss or acquire or ignore whatever you want. In the end, I think that's better design. 

So I like it. I like it a lot. 

Late To The Party: Surge 2

There is a lot to like about the Surge 2...but in the end it asked me to git gud one too many times and hid too many things behind doors I couldn't open.

I've played enough From Software games to know that the difficulty level is high, so any game following in the From model isn't an automatic turn off for me. And the Surge 2 did a lot rigbt!

There was a neat setting, with some excellent level design. I always felt glee when I discovered a new passageway around an area. The shortcuts felt earned, and as if they respected my time: Hey, you did the slog already. Here's a way to avoid that. 

The battle system reminds me of Bloodborne in its pacing. A more staccato move-strike-move element to it than many other games of the genre, that rely on a more plodding rhythm. I vastly prefer this style of combat so I felt like I adapted to this well. 

But, the first git gud moment-the Little Johnny battle- was almost enough to get me to quit. Given the responses I saw online, I wouldn't've have been the first person to decide that they were done with the Surge 2. Fortunately for the game devs, I was sick that week and what else is there for me to do but dedicate some time and really ace this battle!

Which I did. So well, in fact, that I walked out of it with full health. 

OK, that feels good let's-wait. There's another boss fight right now? That I am getting my ass kicked by? 

Ah. Yes. The real "git gud" training moment. 

Admittedly, it was my fault for not banking my experience: I've played enough Soulslike games to know that if you have the opportunity to save and use your exp, you do it. I got cocky, the game reminded me of that, and I kept at it. I still felt rewarded: more secret passageways, more demonstrable mastery over the combat system. The grind wasn't too bad. 

Then I got to the second environment and the game decided to test my blocking skills, which I had none of. 

Git Gud, baby. 

Except this test was being brought by a basic enemy of that environment. The first one and while I was able to work out how to beat it, every time I fought this enemy it was a slog, not a demonstration of my further skills over the combat. And they were all. Over. The. Place. Because as with any Soulslike, every time I died, they respawned. 

I didn't feel good about this and instead of looking at these opponents a something I knew how to beat, I just felt dreary having to do it over and over again. It didn't help that the enemy lock-on feature (one that is incredibly helpful for this particular enemy) was a little too easy to unlock from said enemy. This meant that at critical times, the camera would swing wildly around and I'd get punished for something that didn't feel like my fault.

There was one other thing I found frustrating and that was this: early in the game the player comes across ziplines that are clearly meant for future yse. And while I acknowledge that this is a good way to prevent players from getting into places they shouldn't before they are ready, it started to feel like they were everywhere. 

Then I realized that there were two different kind of ziplines! As in: I would need two different kind of hooks to access them. When those lines would go to someplace that I could see-that I had already explored!-it felt really, really bad. 

It's a shame, because I was enjoying so many other things about the Surge 2! There is talent on display and knowledge, at least in some ways, of how to reward players in a decent gameplay loop. Heck it might even be for gamers who are, frankly, better than I am at videogames. 

But the makers of the Surge 2 do have a new game coming out soon and I'll admit, I'm interested.

Late To The Party: Cyberpunk 2077

I blame Grand Theft Auto 3, honestly.

Back when Grand Theft Auto 3 was THE game, (21 years ago, for context) I remember one writeup saying: The genius of GTA3 is that they turned cruising into a game mechanic.

And it was true: driving around, listening to the radio-an experience particularly enhanced by incredibly snarky, satirical DJs- in GTA's remarkably realized city was just a cool thing to do.

Which was a good thing, because the driving mechanic itself was dogshit. The "Auto" part of GTA has always been its weakest experience, with cars feeling like boats, unwieldly and awkward to drive.  None of them having the kind of snap that comes from other driving-oriented games of that era, like Burnout.

In fairness, Burnout was a racing game-there was nothing else to do but go fast at precision speeds. Sure, your goal might be to cause the biggest traffic accident you can, but you wanted to do it immediately and so the controls needed to be precise.

GTA3 gave an entire world to play in; who cares if part of the game was kinda shit?

But, they never improved that. The descendents of GTA-and there are many-have all had to grapple with this problem. Some have gone the extra mile to correct traversal, others, like GTA itself, have decided to say 'fuck it'.

So it is with Cyberpunk 2077. Getting from point A to B sucks ass. Sure, you can set a destination and then hit Circle to skip the travel process but it's not as though you're instantly transported there. You have to look at a loading screen for however long.

Neither option is appealing to me.

Strike one.

"How do I hack this computer?" It was part of finishing an early mission in Cyberpunk 2077 and though I had been shown once, it had been days since I'd done it, and I needed to re-learn the skill. I didn't want to go online to figure out the solution: this was an early puzzle. It can't be that hard.

But I still couldn't figure it out so I did the next obvious thing: I checked the game's submenus for the 'how to' section. Every game has one now! 

The menus are obtuse, and filled with iconography I don't understand. Unlabled folders so I can't easily find what I need.

But it doesn't matter; what I need isn't there anyways.

I brute force my way through the puzzle. At least I won't forget how to do this in the future...if there is one.

Strike two.

Finally, there is one way to get me to instantly quit a game: force me into a fail-state with no understanding of why that happened. This happened for me in Red Dead Redemption, and I quit playing, halfway through what was a reasonably entertaining game.

It happened here, too. I tried to park my car-did so badly, and got a notice "The police have been notified".

Why? Why are the cops coming? What, exactly, did I do wrong? I don't know-there isn't anything helpful around me to tell me why-did I run over someone?

So after having to drive away (a feature which sucks ass) I find my way to an objective: Subdue this person without killing them. Great: I remember the moves for melee!

I enter the arena, my weapon is drawn and the only icons on my screen are; reload. No holster.

So I have no way to do the objective. I die, and one resounding bell goes off in my mind: Fuck ALL this.

Strike three.

Late To The Party: Deathloop

Deathloop came from the makers of Prey and Dishonored, both games I liked quite a bit. So I had a some high expectations for this one!

It was also well reviewed on launch so I had some high hopes!

Those hopes were...sort of met? 

There was a lot that was very entertaining about Deathloop. They did a good job of making the central concept-the Groundhog Day 'play the same thing over and over'- pretty compelling and changing up the areas just a little bit, depending on when you visit. 

There was also a great deal of freedom involving how one might approach play, with powers that accent melee builds or ones that would help with long distance or sneaking. 

I really liked the protagonist, too: Cole is a fun badass to listen to and hear his interactions. All the characters were well written, actually and I got an excellent sense of the place I was gaming in.

However. Because there are some howevers here. 

First, this game did the thing were you could die in a locked room and then just not get back into that room until the game reset. Which is a problem because as with many modern games, if I die in a spot, all my currency stays with the body. This feels cheap and it happened more than once. If I can't get my treasure back because I screwed up that's fine but when the game locks me out of it, that's not fine. 

Second, there didn't seem to be a lot of reward for changing things up or exploring. For example, once I found out that as part of winning the game it was always best to go to the area of Karl's Bay first, that's just what I always did. I wasn't rewarded for exploring another area, unless it was part of a quest. Since areas change depending on the time of day you visit-certain doors are only open at certain times of day-there were avenues of Deathloop that I never looked into. I never ventured into Karl's Bay at night.

Why should I? There was no piece of candy for me to acquire. 

Third; sometimes brute attrition > puzzle solving. One boss in particular had a tell I was supposed to use to pull them from a crowd at a party. 

Why do that? Just murder everyone. There's no penalty for just murdering all the people. Eventually, the alert will trigger telling me I got the right character and I can skip out. 

Fourth, the ending. So stop here if you don't want spoilers for it. 

Cole wants to break the loop. He wants a life again, one that has meaning and matters. 

Julianna wants the loop to continue. She...is looking to save something? I actually don't know why she wants to protect the loop, beyond wanting to do that. Cole is just the asshole who is fucking up her day-a day she would happily return to, if he'd quit breaking things. 

These positions are constant: Cole doesn't have any self doubt about what he's doing. Julianna doesn't have any sympathy for him. It's hinted at that the world outside has a problem but we're never shown anything that suggests this is the case. 

When the final confrontation comes to Cole and Julianna, the player suddenly gets to make a choice about how the end will play out-will Cole continue on the path he's been at all game or not? Except that moment wasn't clear to me-it came right after a cutscene where I did not have control and without the HUD that suggests that I have agency. 

So I didn't make a choice and the moment to do so passed, the game accepting my "input". 

But that wasn't what I wanted! It certainly didn't seem to be what Cole wanted. Which means I got an ending I didn't ask for. 

That sucked. 

Which was a big letdown, because a great deal of what I was doing was fun. 

So while I enjoyed Deathloop, I also came away from the game feeling disappointed in it.

The Galactus Problem

I've been playing a lot of Marvel Snap lately-I may've mentioned this earlier. But one of the 'upsides' of being sick is that mobile games are easy to manage. And there is a problem facing the game that I'm not sure how they fix, but they clearly are aware of it. 

For those not in the know, Marvel Snap is a game where you play characters with various abilities and power stats in order to control two of three locations. The person with the highest character stats at two of the three locations and the end of six rounds, wins. The locations change each game, so there's a lot of potential variety about what might be good in any given situation. 

Galactus flips this on its head by destroying two of the three locations, making only one matter. Usually when a player gets Galactus on the board, the game is over; there is nothing the opponent can do about the fact that their entire board just got wiped and since the Galactus player's follow up is usually Knull, that's it. Effectively, Galactus turns a game about three locations into one location. 

The first problem: Galactus is unfun. A little unfun is actually important in any game because it helps keep things from getting out of hand. But Galactus creates a kind of unfun that starts to break the metagame down: can you stop the Galactus deck, or not? So you get two kinds of decks; Galactus decks/anti-Galactus decks. 

Which is fine-if it is in little doses. A little unfun is important. 

The problem is that Galactus players play it because it's reliable; if their opponent doesn't have an answer, it's a way to climb the ranks no matter how slowly. It is good to stick with a deck that consistently wins.

But as someone who has had to face Galactus decks multiple times a day, because I'm in the trenches of people trying to rank up I am here to tell you; it isn't any fun to play against. I have two decks that I get to play now and both of them are effectively anti-Galactus tech decks. 

This is out of twenty possible decks I could be playing. Instead of getting to see a lot of wild interactions and a variety of different decks, I see the same play pattern time after time and that is boring. 

Unfortunately, this leads to the second problem: Galactus is necessary. Without the threat of having the game's win condition entirely broken, there is a huge encouragement to build the biggest "go-wide" decks players can build. Flood the zone and call it good, because it's pretty easy to get around locations that have restrictions on what can be there. I think the game devs are smart enough to know that this is a problem and Galactus was their solution to it, as poorly designed as I think it was. 

However, now we're stuck with this: I'm facing multiple Galactus players per day so the "little unfun" element becomes 'frequently unfun' and frequently unfun starts to impact the experience people have overall. 

I don't want to see a game without Galactus though: I understand that would open up a whole other box of problems. But it definitely hampers my enjoyment and turns a game I was enjoying a lot into one that feels grindy as hell.  

There's another element to this though; oversaturation. The TL:DR of that video is that if you're playing in the 85th+ ranks, nobody plays Galactus because they've already got a high rank and the deck is easy to beat/doesn't level you up anymore. Players at that level are ready. 

But if you're in the midrange, everyone is playing Galactus, because that is, however grindy, the way to climb out of it. Of course, most people playing are going to be in the midrange, thus their experience is going to reflect a lot more Galactus than there might actually be. 

I still think the card presents a problem but as with most of these things, the problem likely rests in the enablers-Electro, Wave-than in the end result. So it'll be interesting to see how they work with this, especially since the new season started today, and Nebula seems very, very good. Not good enough to dethrone Galactus, but a challenge unto herself.  

Fashionably Late to the Party: Resident Evil 4 Remake

Well, the RE4 remake has arrived aaaaaaand....I was kinda right. 

I'm about halfway through the game right now-hip deep in the castle-and there is a lot that has been done right! The primary gameplay loop is in tact: shoot enemies, get loot from downed enemies. They've kept plenty of the good aspects of the initial game; the suitcase management, a light crafting system, treasure hunting and, Very Importantly, you get to save the dog. They've also improved on things: you can change game prompts from being a 'repeat press' to 'press and hold' which I vastly prefer. The pacing is tighter: you are very much in a: You go forward, mode, a la the best elements of Doom. Doubling back isn't something that is necessary, and when you do have to revisit an area, the trip is brief.

Unfortunately, there's a few drawbacks as well.

First: Jesus christ this game is fucking dark! Why do I need to turn the brightness up so high just so I don't run into walls? I get it, the game is an action/survival horror and takes place at night but c'mon. I have this problem all the time and I don't know why. It's only videogames that do this.

Second: Jesus christ this game is dark! And by this I mean that it has taken a more serious tone. They didn't go full throttle serious but...like I can hear Leon pant now, and he rolls his shoulder like he's in pain. He's just a normal dude, right?

There's a lot of little touches like that making the game less wacky and as I noted, I believe that's to RE4's detriment. It's not enough to ruin the game but it is what makes this a remake, instead of a straight up improvement.

Third: your knife breaks. I don't care why, breakable weapons suck. This mechanic even sucks in Bloodborne, and I love that game.

Fourth: The RE6 problem. My biggest issue with Resident Evil 6 was that I spent more time punching, suplexing, or otherwise meleeing zombies in the face instead of shooting them. With my gun(s). Which I have a lot of. 

I do not care to play Zombiepucher the game, I want to play Resident Evil and in the original RE4, there was enough ammo that I didn't have a need to melee an enemy often.

Now, it's practically mandatory: the ammo drops aren't frequent enough to just keep shooting, and the enemies are quite tough, compelling me to get up close and, siiiiiiiiiiiiigh, punch a dude in the face. This takes me out of the flow of the game-instead of tracking my shots, I now have to look for a melee indicator, race up to an enemy in what I hope is in time, and then watch a cutscene of me kicking or worse, suplexing an enemy. Why are suplexes worse? Because they are disorienting and I don't always know where I am in space-in relationship to the enemies- when I recover from such a move. 

But how is this fun in relationship to the rest of the game? I'm genuinely curious why this mechanic is so fundamental. Shooting enemies in the leg to stagger them and then punching them is the kill-why can't I just plug someone center mass three times and be done? 

Headshots are discouraged, so what's left? 

What's left is sayin' fuck it and doing headshots anyway. If they mutate, well that's what shotguns are for. Don't overthink it, my dude.

Still, they game rewards you for doing the opposite (in close punching) of what you want to do (distance gunfights) and that's a problem. Is it enough to capsize the game? No. The RE4 remake does a great job building on the bones of the original and making it a hell of a ride. Does it equal the original? 

Yeah, I think it might.  

Late to the Party: God of War: Ragnarok

God of War: Ragnarok (hereafter Ragnarok) is too much game for its story. 

I finished Ragnarok's story while sick at home-too much energy to watch TV, not enough energy to go toil at the day job-and when the credits rolled, I walked Kratos down a path, through a set of doors and out onto a vista of Midgard. 

Where the game helpfully informed me that I had anywhere from 1/3 to 1/4 of the game yet to play! Good lord. Can you imagine saying you're done with something and there still being that much left to do?

I feel like this is a way to drill into the core problem of Ragnarok. Because it's just so stuffed with things! Quests! Checklists! (Have YOU kicked enough dark elves to get gold?) Systems!

It got exhausting for me. Keeping up with every weapon-which has a pommel of some kind, and which one might give me a percentage increase and decrease in various stats, every shield, which also had attachments, every piece of armor-one for your arms, chest and waist- and an enchantment belt that can have up to 10 different enhancements slotted in. 

I want to punch Thor in the face. Why does it need this much stuff??? 

So I never quite got the hang of combat: again, a place where there were so many different moves and powers with cooldowns to use-I was two-thirds the way through when I discovered that there was an extra move I hadn't been utilizing, that also had a cooldown-but extra move!

Nothing seemed to flow into one another-one move set leading to another, so that a deliberate choice of moves would flow into another, and another which lead to me feeling like I was doing great. And I am not saying that system isn't there, just that I never found it!  

Instead, I was brute forcing my way through things, one eye on my cooldowns, swapping weapons as quickly as I could to use the next power and stall until I could get my next powerup going. It wasn't as though the weapons flowed into one another though-at least, not in a way I could put together. Again: all these systems creating confusion rather than coherency. 

So why did I keep at it?

The story is quite good. 

And the thing is: I would've played this game if it just had the last God of War's system (I even beat all the Valkyries in the last game, because I was having so much fun) and just the one added weapon (the new weapon is a story acquisition so I don't begrudge it). I liked these characters and I wanted to see what happened. They didn't need to add in so much buuuuuut I think they didn't feel they could charge $60 for a new game if they didn't.

The game itself is polished enough that I didn't hate playing it but it DID feel overwhelming-an inverse relationship to its rather straightforward narrative. 

I just wish the gameplay loop was as hooky. 

Time and Value

 Jason and I were talking Marvel Snap last night and he was telling me about how difficult it was to climb the ladder to get to rank 100 (or Infinite). 

"I saw a couple videos on Twitch," he lamented, "guy was all 'OK here we go, rank 96 to infinite' and the video was five hours."

Five hours!!!

The reason for this is because people get very aggressive and very defensive at this point. Anyone raises the ante for any reason and the opponent backs out. If you can't win it all lose as little as possible, seems to be the principle. In the meantime, Jason is talking about how difficult it is to grind to get to level 100.

"Man, what do you get at Infinite, though?" I asked, rhetorically. "You get a card back. Who cares! Instead of trying to build the deck that will win you that rank, just say fuck it and have fun."

I could almost hear the lightbulb go off.

I mention this because as a free-to-play game, Jason was the person who convinced me to actually put money down. In an earlier discussion we were having about the game, he said to me:

"I'm having $10 worth of fun, easily, dude. Take my money. You've earned it."

Huh. I also am having $10 worth of fun. It isn't that big a hit to pay for it every month and I personally believe in offering people money for their work.

Strength of the Medium

Between the ending of HBO's The Last of Us, and this Cold Take at the Escapist, I am reminded of an experience I had with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Spoilers from here on out. 

I was attempting a no-kill version of Deus Ex, in part because it was more of a challenge, in part because even in games I don't like to kill people I don't have to. This isn't Doom: this is a game about how the cogs in the capitalist machine grind us into dust. 

Murder seems excessive. 

Over the course of the game, you're ferried around by a pilot: Faridah Malik, who you get to have conversations with (or not). I found myself rather fond of Ms. Malik: she was pretty cool! 

And then a mission began where the plane was ambushed and over the course of time, explodes. 

Well. Can't have that. Restart the level. 

Plane explodes. 

I Groundhog Day this event a few more times before checking online to see if this is a scripted event. If it's scripted, let's just move on. This isn't: It is possible to save Faridah! Great! 

Except I'm on a no-kill run and I don't have the equipment to take these attackers on in nonlethal ways. So what do I do? 

...

The end of The Last of Us goes very much like the show does. Joel goes in and murders all the people. I was with them: let's get Ellie.  

Except, when I came to operating room, the doctor complied and unhooked Ellie. I wanted to grab Ellie and leave and the game instead insisted I murder the doctor. 

I didn't want to murder the doctor. 

But it was either that or never finish the game. 

The Last of Us is lessened for me because of this. A game is supposed to give players agency and when it doesn't, there had better be a damn good reason for it. In Bioshock, the lack of agency is a key to the whole plot. In the Fallout series, they take agency away from the player just long enough to convey the necessary information, and they if you want to be a human flamethrower everywhere you go, that's up to you.

In TLOU, it became very clear that I wasn't playing a game: I was playing a movie. And this is, in the end, my issue with all of Naughty Dog's games. For the Uncharted series, that isn't a problem because you're playing a modern swashbuckler. The loveable louse, if you will and when you get in trouble in Uncharted, it's always with people worse than you. 

Well, fuck 'em, right? 

Now you can make any number of arguments about why the doctor should've been killed but the problem is that you are making them, not the game. 

In the TV show, the doctor does the dumbest thing ever: "You can't take her," he says, stepping towards Joel.

Well, that's gonna get you shot. Duh. 

But that isn't how I remember my playthrough going and maybe, just maybe Naughty Dog should remember that they are still making games, not film. 

Wow.

 I like Bloodborne, of course: It's a fantastic game. 

But this video showing someone's process to make the iconic saw cleaver is incredibly cool. 

Sure, gaming adjacent but still! Pretty neat. 

Grimdark

 A new trailer as been released for the Resident Evil 4 remake, along with some gameplay footage. I am...dubious. 

For anyone who hasn't been playing videogames for awhile, Resident Evil 4 is not only one of the landmark games in the franchise, it's also one of the best videogames, period. After the remake was announced, I even went back to replay the original to see if it still holds up.

It does, but it isn't flawless. That's to be expected from a game that is 17 years old: Quick Time Events were the hotness back then and boy did they suck. They still do. 

There are also some pacing issues with quests that have the player looping back to previous areas that feel like timesucks. RE4 is LONG and these tasks make it feel long. 

However, these are pretty small hiccups in what is a lengthy, gleefully bonkers campaign. A remake of could certainly smooth the pacing issues out with little trouble.  

RE4 is also campy and I don't believe we should forget that. This camp contributed to RE4's success, because as intense as it got-and it got extremely intense-it never felt burdensome. There were times when it felt outright silly! 

Which was a good thing, because it helped keep things light and brisk, even when they were disturbing, eerie, or outright frightening. The player never had to endure any one thing for too long. 

Which brings me to the things we've seen so far. 

Everything is folk-horror shadowy, flickering lights that are sponged up by gloom, with a Leon that is very, very VERY serious. I don't know how the portrayal of the other characters will go-no doubt there will be changes for the better, like giving Ashley more personality than 'item to be rescued', and some that will be worse, most certainly everyone else. 

Luis was inappropriate but still charming in the original. A ne'er-do-well to be sure but still trying to do the right thing. In the brief trailer clip, he looks like a Jake Gyllenhaal in one of his creepy villain roles and he sounds skeevy too. 

The quick glimpse at the villains show a similar self-seriousness that is just worrisome. 

Because games shouldn't be a slog, damnit. They should be fun! And RE4 was able to be a bit crazed because of the tone it set. Now I'm concerned that a healthy number of silly, funny, charming moments won't make the cut. Worse, we'll have those moments cut and be left with a Leon who is equally dour. They haven't showed much of his personality in the clips so far.  

I hope I'm wrong. I would very much like to be wrong, and see a game that is as audacious in its remake as Final Fantasy 7 was. Some things that sucked, like QTEs have been replaced! There is a crossbow now and those are inherently dumb in a world with guns-but perhaps that's the point? I hope so!. Resident Evil 2RE was excellent and some of the same people are involved, and RE3RE was solid. So there's reason to hope...but maybe classics should be left alone. 

And that would be relevant if we could always go back and just play the original Resident Evil 4, in the same way that we can always enjoy the classic versions of movies or books. But videogames really exist in a certain point in time and their preservation is a weakness, honestly*. So I suppose I'll just hope for the best.

*In the case of RE4, this is less of an issue since it's been released for multiple systems over many years, but this is an exception, not the rule.

The Cold Take

This has become my favorite videogame-related series of late. 

It's thoughtful, it's snobbish in a cool but not exclusionary way and I appreciate what Mr. Ruiz has to say on the matter of videogames. From a high minded-ish view, anyway.

Also, I still like Midnight Suns more than he did but I do agree that the writing gets in the way of itself a bit. But when Midnight Suns' story is good, it's really good. I've put in a lot of time into Midnight Suns at this point and I haven't even recruited all the heroes yet! So for me, clearly this game is more than the sum of its parts. 

Still, I like Cold Take and think it's worth the time.