tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64028342657903483802024-03-14T03:36:48.035-07:00YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary)Games and game reviews. Film talk. Occasional creativity. Satisfaction not guaranteed.Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-82952922691541034462022-12-30T12:47:00.009-08:002023-01-02T12:38:43.166-08:00One-Roll Discovery: The Rain-Cursed Valley of Tekhannaya<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZEQvadEBtSDDK1CqqLVUQmZ8MYz2iMwmH4VqYR9YNeyb0IBHM09xpHMBgD4JgXR96o7JIuYFqxC1kAG8Gnq1BmQe_FuLwy6q3aQL_QXFZlRVKGLWxRhs6cST188c_ve-3R6he-dh9Wcyg3-24Bg31MAyzFaPr6nhIWNimd3SzmgBZdeLO5CxPc_YOWQ/s3500/Rain-Cursed%20Valley%20of%20Tekhannaya.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A dense rainforest hollow cloaked in heavy mist" border="0" data-original-height="2333" data-original-width="3500" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZEQvadEBtSDDK1CqqLVUQmZ8MYz2iMwmH4VqYR9YNeyb0IBHM09xpHMBgD4JgXR96o7JIuYFqxC1kAG8Gnq1BmQe_FuLwy6q3aQL_QXFZlRVKGLWxRhs6cST188c_ve-3R6he-dh9Wcyg3-24Bg31MAyzFaPr6nhIWNimd3SzmgBZdeLO5CxPc_YOWQ/w320-h213/Rain-Cursed%20Valley%20of%20Tekhannaya.jpeg" title="The Rain-Cursed Valley of Tekhannaya" width="320" /></a></div></div>As part of a secret server’s Secret Santa event of sorts, <a href="https://dungeonantology.com/">Jojiro</a> inspired me to create a “one-roll biome” and suggested a D6 one-roll discovery table method. I wasn’t familiar with the one-roll discovery table, but after putting one together I’ve fallen in love with it. <div><br /></div><div>How does it work? Well, it’s pretty simple. The one-roll biome<i> </i>is <i>actually</i> just a miniature adventure setting laid out on one progressive table instead of on a map, a map key, and an encounter table. Each time the party explores further into the region, the Referee rolls a D6 to find out what the party discovers, checking off entries as the party advances. Each discovered entry acts as a location, a creature encounter, or a specific event—sometimes all three in one. </div><div><br /></div><div>Care to see it in action? Check out <i><a href="https://calebwimble.itch.io/the-rain-cursed-valley-of-tekhannaya">The Rain-Cursed Valley of Tekhannaya</a>, </i>which just so happens to share the location of an upcoming adventure I’m developing for <i><a href="https://www.sojournrpg.net/">Sojourn</a> </i>and 5e. You can play this one-roll version right now using <i>Sojourn </i>or any other fantastical roleplaying system of your choice. <div><p></p></div></div><div>Let me know what you think—especially if you wind up visiting Tekhannaya at your own table!</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>
<iframe allow="autoplay" height="640" src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cmEnjFmEmDV5sr_gNQ6LtI9FaHFf9nEj/preview" width="100%"></iframe><div><br />
<div><b><a href="https://calebwimble.itch.io/the-rain-cursed-valley-of-tekhannaya"><i>The Rain-Cursed Valley of Tekhannaya</i></a></b></div><div><br /></div></div>Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-29085045538786919262020-08-07T10:38:00.001-07:002020-08-07T10:46:45.640-07:00Swords, Spells, & Shields<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvtsbjBeS-CijWb4KAWljUgdVG49GTKK_bNmyms24F1AlhaBrZwtlJCoAJvhEEKIws86jCVC4Jkeb83sNnoonFJBsBc4JP4amxdu4CxMqNnimzh5qPltnJFsOuPRIQ3Fd-ewYjKbkeeew/s1600/Spells+Swords+%2526+Shields+Logo+Small.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="182" data-original-width="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvtsbjBeS-CijWb4KAWljUgdVG49GTKK_bNmyms24F1AlhaBrZwtlJCoAJvhEEKIws86jCVC4Jkeb83sNnoonFJBsBc4JP4amxdu4CxMqNnimzh5qPltnJFsOuPRIQ3Fd-ewYjKbkeeew/s1600/Spells+Swords+%2526+Shields+Logo+Small.png" /></a></div>
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<i>A quick conflict resolution system for fantasy roleplaying with a friend or loved one when you’re somewhere without dice and your cell phones are dead!</i></div>
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To play, the <b>referee describes a scene</b> and the <b>player describes what action their character takes</b> to achieve a goal. If the player character tries something dangerous, or a referee-controlled opponent resists them, the <b>referee calls for a contest of Swords, Spells, & Shields to resolve the conflict</b>.<br />
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If you’ve ever played Rock-Paper-Scissors, you already know how a basic test of SS&S goes. The player and the referee each choose one of the weapons secretly and “throws” their chosen weapon at the same time with a hand signal.<br />
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Shields (✊) overcome Swords (👆)<br />
Swords (👆) overcome Sorcery (🖐)<br />
Sorcery (🖐) overcomes Shields (✊)<br />
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If the player and referee both throw the same weapon, they continue to throw weapons until one overcomes the other. This is one <b>complete round</b> of SS&S.<br />
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If the player character has an advantage over the referee opponent, the player and referee play up to two complete rounds of SS&S, but the player need win only one round to emerge victorious in the contest.<br />
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(Advantage can mean the player character is significantly stronger than a weak opponent, or that the player character has some edge over an equal opponent such as surprise or when aided by allies.)<br />
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Similarly, if the referee opponent has an <b>advantage</b> over the player character (such as through surprise or superior strength and numbers), the player and referee play <b>two complete rounds</b> of SS&S, and the referee opponent <b>need win only one round</b> to emerge victorious.<br />
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If one side has a <i>significant</i> advantage over the other, the referee may add an additional third round of SS&S — for <i>overwhelming</i> advantage, a fourth. <b>The side with the advantage will always emerge victorious if they win one round.</b><br />
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Advantage is an easy way to accommodate several players or opponents engaging in conflict at once. If the sides are equally matched in strength and number, simply run one round of SS&S as usual. If one side has a strength or numerical advantage, add another round. For a significant advantage, add a third round, and so on.<br />
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And that’s it! You’re ready to resolve dangerous fantasy conflicts with Swords, Spells, & Shields. Like classic Rock-Paper-Scissors, this mechanic is highly flexible and can also be used to resolve social conflicts (SS&S can be treated as “Argument, Resolve, and Emotion”), survive environmental hazards (“Brave, Block, and Dodge”), and even simulate a complex magical duel between mages (“Spell, Counterspell, and Transform”).<br />
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For grittier adventures and more granular conflict resolution, you’re encouraged to make use of <b>resources</b> like Health, Supplies, and even Spells (prepared and expended in the Vancian style). Resources can be depleted as a natural result of the fiction when the referee rules so, or expended to avoid consequences as a result of lost SS&S contests.<br />
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For instance, a player character might ordinarily die when they lose an SS&S contest against a hungry ghoul. But if the Health resource is in use, the player could instead expend 1 Health (out of a recommended max 3) to take a wound from the ghoul bite instead of immediately dying.<br />
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Similarly, and more abstractly, a player character might ordinarily die when they lose an SS&S contest to evade a landslide, but the referee might allow them instead to expend a prepared Spell to create a protective barrier, or expend Supplies as food and torches to survive trapped in the darkness beneath the rubble.<br />
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If player characters are making use of resources, referees are encouraged to track opponent resources as well. This will provide many opportunities for creative player problem-solving and offer more tactical variance during conflict.<br />
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Swords, Spells, & Shields can be combined with resource management to simulate just about any roleplaying game genre you can think of. Who needs dice when you’ve got friends around to lend a hand?Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-31373711927219070722020-08-04T18:32:00.001-07:002020-08-04T18:52:45.902-07:00Did You Just One-Shot Cthulhu?<a href="https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Cthulhu_and_R%27lyeh.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHn6wWKUSKQixcsB4Svft0PB70ZFWOEEdhjB-EZy6Fo73vSM4-uIfCtusO9YKnksM-hsy-KDJ0U16t9NfWrm9nIqa1zYktT9m50W_7S2YKBCZeIz99si-OceuRjp_dop8ut_qEu39lH5S9/s320/Cthulhu_and_R%2527lyeh.jpg" width="235" /></a><i>Two to six unconventional individuals step off the day’s last coach by the lingering light of dusk. A sleepy town on the thin edge of what one might call civilization greets them with a sad, somber air of both quietude and disquiet. </i><br />
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<i>The individuals look to the town, then to one another, then back to the town. They steel their resolve, for this is the sort of place that tests one’s resolve by its mere contemplation. </i><i>One by one they proceed from the platform toward the outskirts to do what they came to this desolate and depraved place to do: </i><br />
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<i>They investigate. </i><br />
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Here are all the rules you’ll need to adjudicate their investigation — and encounters with the unspeakable horrors it uncovers.<br />
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<b><i>Did You Just One-Shot Cthulhu?</i></b><br />
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<b>Choose your investigators:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><i>The Professor, The Librarian, or The Author</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: chosen field of expertise and research tasks</li>
<li>Briefcase: books, papers, typewriter, intriguing letter from a colleague</li>
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<li><i>The Journalist or The Private Detective</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: pressing interviewees and suspects</li>
<li>Pockets: notebook, camera, pen, hard liquor, victim’s photo</li>
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<li><i>The Doctor</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: medicine and autopsy</li>
<li>Medical Bag: stethoscope, bandages, syringe, scissors, spirits, disturbing medical report</li>
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<li><i>The Preacher</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: ministry and inspiration</li>
<li>Shoulder bag: scripture, book of prayers, holy symbol, vestments, urgent request from ecumenical order</li>
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<li><i>The Antiquarian</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: appraisal and artifice</li>
<li>Heavy-duty case: telescope, magnifying glass, chemical testing kit, chronologically incongruous local artifact</li>
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<li><i>The Medium, The Psychic, or the Paranologist</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: empathy and communion with entities</li>
<li>Chest: silver mirror, astrolabe, focusing crystals, spectrometer, portent of doom</li>
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<li><i>The Soldier</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: applied force</li>
<li>Soldier’s pack: jack knife, revolver, field rations, discharge papers, pocketwatch with the victim’s name engraved in it </li>
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<li><i>The Salesperson or The Con Artist</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: chicanery</li>
<li>Carpet bag: hair oil, tie selection, comb, straight-edge razor, freight bill of goods, local delivery manifest</li>
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<li><i>The Heir</i></li>
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<li>Advantage: powerful connections</li>
<li>Luggage: fine clothes, recreational pills, letters of credit, threatening message from family, invitation from a prominent local</li>
</ul>
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<b>Cash on hand:</b> Roll 3d6 x 10 each for dollars.<br />
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<b>Test fate with a 2d6:</b></div>
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<li>10+ success</li>
<li>7-9 success at a cost</li>
<li>6- failure at heavy cost</li>
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<b>Choose how the investigators take harm:</b><br />
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<li>Fall unconscious <i>or</i></li>
<li>Lose use of a body part <i>or</i></li>
<li>Gain a madness (check out <i><a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8_Fz4m5hcoiODhVdGpOTzIxOG8">Black Stars Rise</a> </i>for some good examples) </li>
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Best of luck, investigators. It probably won’t save you.<br />
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-34936040369261691852020-07-13T11:32:00.000-07:002020-07-14T12:56:29.216-07:00Dungeon of the Day: Manor Cambio<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6DJTEuPWmZR19iW3CgzeF9L844WTAXWJyimY8m5_7xaQhAjAvupwfWRoqTlLS0_w1haT7g5gE7lmpKQuH8HSF8fY7IjwJ5szC_pj5uBxb3kINQOgmFse4xfkBFy3rnb-05AYW_eVzNuff/s1600/Manor+Cambio+0F.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6DJTEuPWmZR19iW3CgzeF9L844WTAXWJyimY8m5_7xaQhAjAvupwfWRoqTlLS0_w1haT7g5gE7lmpKQuH8HSF8fY7IjwJ5szC_pj5uBxb3kINQOgmFse4xfkBFy3rnb-05AYW_eVzNuff/s320/Manor+Cambio+0F.jpeg" width="257" /></a><i>The Imperial Prefect of the region has imprisoned a local dissident in his dungeon, slated for execution in three days. The dissident’s family has hired you to extract him. Find a way into the Prefect’s lavish manor and through his well-guarded dungeons to save the young would-be rebel from his fate.</i><br />
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<b>Manor Cambio </b>is a level 1-3 dungeon heist for your favorite dungeon-crawling roleplaying game. The manor makes an excellent first adventure site for new players, emphasizing careful planning and rewarding imaginative play over brute force combat solutions. Veteran parties should find the manor more than sufficiently challenging if they press on to uncover its deepest secrets.<br />
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A few extra details not found on the map sketches (unnecessary, but they add some flavor):<br />
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<ul><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTBxM_B4yz9ZG0fPC2FO1bcYRsvNZS-roNOsz_pIWFOuqcu3i1vDx0omdgVHcflTiS4hDeHz1U4R_O2G5qlxWMYitYloMTIzRTmJ4neFkqtcJwm9vj-W74fRvCn27Et5tBCjJ0k2eU6hD/s1600/Manor+Cambio+1F.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTBxM_B4yz9ZG0fPC2FO1bcYRsvNZS-roNOsz_pIWFOuqcu3i1vDx0omdgVHcflTiS4hDeHz1U4R_O2G5qlxWMYitYloMTIzRTmJ4neFkqtcJwm9vj-W74fRvCn27Et5tBCjJ0k2eU6hD/s320/Manor+Cambio+1F.jpeg" style="cursor: move;" width="258" /></a>
<li>A young woman named Eurenia has hired the party to rescue her brother from <b>Cambio</b>, the town Prefect who <b>imprisoned Taimon in his manor dungeon</b> for dissent and subversion. Taimon is to be executed in the town’s center square three days from now. If the party rescues him they’ll receive <b>1,200 coins</b> Eurenia and Taimon’s family managed to pool together from the village resources. This would also gain the party the attention of local insurgents.</li>
<li>The manor is a <b>lavish wood-and-mortar mansion</b> in a gaudy mix of the Imperial and local style. It lies a few miles outside a small town called Loknam, the seat of what the Empire calls a “backwater” colonial region, surrounded by <b>dense rainforest</b>.</li>
<li>Also surrounding the manor: <b>5’ walls with inlaid iron fencing rising 10’ high.</b></li>
<li>The manor is <b>heavily patrolled </b>by guards — some disciplined Imperials, most local mercenaries — bearing <b>halberds and flintlocks</b>. Frontal assault on the manor gates would be suicide.</li>
<li>There’s a rumored <b>secret entrance </b>to the north side of the dungeon level concealed by <b>illusory vegetation.</b> Cambio uses this entrance to smuggle in goods and guests to his private fight ring.</li>
<li>The <b>under-butler </b>is a friend of Eurenia’s and might be willing to provide the party with information — such as that opening Cambio’s secret vault requires the <b>keyvine </b>growing in Mistress Cambio’s conservatory (13). </li>
<li><b>Mistress Cambio</b> (3 in 6 chance present). Bored, cruel, vindictive, and self-amusing. </li>
<ul>
<li>The garden is her one love. She’ll gladly help the party make life miserable for Cambio, but might just as easily decide to torment them. </li>
<li>Freely shares location of <b>keyvine</b> (which might be concealed behind her entrance to the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/237544/The-Gardens-Of-Ynn">Gardens of Ynn</a>).</li>
<li>Will not warn the party about the dangerous <b>bloodroot</b> in her garden (but can be convinced to tell them how to remove the cursed weapon once it attaches to a party member). </li>
</ul>
<li><b>Vault treasures:</b> Eye Cage (hidden, over-butler is spying on party), 2,800 in coins and jewels, coded binder of war correspondences (including the location of an imperial weapons testing facility), infant basilisk in cage (covered by a weighted tarp, coiled and asleep, save against petrification if it’s uncovered and awakened).</li>
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Full-sized maps:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6DJTEuPWmZR19iW3CgzeF9L844WTAXWJyimY8m5_7xaQhAjAvupwfWRoqTlLS0_w1haT7g5gE7lmpKQuH8HSF8fY7IjwJ5szC_pj5uBxb3kINQOgmFse4xfkBFy3rnb-05AYW_eVzNuff/s1600/Manor+Cambio+0F.jpeg">Manor Cambio (0F, Dungeon Level)</a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJTBxM_B4yz9ZG0fPC2FO1bcYRsvNZS-roNOsz_pIWFOuqcu3i1vDx0omdgVHcflTiS4hDeHz1U4R_O2G5qlxWMYitYloMTIzRTmJ4neFkqtcJwm9vj-W74fRvCn27Et5tBCjJ0k2eU6hD/s1600/Manor+Cambio+1F.jpeg">Manor Cambio (1F, Ground Level)</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTk1Q6JF94HYtAZR3pJfX6_gI_lrsED4MhMs7XypA8cghqGQxMyI5jJu28UeOvJBXSlU2wAPieTcQOOj8vOCJ6FMuToI5qpOAwr4EfPmUWYPYq9MSqM2lYN5FKh5QYb2BK6kxtH-FkGzTo/s1600/Manor+Cambio+Concept.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTk1Q6JF94HYtAZR3pJfX6_gI_lrsED4MhMs7XypA8cghqGQxMyI5jJu28UeOvJBXSlU2wAPieTcQOOj8vOCJ6FMuToI5qpOAwr4EfPmUWYPYq9MSqM2lYN5FKh5QYb2BK6kxtH-FkGzTo/s320/Manor+Cambio+Concept.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-18153669667989163492020-07-11T08:07:00.000-07:002020-07-11T08:07:00.364-07:00Swords & Sorcery (A Lasers & Feelings Hack)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji3GStyF0SvnfeeFpHLhPf4YIwsfjoLQUNVkpnLHaidJiu_yUcyQvhfaYrmFgI8_RcrKU4C-eijDfukFkilO9QR2bHVfZ_1n5suw5JTdGC91fH3v5rtc1wqMvSnA2SF-bhL0AX-Dh08ZID/w179-h320/Swords+and+Sorcery+Numbers+with+Symbols.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Swords & Sorcery Logo" border="0" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="396" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji3GStyF0SvnfeeFpHLhPf4YIwsfjoLQUNVkpnLHaidJiu_yUcyQvhfaYrmFgI8_RcrKU4C-eijDfukFkilO9QR2bHVfZ_1n5suw5JTdGC91fH3v5rtc1wqMvSnA2SF-bhL0AX-Dh08ZID/w179-h320/Swords+and+Sorcery+Numbers+with+Symbols.png" width="179" /></a>A few years back I made a little dungeon-crawling hack for John Harpers’ <a href="http://www.onesevendesign.com/laserfeelings/">Lasers & Feelings</a>. For those unfamiliar with Lasers & Feelings, it’s a wonderful little ultra-rules-lite system to pull out whenever you want to dive into a Star Trek-inspired adventure without a whole bunch of fiddly bits or bells and whistles. Easy to teach and learn a couple of minutes. Highly suited to shenanigans.<br />
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I’ve gone and retooled it for fantasy games.<br />
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You know what else I haven’t done in three years? Post a single thing to this blog. A lot of things have changed since 2017 — many for the worse — but at least RPGs are still good.</div>
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Anyway, here’s Swords & Sorcery. It’s one page of system, one page of adventure generation, and it’s good! (I mean, I think it’s good! I don’t know for sure, I wrote it three years ago. But probably it’s good! Give it a try!)<br />
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Thanks to reddit user McDie88 for some additional inspiration.</div>
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Link:</div>
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<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QjBO8wRToHlW245E8SvX3NRnPWi6-GCC/view?usp=sharing"><b>Swords & Sorcery v0.3 on Google Drive</b></a></div>
Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-16325897935229579252017-02-15T08:04:00.000-08:002017-02-15T08:20:08.193-08:00Everybody needs to know, IT'S THE YEAR OF THE CAPSIt seems appropriate that after over-ambitiously taking months to (mostly) get around to writing individual reviews of my top 10 games for 2015, I would nearly skip it entirely this time around. So without any ado, my top 10 picks for 2016 in short form.<br />
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<b>10. <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/03/the-devils-in-details.html">Devil Daggers</a></b><br />
Devil Daggers was a <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/03/the-devils-in-details.html">tough one to review for its bite-sized brevity</a>. But that’s OK - I enjoyed my (very brief) time with Devil Daggers more than the many hours I spent trying to love could-have-been’s like Civilization VI and Dishonored 2.<br />
<br />
<b>9.<a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/03/prepare-to-die-and-not-know-why.html"> XCOM 2</a></b><br />
I’ve warmed up to this one significantly in the months since they started ironing out its <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/03/prepare-to-die-and-not-know-why.html">rampant bugs</a>. Yes, it’s more XCOM, but it’s <i>more XCOM </i>and a better helping of it at that.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>8. Total WARHAMMER</b><br />
The Total War that totally got me. Turns out I really am just a sucker for smashing demon hordes as a dwarf lord. Whether it’s that or the streamlined strategy layer, there’s a certain something in the flavor and variety of Total Warhammer’s factions that lured me in in a way the historical entries of the series never quite did. Shame on them for having the guts to charge DLC money for the game’s blood and guts graphical setting.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>7. Titanfall 2</b><br />
I feel a bit bad for Titanfall 2. In a year without Overwatch, this would have been <i>the </i>multiplayer shooter extravaganza. It’s still a thrilling and unique FPS in a year where the genre really made a comeback, and its freerunning, robot-quipping campaign is a blast in its own right.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>6. Sorcery!</b><br />
The same folks at Inkle who gave us l<a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/04/game-of-year-final-three.html">ast year’s singular 80 Days</a> have managed to take the best of the 80s gamebook genre and turn it into an epic RPG with an old-school sense of danger and a new-school layer of mechanical polish. Sorcery’s ever-unfolding world of weirdness and wonder sets it apart from the increasingly stale “narrative” RPGs of today, which (Witcher 3 notwithstanding) have a tendency to promise player choice and consequence but rarely deliver it on this level.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>5. SUPERHOT</b><br />
Oh look, another stylish short-form shooter evoking the thrill of the genre’s bullet hell roots with the style and innovation of a 2016 showstopper. This is the best of them. Play SUPERHOT.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>4. <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/02/firewatch-with-me.html">Firewatch</a></b><br />
A poignant, breathtakingly beautiful story game that has stuck with me over the year <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/02/firewatch-with-me.html">even more than I expected it to</a>.<br />
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<b>3. INSIDE</b><br />
It really was the year of the CAPS LOCK key, wasn’t it? I held off on INSIDE much longer than I should have because at a glance it looked like just another Limbo (which I loved). It kind of is, but it’s such an improvement on its predecessor’s mechanics and such a brilliant piece of world-building that no degree of familiarity is an excuse to pass over this one.<br />
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<b>2. <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/04/game-dark-souls-iii-from-software-2016.html">Dark Souls 3</a></b><br />
There’s not <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/04/game-dark-souls-iii-from-software-2016.html">much more to say about this one</a> except that I’m surprised it’s not my #1. It sure was close, but there are four (<a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/04/game-of-year-final-three.html">OK, five</a>) Souls games now and only one Overwatch.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>1. Overwatch</b><br />
Overwatch is what happens when you throw Blizzard science at all the best elements of a genre, polish them to perfection, then layer on top of them a series of innovations so elegant in their simplicity that they set the new standards for multiplayer gaming overnight. Overwatch is more than just Team Fortress 3 or first-person Dota. Overwatch is lightning in a bottle. Overwatch is the future. A vibrant, frenetic, candy-colored future of boundless joy and infinite addiction.<br />
<br />
<b>Honorable Mentions:</b><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine</b> </li>
<ul>
<li>I’m still playing the <a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2016/02/game-of-year-5-which-witcher-whipped.html">third-best RPG of 2015</a>, which also happens to be the second-best RPG of 2016. I just haven’t even finished the Hearts of Stone expansion yet, let alone Blood and Wine. This game’s scale is goddamn ridiculous.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Oxenfree</b></li>
<ul>
<li>A particularly pretty piece of interactive storytelling more than a bit undone by its overwrought ending and underdeveloped characters.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>Stardew Valley</b></li>
<ul>
<li>I didn’t play it, but I watched my partner play it. I spent enough years adoring Harvest Moon to recognize very quickly that Stardew Valley is the definitive version of that formula and could only be improved a mobile edition.</li>
</ul>
<li><b>BioShock 2</b></li>
<ul>
<li>Obviously this didn't come out last year, but its remaster did, and I finally got around to giving this formerly underappreciated sequel a go (albeit on the non-remastered version). BioShock 2 really is quite good, mechanically perhaps the best of the trilogy. I'm not sure I buy the revisionist hype that it tells a better story than the first or Infinite, but I quite enjoyed a familiar foray back into Rapture nonetheless.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-42743605315346328022017-02-08T08:56:00.000-08:002017-02-08T19:00:44.838-08:00Why You Should Read the Sword of Air (But Think Before You Run It)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6163sND3jvqCRcs4ZVjknee_3flcI93G3qzgVarmp1DI3COxxXWjts3LBlrcteA-WbkqmriGnDxp2EmmBhakr1s5QNpUtE5w3Qe-1tJBLFBrSNUac1De1xtjQyKk8zSLLJn7U6hF5pS4K/s1600/FGGLLSOAPFE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6163sND3jvqCRcs4ZVjknee_3flcI93G3qzgVarmp1DI3COxxXWjts3LBlrcteA-WbkqmriGnDxp2EmmBhakr1s5QNpUtE5w3Qe-1tJBLFBrSNUac1De1xtjQyKk8zSLLJn7U6hF5pS4K/s320/FGGLLSOAPFE.jpg" width="252" /></a><b>Game: <i>Sword of Air</i></b><br />
<b>System: </b>Pathfinder/Swords & Wizardry<br />
<b>Publisher: </b>Frog God Games<br />
<b>Author:</b> Bill Webb<br />
<b>Initial Release: </b>2014<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.froggodgames.com/lost-lands-sword-air">Sword of Air</a> is unfinished. This is partly by design. The back cover will tell you that this hefty Pathfinder/Swords & Wizardry module is a “sandbox campaign in the old-school style that take [sic] your characters from level 1 through level 20.” (Yes, there are a lot of typos and errata - best get that out of the way now.) “Within these pages you will find: the secret of the Sword of Air artifact; a vast and detailed wilderness; a feud between two powerful wizards Kayden and Sorten; both Kayden and Sorten’s domains described in detail; the tomb of famous wizard and court adviser Aka Bakar; the Plane of Shadow; the City of Tsen and its surrounding wastelands; Steve the Cat; and more! Sword of Air,” you see, “is part of the home campaign world of Frog God Game’s Bill Webb and it has been running since 1977.” That last boast should tell you quite a bit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Most of this is, strictly speaking, true. And it’s exciting stuff, albeit a little misleading. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sword of Air is </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">not</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, in itself, a campaign. It would barely even qualify as a campaign setting by most standards. It provides virtually nothing in the way of gazetteer or background content, with a few partial exceptions like the historical notes before the chapter on the Tomb of Aka Bakar. It assumes that the DM is either intimately familiar with the Lost Lands setting - the home of the </span><a href="http://www.ymmv.org/2017/02/dungeon-divin-done-right.html" style="font-family: inherit;">Necromancer and Frog God Games line of products</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, described piecemeal in other works - or willing to create a world of her own wholesale. Sword of Air is also not a collection of modules republished with a unifying plot hook in the </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">guise</span><i style="font-family: inherit;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">of a campaign, like so many other Frog God products tend to be (no shade thrown on these; I tend to love them).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />No, Sword of Air will provide you with next to nothing in the way of campaign materials. It won’t even provide you with descriptions for many of its major locales. A detailed map will give you vital locations like the City of Freegate directly next to where it intends some major action to take place, but it will tell you nothing <i>about</i> Freegate, leaving it to the DM to provide the local care and color. It will haphazardly throw out references to fantastical locations like the Wizard’s Wall and hint cryptically at their wondrous back-stories (in the form of what are often rather tone-deaf allusions to Bill Webb’s own home campaign anecdotes and in-jokes), but it will tell the DM little else of use about those places beyond their names - often not even so much as a location on the otherwise richly detailed map. Sword of Air is honest about this within its introductory chapter, at least, if not its back cover and sales description. Webb goes on at length about his “monkey and the engineer” theory of design without ever quite making sense of the metaphor, but he does<i> </i>at least admit there - albeit to folks that have already purchased the book - that he has no intention of providing a campaign module but rather a loose collection of tools from which a DM might build a grand campaign.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />And finally we hit on the truth of what Sword of Air is: not a sandbox (or, if it is, a grossly incomplete one with misleading maps), not a campaign module, not even a campaign setting. Sword of Air is, in fact, a loose box of badly organized tools from which a dedicated DM and group of players might one day build something great. But my god, what a beautiful set of tools of those are.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The finest among these tools are Sword of Air’s set pieces, and golly are they masterful set pieces. The book offers in its first chapter and scattered throughout some snippets of character and plot hooks to use to tie these set pieces into your campaign’s larger story, and if you can be arsed to put in the effort you will be richly rewarded for having included them. Foremost among these are the two enormous<i> </i>towers owned by the archwizards Kayden and Sorten respectively, filled with all the wonders and weirdness your inner 12-year-old would want to find in the lairs of a master necromancer and conjurer. These, depending on the players’ allegiances and inclinations, may serve either as fantastical “towns” and bases of operation or as extraordinarily complex and coherent dungeons. Webb provides detail not only as to the stats of the denizens of these towers but as to their daily schedules, likely locations, relationships, and strokes of their broader lives. There are endless goodies to play with here, and a party visiting either of these towers, should they survive entry, will likely find themselves with days’ worth of things to do.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Sword of Air also includes no fewer than two<i> </i>massive megadungeons - each with a deceptively devious “introductory” dungeon hiding the much deadlier and more expansive structures below. I won’t say much about these for the sake of brevity beyond that, like most of Frog God’s megadungeons, they are top-notch old-school dives filled with tricks, traps, and secrets elaborate enough to put most “classic” D&D dungeons to shame. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better balance of tough but fair environmental puzzles (more Zelda than Zork), fascinating enemies, and coherent monster ecology filled with more interesting denizens, though a few of the overused favorites do make appearances.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The rest of the module is a collection of hex crawls and mostly exotic locales. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The hex crawls set in the “normal” parts of Akados, the continent of the material plane on which Sword of Air mostly takes place, are fairly tepid. Most of the encounters here are overly familiar, the sort of goofy Gygaxian fare already overrepresented in hundreds of modules from the 70s and 80s. NPCs with jokey meta names, former real-world player characters with trollish personalities - the presence of a feuding family of hick dragons </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">literally called the Hatfields and McCoys</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is at such a tonal dissonance with the more coherent locations of the game as to be baffling, though it does speak to the organic history of the campaign as Webb’s own evolving homebrew from childhood on over the years. But if you find the notion of meeting up with a line of Joe Platemails the Third and Fourth - a whack-whack-whacky paladin from Webb’s original player group with a penchant for stupidity and indestructibility (“Intelligence and Wisdom were his dump stats,” you see) - to be an enticing proposition, maybe you’ll get more out of these zany “random” encounters than I did.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />The aforementioned exotic locales, however, are much stronger hex crawl material. Sword of Air’s chapter on the Plane of Shadow aka the Shadowfell is the stuff of nightmares, a terrifyingly alien place into which I cannot wait<i> </i>to throw a woefully unprepared player party. Filled with light-devouring monsters, doomed and half-crazed wanderers, twisted human revenants right out of Silent Hill (or more recently Stranger Things), and a literal river to Hell, <i>this </i>is the vision of a journey to the planar embodiment of darkness with the imagination and horror that were so sorely lacking in TSR and WotC’s takes on the subject. The Wasteland of Tsen, too - a fantasy Fallout zone with mutation-inducing radioactive air and lethal lead mines - is a consistently surprising and harrowing sojourn away from the ordinary, and an excellent taste of that desolate <a href="http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/slumbering-tsar-saga">Slumbering Tsar</a> flavor for those without the stomach to play a whole campaign in that kind of setting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />I mentioned Sword of Air has organization issues. Holy hell does it. There’s little consistency to any of the chapters’ layouts. Maps are scattered piecemeal everywhere; the hexes are particularly egregious. Critical character details and hooks are similarly offered in bites and chunks at near random for the DM to scrounge together, sometimes hundreds and hundreds of pages apart (and unbolded) for the same character. There are frequent contradictions. Being a Frog God product, this lengthy and disorganized volume has, of course, no index of names or terms (though it does thankfully have an appendix that includes player maps).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />It’s worth mentioning that the Sword of Air has a weird obsession with males. As in, 90% or more of its named inhabitants are men (nearly all, if you believe the art, are white), all the non-deific characters of note are men, and it’s hard to say why that is in a game system that mechanically represents the sexes as equal and usually strives to make its fantasy world a varied and interesting place to be. This is easily fixed - my Sorten, for instance, is a woman, because who the hell needs another white bearded wizard anyway - but it’s strange, is all. The average gaming group is enough of a homogenous sausagefest without the fantasy denizens being this one-note as well. The less said about the one female plot-critical character having been horrifically raped to death by a demon to set the events of the book in motion, the better.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />The art, all in full color, is occasionally solid but frequently iffy. At the risk of being brutal, much of the coloration looks like some aspiring Deviantartist’s first foray into Adobe Illustrator. 90s-esque Photoshop filters and presets (lens flare! bevel and emboss!) are rampant. The character illustrations of both wizard towers in particular are a little embarrassing and would likely kill the mood if shown to players. Simple black-and-white cartoons in the style of old-school module sketches would’ve been preferable here to attempting to ape the more elaborate Wizards of the Coast productions. The monsters are for the most part much better, and at least the cover is evocative. I don’t mean to sound too harsh here, because the vast majority of published RPG material is seriously lacking in the artistic department, and at least Sword of Air makes an effort to include a lot of it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />So yes, the module has its problems, chief of all that it’s not what it claims to be, and conversely that it could have been so much more. As a campaign setting, collection of characters, or coherent world, Sword of Air leaves much to be desired.
Bill Webb’s “magnum opus” it is not, nor should it be as his work ever continues to improve with the years - the best of which, I think, are yet to come.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> But as a loosely bound, occasionally brilliant set of tools and materials to spark a DM’s imagination and from which to build something greater, Sword of Air has worth in spades. My initial frustrations with the product never disappeared completely, but at this point I have no regrets about picking up this flawed gem of a sourcebook, and would recommend others with the patience to look past its faults to do the same.</span><br />
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-2539458317030678462017-02-01T17:45:00.001-08:002017-02-08T08:58:56.959-08:00Dungeon Divin' Done Right<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSF8k53zn5TQaOL6oYAxmnqi5ViMIitPpB6OyxDe3GtGKWRXh8-qfnZWKb3e5v3hAoTx9Yx6c8JqjskfjnNqFul0fWWa5DYyRRtf4vxluYlI0QhaIqHa3iBlaYhWo6kdkYeoKyDuSLsTUS/s1600/Barakus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSF8k53zn5TQaOL6oYAxmnqi5ViMIitPpB6OyxDe3GtGKWRXh8-qfnZWKb3e5v3hAoTx9Yx6c8JqjskfjnNqFul0fWWa5DYyRRtf4vxluYlI0QhaIqHa3iBlaYhWo6kdkYeoKyDuSLsTUS/s400/Barakus.jpg" /></span></a><br />
<b>Game: <i>The Lost City of Barakus</i></b><br />
<b>System: </b>d20/Pathfinder/Swords & Wizardry<br />
<b>Publisher: </b>Necromancer Games and Frog God Games<br />
<b>Authors:</b> W.D.B. Kenower and Bill Webb<br />
<b>Initial Release: </b>November 1, 2003<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://froggodgames.com/">Frog God Games</a>, publisher of Swords & Wizardry and successor company to the late great d20 publisher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necromancer_Games">Necromancer Games</a>, produce a diverse range of products that nonetheless share a very particular flavor. With few exceptions, they take place in a high-magic, vaguely medieval fantasy world reminiscent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhawk">Greyhawk</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackmoor_(campaign_setting)">Blackmoor</a> - i.e., vanilla D&D - but wherein all of civilization is a thin veneer on a decaying world beneath which malignant gods, forgotten horrors, and eldritch abominations constantly threaten to corrupt and devour all that lives. In other words, it’s more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard">Howard</a> and Lovecraft than Faerun and Forgotten Realms. This gels well with Frog God’s old-school, high-stakes philosophy that players should feel free to explore wherever they wish, but that poking around in deep dark places is substantially more likely to see them murdered than doing the murdering.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/lost-lands-lost-city-barakus">The Lost City of Barakus</a>, a Necromancer d20 module republished by Frog God for Pathfinder and Swords & Wizardry with fresh layouts, content, and errata, is perhaps the perfect embodiment of that philosophy. One part city sandbox, one part wilderness hex crawl, and one part megadungeon, Lost City is all parts danger and excitement. The 176-page module (PF version) comes recommended for character levels 1-5, but there’s more than enough content here to keep them busy well beyond that. My own players didn’t wrap up the bulk of it until level 7, and there are <i>still </i>plenty of secrets they haven’t uncovered - and yet may, since the module’s flagship city of Endhome has become a major hub for their high-level adventures. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />For all that that the titular megadungeon Barakus gets top billing, the Free City of Endhome is every bit as core to the module’s success. Capable of being plopped into any homebrew campaign or used as a springboard for Frog God’s larger Lost Lands campaign setting, Endhome is as richly detailed and interesting a place to explore as any standalone city module this side of Frog God’s own Bard’s Gate. Intrigue abounds in the superficially unassuming city-state, and if your players are anything like mine they will find themselves embroiled in political plots, a temple front hiding a continent-spanning slave ring operation, monstrous sewer infestations, a full-fledged Wizard’s Academy, and a motherfucking <i>vampire mafia family</i> to please all the Masquerade fans in the audience from barely the moment they step foot in Endhome. These obvious major quest hooks are just the beginning. Endhome’s various locales and NPCs are chock full of seeds for stories branching into the surrounding Duskmoon Hills (the aforementioned hex crawl) and other modules in the Lost Lands universe that can easily be substituted for the DM’s homebrew locations of choice. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Whether you decide to start the players in the relative “safety” of Endhome or use one of the several proffered plot hooks that have them travel there through Duskmoon, the real crazy shit begins outside the city walls. On the tamer end of the spectrum we have delightfully varied random encounter tables, a corrupted forest, and a band of dashing highwaymen clad in green who will happily relieve the party of their wealth to “redistribute” in their own woodland camp. On the more vicious (and shamelessly old school) end we have abandoned wizard towers, desecrated temples to dark deities, a volcano-dwelling red dragon, and, of course, Barakus itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />Hidden beneath an enormous upper cave system that could itself stand alone as a top-notch D&D introductory dungeon, players could easily miss Barakus entirely if it weren’t right there in the title to pique their curiosity. A little more coherent than your average megadungeon - thanks in part to its epic backstory and an only-somewhat-batshit monster ecology - Barakus will please both the loot-crazed murderhobos and aspiring actors of your party alike. Running <i>five levels deep </i>and change (and featuring a tantalizing thoroughfare to the Underdark and Matt Finch’s Cyclopean Deeps), Barakus is stuffed to the gills with everything you could ever hope to find in the abandoned city of an advanced elder race. Bizarre mechanical contraptions, deadly traps, mysterious magical artifacts, forgotten monstrosities - Barakus has it all in scale. For a “lost” city Barakus seems to be experiencing a surprising population boom. Tribes of goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, roving drow up from the Underdark, and stranger beings all vie for control of the wealth-littered ruins even as they too struggle to survive against the more monstrous denizens, offering ample opportunities for alliances, faction play, and even, in my players’ case, all-out war. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />The cherry on top (or rather the bottom) of it all is the inevitable Big Bad Boss of the joint. This fresh take on an old favorite lies imprisoned in a lair hidden beneath so many secrets and Zelda-style puzzle levels your players may well never encounter it. But if they do, they’d better hope they’re well-prepared. The boss - like the almost equally dangerous thing waiting above his prison - is deadly enough in its default state, but practically a guaranteed total party kill if your players are anything other than the cautiously thoughtful types capable of out-scheming the creature. Not that they’re likely to have made it this far without an eleven-foot-pole mentality in the first place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />I could gush about this module for ages. I could also spend paragraphs ranting about its problems. The black-and-white art ranges from the forgettable to the downright embarrassing, but what do you expect - it’s a d20-era OGL product. Much more critically, the Frog God reprint was a missed opportunity to fix some glaring errors, omissions, and design issues that will frustrate a DM throughout. For all that the book tends to provide exactly the right amounts of world detail, its map, chart, and stat block placements defy all logic, and the lack player-ready room descriptions in the dungeons is a big “fuck you” to any DM wanting to run this without thorough preparation. Some rooms are completely incomprehensible even to the DM without cross-reference to the maps and other levels. The absence of an index in a piece of clockwork this complex is a baffling flaw unfortunately shared with many other Frog God products. For all its qualities, the city of Endhome, as laid out, is borderline unusable without tabs, hand notations, and careful pre-session study if only to correct all the errata Frog God never bothered to fix. You’ll also likely need a magnifying glass just to read the legend on some of the maps.</span><br />
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In spite of all that, I and my players can't stop talking about what an uncommonly great piece of work this book is<span style="font-family: inherit;">. It’s rare enough to see a good sandbox that pulls together as a cohesive whole, let alone one that marries so well to a developed, dynamic city setting. The Lost City of Barakus really is the complete package, and would that it were the model for sandbox modules everywhere. </span><br />
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-568144057864198012016-05-10T11:10:00.003-07:002016-05-10T15:32:29.796-07:00Lacking in Street Smarts<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1apCmbqTe1UpZHa5nxpdymh552DOTcJEZfq_mPmjwiR41V35aN4HpveMuqk5B-MnUnLnBgPyHTwIWwREW6w3FF-RZtn9jbzI3xwfVzievLGqwo58TmJ_oQN1U1r3vWVA-WZzX3SW2IDqH/s1600/SFV+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1apCmbqTe1UpZHa5nxpdymh552DOTcJEZfq_mPmjwiR41V35aN4HpveMuqk5B-MnUnLnBgPyHTwIWwREW6w3FF-RZtn9jbzI3xwfVzievLGqwo58TmJ_oQN1U1r3vWVA-WZzX3SW2IDqH/s320/SFV+Cover.jpg" width="260" /></a>Game: <b><i>Street Fighter V</i></b><br />
Capcom, 2016 (PS4 version reviewed)<br />
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I haven’t played a lot of Street Fighter since Street Fighter II first rocked my world on the SNES. They don’t seem to have gotten much better since. Even three months of patches and content updates since its initial release, Street Fighter V remains a tragic mess of a multiplayer experience and a cautionary tale of how even the best underlying game mechanics can be ruined by the systems and interfaces surrounding them.</div>
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And it really is a tragedy how much SFV does right. Like Street Fighter IV it manages to transition the series’ classic 2D visuals to a vibrant 3D palette, maintaining nearly the same hitboxes and animation frames while adding a level of grace and fluidity to the characters’ motions that sprites could never quite achieve. I can’t ultimately say I <i>prefer </i>the move to three dimensions in a fundamentally two dimensional game - there’s always something about visible polygons I can never quite appreciate on the level of a hand-drawn character, or the seamlessly convincing faux-sprites of, say, Guilty Gear Xrd - but if we have to drag these games into the third dimension, I’m glad they’re still as pleasing to look at as this. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It’s a tale as old as time...</td></tr>
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At its core SFV plays like a dream. I’m no fighting game pro by any stretch - the only series I’ve ever been able to claim even something like competence in was Soul Calibur - but to my novice hands SFV feels just right. Character input is incredibly responsive. The movelists remain refreshingly tiny and put the emphasis of mastery immediately on the fundamentals rather than gating it behind encyclopedic memory of combos. The characters themselves are as varied and entertaining to experiment with as ever, even if their Story Modes are half-baked nonsense.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...a song as old as rhyme.</td></tr>
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The shame, though, is that those utterly engaging characters and fundamentals are surrounded by a user-level experience that is anything but. The range of available modes borders on the pathetic. Not only are the 5-10 minute Story Mode “journeys” a joke both in terms of challenge and presentation, punctuated by what appears to be storyboard fan art and snippets of context-free dialogue from a badly translated 80s shonen anime, but SFV fails to provide even the basic Arcade Mode experience that has been the baseline way to introduce players to fighting game characters since time immemorial. Good luck if, like me, you’ve had only limited exposure to this series in the past two decades, because there’s no real tutorial either, and the game shows zero interest in helping players achieve basic competence beyond describing half the control scheme and throwing them to the wolves. Even the movelist menu is a pain in the ass to access and display, to the point that it’s easier and almost necessary to physically <i>print out </i>movelists when learning a character.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What the game lacks in story it makes up for in riveting dialogue.</td></tr>
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SFV’s online multiplayer mode, arguably its raison d’etre, has much bigger problems than the game’s general barriers to entry and lack of solo content. While the netcode runs smoothly enough and players are thankfully given the option to limit matchmaking to opponents with high-quality network connections, the amount of time wasted between matches is downright stupefying. It’s probably unavoidable (and very forgivable) that matchmaking itself can take a few moments. What’s not forgivable is the interminable wait between successfully finding a match and actually getting down to fighting. Between loading times and unskippable musical interludes (probably masking more loading times), players are forced to spend just as much time staring at a motionless screen as they are actually playing the game - and significantly more if your opponent leaves after the first bout. These kind of intermediate pauses might be no big deal in games with 30-60 minute match times like Dota, or a minor inconvenience in 10-20 minute round shooters, but in a game whose matches can end in seconds they are pace-killing and frequently just shy of infuriating. </div>
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Consequently, the sum of what might be a technically perfect fighting game is ruined by a functional inadequacy that actively prevents the player from experiencing that perfection. By my own stopwatch timing, I spent as much as five minutes twiddling my thumbs in a session for every <i>one </i>minute spent actually playing Street Fighter V. It is, in short, a tedious and mood-breaking way to engage with any fighting game, however strong its underlying combat. That this seems to be inherent to limitations of the engine is all the more shame, as it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Capcom will ever find a way to patch the problem out of existence. For someone interested only in local matches with enough Street Fighter-playing friends willing to power past the loading frustrations, the failure of SFV’s overall package and online play might be forgivable. For me, it’s a losing proposition whatever way you look at it.<br />
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-20255190353895580812016-04-25T14:53:00.004-07:002016-05-02T13:54:57.536-07:00Dark Souls 3, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Praise the Sun<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGD0HMjszMDJ7psg8xyZ8e6q__EWJVelngspUOf92nJTuZ1Q24dTfEQwCkW3JYLhqptiD_jry9yqeOuDhBv_b5QwzZvK3U7jspEL0_A7cn0W59XoeHYbquTyz7NvI7EgiUxpCc7QM60_Cj/s1600/Dark+Souls+3+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="196" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGD0HMjszMDJ7psg8xyZ8e6q__EWJVelngspUOf92nJTuZ1Q24dTfEQwCkW3JYLhqptiD_jry9yqeOuDhBv_b5QwzZvK3U7jspEL0_A7cn0W59XoeHYbquTyz7NvI7EgiUxpCc7QM60_Cj/s200/Dark+Souls+3+Cover.jpg" width="200" /></a>Game: <b><i>Dark Souls III</i></b><br />
From Software, 2016 (PC version reviewed)<br />
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Dark Souls 3 is Dark Souls 2 at heart. Not the Dark Souls 2 that actually exists, mind you - a great game but flawed sequel in many of the ways it parted from its predecessor - but the Dark Souls 2 that might have been had it recaptured the essence of the first and built directly upon its successes. Sometimes it does a bit too much recapturing and a bit too little building, sure. But it gets the balance right where it matters most, and it’s tough to imagine any fan of the series coming away disappointed with its conclusion.<br />
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DS3 isn’t shy about its sequel status; in fact it’s constantly celebrating it. From the moment the familiar title screen appears and the music begins, the game revels in its place in the trilogy. Where the first Dark Souls featured only quiet, cut by the harsh slashing noise of the player pressing “any button to continue,” and the second introduced a soft, pensive chorus, DS3 bursts into a full-blown choral requiem not-so-subtly indebted to Mozart’s. It’s a fitting crescendo for a game that is in every way aware of its derivative nature as a sequel while simultaneously being determined to take those familiar elements and push them to their extremes. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hello, old frenemies.</td></tr>
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The very first boss epitomizes this, a beautiful little fight combining elements of DS1’s Artorias battle with a very Bloodborne-esque transformation phase. It’s hard to think of a more exciting way to welcome veteran players to this new yet familiar chapter while teaching newcomers the core principles of the series, its combat, and it’s themes. On that front, the developers took criticisms of the infamous Souls obtuseness to heart and deigned to supply in the new Firelink Shrine the most helpful and accessible tutorials of the series. The game is probably still opaque as hell to first timers, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice to see From Software making some basic concessions to mechanical guidance while still leaving plenty of room for discovery where more advanced aspects of DS3’s systems are concerned. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bloodborne’s grandiose Gothic architecture returns in spades.</td></tr>
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Not all the changes are for the better. It’s hard not to be disappointed that DS3’s Firelink Shrine has reverted to the abstract teleportation hub that is the Nexus of Demon’s Souls, rather than DS1’s central axis from which the surrounding world is unlocked like a puzzle box. But while large stretches of DS3 at first seem to unravel in a fairly linear fashion after Firelink, it quickly becomes apparent that the world is as massive and full of alternative routes and secret paths as DS1, if not more so . The areas are gorgeously crafted, each evoking memories of prior Souls entries or Bloodborne while building something entirely new on those memories. The introductory High Wall of Lothric and the Undead Settlement, for example, while instantly reminiscent of the Undead Burg, turn out to have much more in common with Bloodborne’s terrifyingly hostile Central Yharnam. Rather than the staid, largely passive undead guardians of DS1, these areas are full of frenzied religious mobs, packs of hounds, and nightmare creatures that burst from the shadows, all pushing the player toward Bloodborne’s much faster pace of combat and crowd control skills than DS1’s “Try luring them out one at a time” duel-like approach to encounters. These areas are still meticulously designed puzzles to be unlocked through careful exploration, creativity, and plain old trial and error, but the frenetic new pace and variety of enemies succeed in injecting Bloodborne’s excited fear into the proceedings in a way that DS2’s tedious clusters of identical sword-wielding humanoids so frequently failed to do.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For all the allure of Fashion Souls you might be surprised to see half the player base running around dressed as Raggedy Kylo Ren.</td></tr>
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The nods to previous From Software titles can feel overbearing to the point of fan service at first. My emotions at rediscovering old allies and locales peaked in the first hour and almost immediately ebbed after that when I started to worry DS3 was content to be the sequel that rehashes the best moments of its predecessors, then calls it a day. That worry didn’t last long. Without spoiling anything specific, the frequent throwbacks and nods to history <i>do </i>turn out to serve an important thematic purpose that pays off big dividends in the second half of the game, when I was surprised to find myself affected and even disturbed by the places DS3 proves willing to go to both to fulfill and to subvert the themes established by the series. I know this spoiler-aversion makes for a horribly vague way to discuss story, and I’m aware that the effectiveness of these narrative moments is often limited to those who have obsessively explored previous Souls worlds and their surrounding lore,* but all I can say is that I found them deeply satisfying and as appropriate a conclusion to the trilogy as I could have hoped for. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">DS3’s bosses come in all shapes and sizes, but the biggest and baddest are the biggest and baddest of any Souls yet.</td></tr>
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Even sixty hours and one ending in, it’s too early for me to speculate where the game stands among the From titles. The full potential of these games isn’t always apparent on a first playthrough or before having had some time to reflect on and live with the experience. Some initial disappointment aside, I had a blast with my first DS2 encounter, and it wasn’t until revisiting DS1 and returning to DS2 that I realized how much less satisfied I was with it as a Souls game, and how much less interested I was in plumbing the depths of its world than I was with its predecessor and Demon’s Souls. But I can confidently say some superlative things about DS3. The bosses are beautiful, hulking creations that prove a thrill to discover and a joy to master, providing challenges to match the most memorable fights in the series. More than in any previous Souls game I found myself not wanting to move past a given area until I had engaged in jolly cooperation with other players dozens of times, learning the ins and outs of these titans and vicariously re-experiencing the pleasure of besting them. A friend I recently introduced to the series pointed out that some of these battles reminded him as much of Shadow of the Colossus as they did of DS1, and I can think of no better compliment to From than that they have succeeded in wedding the titanic scale and puzzle-like design of those creatures with the intense combat intricacies of Souls, accompanied by the simultaneously most sweeping and most personal orchestrations Yuka Kitamura and Motoi Sakuraba have yet composed for the series.</div>
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Papers could and have been written on the From design philosophy and what makes their worlds tick so distinctively. We can point to numerous core elements and speculate to what extent they’re the “secret sauce” imparting that unmistakable Souls flavor no one else has yet managed to imitate. The brutality of the combat and the careful precision it demands. The unique sense of accomplishment that comes from mastering something so challenging and precise. The mystery of an ancient world largely uninterested in the player character or in giving away its secrets. The thrill of putting together the pieces of those secrets and beginning to discern patterns in the dream-like chaos. The visual design that is equal parts familiar and alien, historically gothic yet otherworldly in its proportions and inhabitants.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You won’t want for excuses to stop and take in the view...</td></tr>
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Maybe it’s some of those things; maybe it’s the careful combination of them. I haven’t even touched upon the multiplayer component that, PVE and PVP alike, is so singular to this series in the ways in which it seamlessly integrates with the “solo” game experience, now expanded and perhaps even perfected in DS3. I certainly haven’t spent the time I should have complaining about the state of the PC port, which a month after its initial Japanese release remains as plagued by network bugs and online instabilities as on day one. </div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc2NOeSzejr6W9yJw_9Vz255yKSA0KwHOAygmnzxZgNcnm0iSktS2XfB9a972sw4p2q-4ZrLXe77a6Ds-EvJSPCNcdglCnHx6tXfSNViqmF3zbpPe0uqlQHgTE4EazQuYrIXeiVwM-In2R/s1600/20160423161456_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc2NOeSzejr6W9yJw_9Vz255yKSA0KwHOAygmnzxZgNcnm0iSktS2XfB9a972sw4p2q-4ZrLXe77a6Ds-EvJSPCNcdglCnHx6tXfSNViqmF3zbpPe0uqlQHgTE4EazQuYrIXeiVwM-In2R/s400/20160423161456_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...buut you’ll be taking in this slightly less welcome view quite a lot as well.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
But I could talk about one or another aspect for this game for pages and still have volumes to write,** so on some level this review was always going to be a half-assed summary. I haven’t made any secret that Dark Souls was my favorite game of its generation - and maybe ever - so maybe it’s enough to say Dark Souls 3 is the sequel I always thought it deserved. If last year’s Bloodborne wasn’t evidence enough of the difference it makes to have Hidetaka Miyazaki at the helm, this should be plenty for anyone. It may not be as exciting to see the director retread familiar ground as it was to see him build an entirely new world, but it’s remarkably fulfilling to experience the way he puts an end to the old. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* A not-small percentage of the Souls fan base, to be fair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** And hopefully will, one of these days.</span><br />
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<img alt="Loved it!" border="0" class="stars" src="http://www.calebwimble.com/images/pixel_star_text_5.png" style="border: none;" title="Loved it!" /></div>
Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-78752859546737418292016-03-29T08:40:00.000-07:002016-04-25T15:17:45.298-07:00Game of the Year 2015: The Final ThreeIt’s surprising to probably no one that my decision to revisit and review my ten favorite games of 2015 was a hubristic one. Yet here on this twenty-ninth day of March in the Year of Our Lord 2016, I’d say it’s about time to sit down and seal the deal on the old year to get on with the new, even if that means giving the biggest players the shortest shrift. So without any further foot-dragging, my top three games of last year:<br />
<i></i><br />
<i><br /></i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGi17VZPo5T8P6hCr20-atwVFRPRwM75nSHjW17vKZoKFdC3k4K6Hgg6-p_Sw8n3UPeMn97vd6DvHikaLBBIEzCeL5xtwDl7BSPXIPXVVRsojtMiqMVCQH7XJGOUhnuyOVwtwnRw8Q9dpo/s1600/80+days+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGi17VZPo5T8P6hCr20-atwVFRPRwM75nSHjW17vKZoKFdC3k4K6Hgg6-p_Sw8n3UPeMn97vd6DvHikaLBBIEzCeL5xtwDl7BSPXIPXVVRsojtMiqMVCQH7XJGOUhnuyOVwtwnRw8Q9dpo/s320/80+days+cover.jpg" width="320" /></a><b>3. 80 Days</b><br />
Inkle, 2015 (PC and iOS versions reviewed)<br />
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Inkle are national treasures. Well, someone’s national treasures, anyway, since I’m not a citizen of their native UK, but thank god for these guys and their ability to breathe new life into the text adventure genre so many of us adored as kids. They got my attention with their conversion of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series into a brilliant open-ended mobile RPG some years back (now available as a PC port), but they won my heart with their more recent Jules Verne tribute, 80 Days.<br />
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80 Days looks simple enough at first. You are the beleaguered Jean Passepartout, dragged into a globe-spanning adventure by your new master Phileas Fogg’s gambling proclivities. Turns out, though, this isn’t <i>quite </i>the Victorian world you remember from Verne’s novel, but one in an alternate steampunk reality where gyroscopic airships have taken to the winds, mechanical horses pull mechanical carriages across vast distances, and AI-driven automata have begun to encroach upon the livelihood of the late 19th century working class. As Passepartout you will have to chart your and your master’s course across the continents by these transit and means and more, deciding how far you will go and what you’ll be willing to do to ensure your master makes it home to London and wins his money in the eighty days allotted. Or, at least, to ensure he makes it home alive.<br />
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High concept flourishes aside, it’s on the personal level where 80 Days thrives. Your adventure unfolds both on a delightfully animated globe and on a series of dialogue and city screens wherein which Passepartout can chart a course, explore the town, bargain for travel implements and services, and (more than anything) spend time talking to the colorful cast of characters he encounters on the way. I can’t stress enough just how terrific the writing of these conversations is. Sure, a few familiar faces and iconic scenes show up from Verne’s novel, but the vast majority of this content is original and utterly engaging. You are constantly choosing dialogue options that shape Passepartout’s personality and tendencies in ways unique to each playthrough, and the sheer breadth of available encounters is reason enough to keep coming back to the game and finding different routes to your destination - or anywhere else, should your Passepartout decide to take his master’s adventure off the literal rails.<br />
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A core element in each of these interactions is your relationship with Fogg and just how attentive a servant your choices make Passepartout out to be. Will you head out into the New Orleans nightlife to seek transit opportunities and expand your horizons, or will you remain at the hotel to see to Fogg’s needs and secure your finances for the journey ahead? Do you take a chance with the experimental flight option offered to you by someone with whom you had a midnight tryst, or stick with the safer and slower rail route you had already planned to follow? Do you get involved in the plight of a politically persecuted group seeking to overthrow the local tyranny, or place your loyalty to Fogg’s mission about your personal morals?<br />
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The narrative possibilities of 80 Days aren’t endless, but they can often feel that way, and Inkle has even added tremendous new content and destinations to the game free of charge since launch. It’s a lovingly crafted and uniquely personal experience that (at least for now) is like nothing else out there. I can’t wait to see what this team will do next, but I have a feeling I’ll still be discovering fresh and exciting things about 80 Days by the time their next title drops.<br />
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<b><br /></b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO7jmx-dICufW385PQybSau_85ABvedo2T0bEPtOkXF1StSWvzZ4E-ubvORQCIp3GlBtuMrUw7m5rRjCAJPtgHj1ZKgXYqHCEAQaODtwkL3C6ktGNYpRz8W0MPXkhZ6kWTxh_F3L3lwC_K/s1600/bloodborne+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO7jmx-dICufW385PQybSau_85ABvedo2T0bEPtOkXF1StSWvzZ4E-ubvORQCIp3GlBtuMrUw7m5rRjCAJPtgHj1ZKgXYqHCEAQaODtwkL3C6ktGNYpRz8W0MPXkhZ6kWTxh_F3L3lwC_K/s320/bloodborne+cover.jpg" width="256" /></a><b>2. Bloodborne</b><br />
From Software, 2015 (PS4)<br />
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If there was any doubt that director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s absence was the key element that left Dark Souls II a more hollow experience than its predecessor, albeit a technically tighter one, Bloodborne seems to clear it up. A vast gothic labyrinth of Lovecraftian nightmares, Bloodborne exchanges Dark Souls’ profound loneliness and quiet dread of the world’s end with a more visceral terror that there might be things worse than death waiting beyond.<br />
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Some things have changed - combat is less a cautious duel in Bloodborne than a frenetic brawl, the Estus healing system has been replaced by an unfortunately grindy consumable alternative, and the central teleporting hub from Demon Souls makes a return - but Bloodborne retains all the best of Dark Souls’ atmospheric detail and the thrill of exploring its twisting, secret-laiden landscapes. There are a few missteps here and there, an inevitably unfair segment or two and the occasional deadly bug, but as in Dark Souls every nook and cranny (other than the optional randomized Chalice dungeons) drips with craft and intentionality. However indebted this series may be to predecessors like Castlevania and King’s Field, and despite the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Fallen">mixed</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_and_Sanctuary">attempts</a> of imitators, there are no action RPGs out there at quite the caliber of Miyazaki games, and Bloodborne is as great as any other of his Souls.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjenpJcPptW8hXOLg3ks5_gM2Zbc_p-0-mhFA1qql-Pn_ikNzWXP2muH3WLsms9tONPA3dsyMclmC3dSMtcWrTsdG6Pb1Y8Q5UJGEfQSMV5wqOTKidMGTVLIrDpQC2cAfZgZQbvhr8qniEH/s1600/flowey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjenpJcPptW8hXOLg3ks5_gM2Zbc_p-0-mhFA1qql-Pn_ikNzWXP2muH3WLsms9tONPA3dsyMclmC3dSMtcWrTsdG6Pb1Y8Q5UJGEfQSMV5wqOTKidMGTVLIrDpQC2cAfZgZQbvhr8qniEH/s320/flowey.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="320" /></a><b>1. Undertale</b><br />
Toby Fox, 2015 (Mac version reviewed)<br />
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Undertale remains as difficult to talk about as the day it launched. Describing exactly what makes this little indie <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/3avnun/discussion_what_is_the_genredifference_between/csgekb2">JRPG</a> so much more than the simple Earthbound tribute it appears to be at a glance is almost impossible without spoiling some of its biggest surprises - especially since its first hour reflects the most tired, frustrating aspects of that game and its genre. But Undertale <i>is </i>more.<br />
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I can sing a few of Undertale’s praises without spoilers. It’s genuinely hilarious, with a sense of humor simultaneously so broad-ranging and esoteric that it had me laughing aloud more frequently than any game last year but <a href="http://www.y-m-m-v.com/2016/01/game-of-year-2015-tales-from-borderlands.html">Tales from the Borderlands</a>. Its characters, despite all being broad cartoonish caricatures of video game and geek tropes generally, reveal themselves to have rich emotional lives and cores so genuine it’s damn near impossible not to fall in love with all of them. Its bullet hell combat, while challenging to the point of frustration at times, keeps encounters fresh and encourages creative problem solving in a way few JRPGs ever bother to. Best of all, Undertale tells a story I hadn’t heard before, a story that unfolds in drastically different ways based on not only overt player decisions but on the little choices made moment to moment and battle to battle.<br />
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It feels a little odd to extol a game I can only talk about in the most obnoxiously vague ways - especially a game I’m calling my favorite of 2015. But lemme tell ya, in the most obnoxious way I can, <i>man </i>you gotta play it. Gems like Undertale don’t come around every day - or even every year.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>- Honorable Mentions -</b></div>
<br />
There were, of course, a lot of games I missed last year, but I thought it worth mentioning those I played after originally deciding on this Top 10 that probably would’ve made the cut had I gotten to them sooner.<br />
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<b>SOMA </b>is flawed as hell - I got so tired of its “boss” sequences breaking the flow of the story that I used a fan mod to alter their behavior - but it’s nonetheless an enthralling piece of existential horror that’s stuck in my brain for months since my playthrough. One about which I’ve got a lot more thoughts to share here one of these days.<br />
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I played Dark Souls II on console back in 2014, and I only ultimately jumped into <b>Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin </b>on PC this year to co-op through with a friend. It’s a great update to an already great game that, while failing to measure up to Dark Souls or Bloodborne as a complete world and narrative, stands nonetheless a head above every other action RPG out there.<br />
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<b>Divinity: Original Sin: Enhanced Edition </b>is also both an update to a 2014 title and a fantastic co-op RPG, one that I haven’t yet had the time to give the attention it deserves.<br />
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I’d also love to spend a lot more time with the brilliant systems of tactical espionage RPG-ish thing <b>Invisible Inc. </b>before rendering a final verdict.<br />
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<b>Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes </b>is the brain-bending party game to end all brain-bending party games, and I only wish I’d discovered it sooner.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>- Dishonorable Mentions -</b></div>
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Most Disappointing Game / Best Child Neglect Simulator:<b> <a href="http://www.y-m-m-v.com/2015/11/i-dont-want-to-set-world-on-fire.html">Fallout 4</a></b><br />
Most Broken Thing I Didn’t Even Want But Got for Free with My Video Card: <b>Batman: Arkham Knight</b><br />
Most Morally Repugnant Murder Porn, AKA the Jack Thompson Game of the Year Award: <b><a href="http://www.y-m-m-v.com/2016/03/the-cabin-woods.html">Until Dawn</a></b><br />
Most Pretentious Execution of a Genuinely Cool Concept: <b>The Beginner’s Guide</b><br />
Most Frustrating Lack of Split-Screen Multiplayer: <b>Halo 5: Guardians</b><br />
Most Abusive Digital Marketplace Pricing Practices: <b>the entire Nintendo eShop</b><br />
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-35550789319773627312016-03-12T13:11:00.000-08:002016-04-14T20:39:33.229-07:00The Cabin the Woods<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT4D-zPR6PlsQKm1IJQj8wJ7zrIpxU3IRpO7G3cJjN9Wrtq5LuJkSSPPIh1t4QwDsMc91OI2a1pxT24B6LgtZIzlU9LL5_SkLpLUCK3p-9KhyphenhyphenD7RntlYiy8jcpEOxlTWhW8qvWKxrkWcw-/s1600/untildawnboxart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT4D-zPR6PlsQKm1IJQj8wJ7zrIpxU3IRpO7G3cJjN9Wrtq5LuJkSSPPIh1t4QwDsMc91OI2a1pxT24B6LgtZIzlU9LL5_SkLpLUCK3p-9KhyphenhyphenD7RntlYiy8jcpEOxlTWhW8qvWKxrkWcw-/s320/untildawnboxart.jpg" width="256" /></a>Game: <b><i>Until Dawn</i></b><br />
Supermassive Games, 2015 (PS4)<br />
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<div class="p1">
There’s a lot to admire in Until Dawn’s ambition. Technically it’s a stunning achievement, even if the PS4’s hardware isn’t quite up to the task of rendering its ultra-realistic, motion-captured cast in real time at anything like a consistent frame rate. The idea of applying the Telltale formula to an 80s horror film and throwing a more constant threat of character death into the mix certainly seems right up my alley. After all, who hasn’t wanted to yell at the characters on screen in a slasher movie for their constant stupidity and lack of basic self-preservation instincts? On paper, the idea of directing their behavior from position of cast puppet master sounds like a perfectly fine concept for a game.<br />
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Alas, Until Dawn not only mucks up the execution of that concept but falls prey to the same old hoary tropes of the slasher genre itself. Not content just to give you a limited range of choices often stripped entirely of story context, it frequently takes even that power from the player and has the characters do the same old stupid slasher stuff anyway. It’s an insulting way of trying both to blame the players for their mistakes - though good luck knowing what those mistakes are - while wresting control at the most critical moments of consequence. Characters splitting up to investigate clear deathtraps entirely on their own? Check. Leaving crucial weapons and MacGuffins behind out of sheer blind stupidity? Check. Stopping in the middle of a life-and-death chase to argue about petty teen social vendettas? CHECK CHECK CHECK. Frequently the player has no say in anything but how badly the characters will suffer based on a series of quick-time events - though maybe one in a hundred of these quick-time events might be the trigger that later gets someone killed.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRMB-n9tzv5afePo5hU22I1zWeKkK-ziJHRk0naoJ2L2Dww24o_6GjNKEZdzLOhmvMOhZz-3X7BgSq06-_Es7ntF_gXh4gza08e3JRdv2rJME-wxyQLjmiXUur2j3XAFx_TfaCczCba6T_/s1600/untildawnjosh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRMB-n9tzv5afePo5hU22I1zWeKkK-ziJHRk0naoJ2L2Dww24o_6GjNKEZdzLOhmvMOhZz-3X7BgSq06-_Es7ntF_gXh4gza08e3JRdv2rJME-wxyQLjmiXUur2j3XAFx_TfaCczCba6T_/s400/untildawnjosh.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I’m hard-pressed to think of many games that have come this close to realtime-rendered photorealism.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Until Dawn also embraces the absolute worst narrative elements of its source materials without the slightest inclination to subvert or improve upon them - this is far more Friday the 13th Part VI than The Cabin in the Woods or Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. The characters turn out to be the same old awful slasher clichés we’ve seen a thousand times over, from the Dumb Jock to the Slutty Slut to the Hapless Nerd to the Queen Bee Bitch to the Virgin Final Girl, and Until Dawn shows not the slightest inclination to bring depth or empathy to these teens* over its grueling 10-12 hours of running time. This would have been a hard task even in the best of writer’s hands, given that the story begins with these characters doing something absolutely vile to one of their friends, but the failure to give them any kind of self-awareness or remorse for the bulk of the narrative prevents any real feeling of player connection to these brats.<br />
<br />
In fact the game goes out of its way to goad the player into killing them, reveling in some of the nastiest and most misogynistic aspects of the genre as it gleefully pushes the most egregious elements of their personalities to the nines and <i>literally asks </i>the player point blank whether they wouldn’t enjoy their gore porn more if they would just give this Queen Bee the violent comeuppance she deserves, or punish the Slutty Slut for her slutty sins accordingly. It’s all very gross, very puerile stuff, the kind of thing you might have once taken for granted in genre B-films but would hope a “story game” in 2016 would have moved past by now, particularly given what a debt Until Dawn owes to the much better-written Telltale titles.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIZj30ABLaC7VbYCIDVXrqL_6bMFpPCe7QfcU8vPBIuSC5WeQckXTKwyhgG7OLLksNq_HsRdV9yRyXerKZIx8Vx2-xqYhxfu2GCj6TFZPUFOKO05X01rmetI_mJJl4ksIE4Bxq2lXWJa-N/s1600/untildawnrope.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIZj30ABLaC7VbYCIDVXrqL_6bMFpPCe7QfcU8vPBIuSC5WeQckXTKwyhgG7OLLksNq_HsRdV9yRyXerKZIx8Vx2-xqYhxfu2GCj6TFZPUFOKO05X01rmetI_mJJl4ksIE4Bxq2lXWJa-N/s400/untildawnrope.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If nothing else there’s some genuinely fine cinematography on display from time to time.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Perhaps just as unfortunately, Until Dawn has also failed to learn the fat-stripping lessons from Telltale’s more recent entries. As bad as the story beats of Until Dawn might be, they’re not half so bad as the hours the game forces you to spend shuffling through its fixed-camera environments with Resident Evil-era tank controls as the characters perform literal pixel hunts and struggle to find doors invisible behind blocked angles. Frequently beautiful environments, to be sure, but it’s hard to appreciate the depth of care that went in to the art design when it’s used in service of 90s gameplay relics and equally dated 90s horror game clichés (SPOILER alert: you’ll spend about half your time in a spoooooky old insane asylum, as I’m sure absolutely <strike>no one</strike> everyone could have guessed). At least the fixed camera means we always get a cinematic view of those clichés.<br />
<br />
I really got the sense that the lion’s share of Until Dawn’s resources, fiscal and mental, were poured into its production design at the expense of everything else. Constant frame dips and stutters aside, the mo-cap’d character animation is truly something to behold, with possibly the most nuanced and expressive facial models I’ve seen this side of the uncanny valley. Apart from some audio mixing issues, the voice acting is similarly about as strong as it gets in gaming, and a game cast of film and TV celebrities do their damnedest to elevate the trash that is Until Dawn’s script to something at least vaguely human. For stretches it does feel very much like you’re inhabiting an actual movie. Unfortunately, if at the end of the day the best you can say about Until Dawn is that it’s an especially long and well-produced Friday the 13th sequel, you’re probably better off just watching Friday the 13th. </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Played here, true to genre form, mostly by 30-year-olds.</span><br />
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<img alt="Disliked it." border="0" class="stars" src="http://www.calebwimble.com/images/pixel_star_text_2.png" style="border: none;" title="Disliked it." /></div>
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-61057300478890815622016-03-03T11:14:00.006-08:002016-03-12T13:07:32.932-08:00The Devil's in the Details<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEXkjo6d2Ou4znTRRY-X4dLf7_YoZJ7OPgZgiP7GCyGjijr8ynsVlwRV7w7sqF1c12Wa82MMV5Ad_06kXhnU7IHxlSgL51GQlu_Krg-2i-DuLTWC7DWLw7NvwFmONIEnq2-sjdca2115xo/s1600/devildaggerscover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEXkjo6d2Ou4znTRRY-X4dLf7_YoZJ7OPgZgiP7GCyGjijr8ynsVlwRV7w7sqF1c12Wa82MMV5Ad_06kXhnU7IHxlSgL51GQlu_Krg-2i-DuLTWC7DWLw7NvwFmONIEnq2-sjdca2115xo/s320/devildaggerscover.jpg" width="256" /></a>Game: <b><i>Devil Daggers</i></b><br />
Sorath, 2016 (PC)<br />
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<div class="p1">
I used to be one of the worst Devil Daggers players in the world. Now I’m just bad. I know this because it tells me every time I die. (I’ve died a lot of times.)<br />
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It’s tough at first to know what to make of Devil Daggers. Best described as a first-person bullet hell (literally set in hell) with mechanical and aesthetic similarities to an early 90s shooter, Devil Daggers probably shares a closer relationship with Geometry Wars in my brainspace than it does with Doom or Quake. You stand on a flat floor over an empty chasm (whose edges you <strike>can</strike> will repeatedly fall off) and fight off increasingly swarming hordes of nightmare creatures for as long as you can, using fiery projectiles shot from your hand. A single collision with any foe means instant death, so even the first and easiest enemies you face - a cluster of floating skulls spewed out of a Hellraiser spire - are a constantly growing threat to be managed as the seconds tick along.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alone in the dark...</td></tr>
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And my do they tick slowly. A minute is a hell of a long time in Devil Daggers; it took nearly an hour of play before I first survived past the 60-second mark and graduated from uber scrub to plain old mittel scrub. Like any good bullet hell, Devil Daggers is brutally difficult, but the short duration of each round and the immediacy with which you can tap R to restart keeps it from being remotely as frustrating an experience as many of the ones I’ve had with the genre. Making it just shy of your former high score then getting bitten in the back by a laughing skull demon is actually much more energizing than it is infuriating; you made it that close, after all, and the knowledge that you could do it again in a matter of seconds means it’s easy to keep your eyes on the prize.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...but not for long.</td></tr>
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The problem came for me when I took a moment to ask, but, uh, <i>what </i>prize, exactly? It was easy to remain engrossed in Devil Daggers when it was all about the thrill of discovery. Its faux-retro, pixelated horrors are a beautiful work of imagination, and it’s always a thrill to hear the unfamiliar sound - and what thrilling, viscerally chilling sound design it is! - of a new demon approaching behind you. But those moments grew further and further apart as I reached my skill cap and I found myself adding fewer and fewer seconds to my top time with each hour of play. Getting off the bottom of the leaderboards was enough additional incentive for a while, but the knowledge that I will never have the skill or motivation to make it within spitting distance of the global high scores quickly removed that motivation fairly soon after I passed into the mid-leagues.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ah, bloody chunks of demon viscera. The best kind of viscera.</td></tr>
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Since binging hours of the game over the release weekend, I honestly haven’t had much interest in returning, other than to briefly watch the replays of the new high score breaking players. And you know what? For a $5 game, that’s A-OK. There’s also something to be said for a game model that sucks you in long enough to learn the basics, then appreciate the Twitch and YouTube appeal of pro playthroughs for years to come. Sure, a part of me wishes there were either a checkpoint system or random-enemy mode that made it more varied and interesting to play through the same ___ seconds of the game over and over, but there’s an argument to be made that those would undermine the competitive and Let’s Play appeal I just pointed out. The fact that I also wish the engrossing gameplay and fantastic aesthetics could be applied to a feature-length narrative game really just goes to show how much love went into this little thing, and is no way a mark against what it is. I may have already had enough of Devil Daggers for a lifetime, but I don’t for a second regret my time spent with it.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hell is other people's skulls.</td></tr>
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-84387022369831143472016-03-02T12:33:00.000-08:002016-03-02T18:18:26.017-08:00Prepare to Die (and Not Know Why)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSmLHHZEBeLLa3rV7KErBMBRhBcgB4FiSXUw1UnH43SK8miseRrCiUKzHFRjD3VzVRkEMUh4KS3fy_2xeHsynOJ9JbhSVwGFfneWJKKgdmQmLEuW6a41hU9TReEeWw1QGccMyChbYL2jmj/s1600/xcom2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSmLHHZEBeLLa3rV7KErBMBRhBcgB4FiSXUw1UnH43SK8miseRrCiUKzHFRjD3VzVRkEMUh4KS3fy_2xeHsynOJ9JbhSVwGFfneWJKKgdmQmLEuW6a41hU9TReEeWw1QGccMyChbYL2jmj/s320/xcom2.jpg" width="225" /></a>Game: <b><i>XCOM 2</i></b><br />
Firaxis, 2016 (PC version reviewed)<br />
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Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first: XCOM 2 is a fucking mess. Continuing the alarming trend of day one technical disasters in high profile releases, at the time of this review XCOM 2 is buggy to the point of brokenness if you’re lucky enough to be able to run it, and reportedly unplayable on a large number of rigs that otherwise ace the listed system requirements. Among the more stable, non-crash-to-desktop bugs are such constant joys as: enemies and allies alike disappearing or teleporting at random. Entire turn phases failing occurring invisibly. Vanishing cursors. Menu items becoming unselectable until a reload. Doors and windows failing to render, leading to your units breaking through them by surprise and eliminating your stealth cover or falling to the fire of hidden foes. Animations hanging constantly and the cinematic camera freezing as often as it functions, sometimes permanently. Clipping errors causing your units to wind up dozens of tiles away from your command point. Items disappearing out of your inventory without a single use.<br />
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The lack of an instant-undo button means your only remedy to some of these issues, if any, is a quick quit to desktop. And these are, again, just some of the glitches that <i>don’t </i>result in your GPU melting down to a pool of alien slag. Whether any game is worth putting up with that kind of aggravation, particularly at a $60 launch price tag, is a question very much worth asking.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“Deep Six” refers to the number of point black shots she’s missed in a row.</td></tr>
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So why, despite of all that, am I standing at the end of a brutal 45-hour campaign reflecting on how much I enjoyed the experience and whether I’ll play another? Chalk it up to the magic of XCOM, I guess. There’s just something so engrossing in the core formula Firaxis has found in reinventing the series that I find myself sucked into “just one more mission” hours after a squad-wiping series of bugs, personal errors, and trademark XCOM bullshit made me declare <i>that </i>was my last mission, now and forever. And there is oh, so<i> </i>much bullshit to that formula. Part of the weird XCOM paradox is that the things that make it such an interesting procedural narrative experience are the very things that make it a shoddy strategy game. As refreshing as the new squad stealth mechanics are, there’s still a constant element of unpredictability and unfairness in the enemies’ ability to appear out of nowhere and receive a free turn, or the fact that virtually every encounter with a new type of foe ensures you will lose soldiers discovering those foe’s unknown skills, or the glee with which the game flatly refuses to clue you in to which elements of base strategy will lead to a long term win or loss without painful trial and error. Enemy line of sight is a constant mystery. Mission difficulty ratings are largely useless, as a “Very Difficult” op might be a complete breeze if filled only with familiar unit types, whereas an “Easy” one might wipe your entire squad through the appearance of unknown elements without warning. Even many of the more predictable elements seem to have been included frankly just to annoy, such as the stupidity of multi-enemy targeting abilities like the Gunslinger’s “Face Off” forcing you to attack units you have mind-controlled into submission.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dr. Tygon’s not afraid to let you know how this Archon makes him feel.</td></tr>
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The truth is, however, that most of the masochistic pleasures of XCOM 2 are a result of these bullshit elements; some of the most satisfying moments in the game would likely never happen without them. The unpredictability of the abuse is as organic to the player experience as the stories that form around your beleaguered troops and their fallen comrades. You come to value these procedurally generated personalities precisely because of the awful experiences you have “shared” with them, and the constant threat of permadeath lends a weight to your choices even when they turn out to matter less than your luck of the draw (as anyone who’s ever missed an entire turn’s worth of shots can attest).<br />
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Bugs aside, XCOM 2’s improvements on the Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within formulae provide a strong framework for those stories to take place in, even if the changes are mostly iterative - and owe an undeniable debt to the <a href="http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/88">fan-made Long War mod</a> for Enemy Within. The base management tools and Pandemic-inspired world map exploration, if poorly explained and overwhelming at first, make for a much deeper and more satisfying strategy experience outside of the missions themselves, to the point where I found myself wishing the battlefield wouldn’t so frequently pull me away from management.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz2i9752dmzp2twQp8fy1Pi883vqICtNiRbqXzU91ljk2zPowv_9_ii8VowsWH1keMF9JnMCvZTOe5cZYg9_mK35eghE7HSpHc_vDDDKNOnGO2P5eOOh9VWBPo1wR30gmydq_bRiSFsjmd/s1600/2016-02-21_00001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz2i9752dmzp2twQp8fy1Pi883vqICtNiRbqXzU91ljk2zPowv_9_ii8VowsWH1keMF9JnMCvZTOe5cZYg9_mK35eghE7HSpHc_vDDDKNOnGO2P5eOOh9VWBPo1wR30gmydq_bRiSFsjmd/s400/2016-02-21_00001.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">XCOM 2 continues to tease with so many toys and so little cash with which to buy them.</td></tr>
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Missions, too, have received major improvements. The new manual evac mechanic not only feels <i>so right </i>but provides a thrilling and life-saving way to pull your team out of a botched mission or rescue incapacitated comrades. Unit skills have been revamped almost completely, with familiar classes progressing in ways that provide much more interesting choices between abilities and team composition. There’s much more variety in the enemies you face as well, with familiar foes showing off reconfigured tactics and newcomers finding all sorts of novel ways to make your life a nightmare.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1Gv_PSigT1V3OStKDMl3cCnU5ceOmHf0nBdbiuKB528lzMbpR9driknUSu91TVt914oBdYER-R_TccmouiqZD8_k_8Oa5fCnA1FPetx04BSE1bqo6qXzxTeeq1clfzENKCk2GmUmhdUQs/s1600/2016-03-02_00002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1Gv_PSigT1V3OStKDMl3cCnU5ceOmHf0nBdbiuKB528lzMbpR9driknUSu91TVt914oBdYER-R_TccmouiqZD8_k_8Oa5fCnA1FPetx04BSE1bqo6qXzxTeeq1clfzENKCk2GmUmhdUQs/s400/2016-03-02_00002.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There’s a flashy, neo-dischoteque vibe to the alien propaganda materials that would’ve been nicer to see more of in the 3D visual design. </td></tr>
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Some things haven’t changed at all. The writing’s just as earnestly awful as ever - even if it is part of the charm - and the story unfolds in ways not only predictable but downright repetitive of its predecessors. A few of the non-timed mission types still try to bore you out of Overwatch creep into making stupid decisions. Visuals have been touched up only a little, and certainly not enough to justify the new technical problems, but the bigger improvements are stylistic, particularly in the now much more varied environmental design. Mechanical improvements notwithstanding, XCOM 2 is an obvious evolution on Enemy Within, and it can struggle to justify its packaging as an independent, fully-priced sequel rather than the sort of thing a studio like Blizzard regularly puts out as a discounted expansion pack. But if you’re anything like me, you may just find XCOM 2 is exactly what you wanted more of out of the series, and all the bugs in the world won’t keep you from that “one last mission” at 3 AM on a Monday.<br />
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-72227200774701513372016-02-15T10:40:00.001-08:002016-02-15T21:28:01.162-08:00Game of the Year #4: About a Girl<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX4lytvuET9A497w9Avw-IdYvd9VF4dviY_pyD-heldbeWmL7_2W1ExTCMCZgJ62Cubf6lyva9Gq-m2IU0EcdDnEfAnke4Lb_HVIpSp16UngdtCyy9S1QGeMUYdFPTUV56zwmqaR0L4e5F/s1600/herstory.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="92" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX4lytvuET9A497w9Avw-IdYvd9VF4dviY_pyD-heldbeWmL7_2W1ExTCMCZgJ62Cubf6lyva9Gq-m2IU0EcdDnEfAnke4Lb_HVIpSp16UngdtCyy9S1QGeMUYdFPTUV56zwmqaR0L4e5F/s200/herstory.jpg" width="200" /></a><b>4. Her Story</b><br />
Sam Barlow, 2015 (PC and iOS versions reviewed)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #5 title on my personal countdown: Sam Barlow’s Her Story.</i></blockquote>
I don’t suppose there’s much left to say about Sam Barlow’s breakout <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_motion_video">FMV</a> hit that hasn’t been said, so I’ll keep it brief and reflect on my more recent follow-up experiences with the game as opposed to my original playthrough. For those who missed this high-profile indie gem or the months of heated discussion around it, Her Story is a digital detective simulator wherein you sift through an aging computer database of interrogative police video clips from 1994. Only the interviewee tapes are preserved - nothing of the detective’s (or detectives’) questions can be heard - and the archaic metadata transcription system means that, while you use simple word searches to sift through these videos for content, you are limited to viewing the top five results for any given term. Other than clicking around the virtual desktop and tagging videos with your own notes, this search bar is basically the game’s sole mechanic, but boy does it get a lot of mileage out of it.<br />
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Her Story unfolds in completely unique ways for every player due to this open-ended progression system and the near infinite number of possible search sequences that can be entered. I didn’t realize just <i>how </i>uniquely, however, until I began introducing the game to friends and discovering how utterly distinct the narrative can be depending on your pace and path of the discovery, the preconceptions individual players bring to the table, and sheer luck. As rich as these individual experiences can be, Her Story’s true potential shines nowhere more brightly than in a group setting. It’s engrossing to play the detective on your own and let yourself sink into the flow of your personal investigative narrative; it’s downright enthralling to do it as a party, feeding off one another’s speculative energy and bouncing your crazy theories and stratagems off one another like a bunch of drunken McNulties playing-acting couch Poirot. Pencils fly off of notepads, suspect profile are spouted, and the gaps between searches are filled with impassioned attacks or defenses on a particular character’s honesty or dishonesty, innocence or guilt, as all the strands of your thoughts and impressions begin to form the web that is <i>your </i>group’s Her Story narrative.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuK1kFxNBIqKSMYs-hlO1rdrtxBHWO3QV2vE8LNswEkH9H2u9IPxy5iB6UfUyTmXOhlkP6LVaSFIK9rMLlALGyel8lDzUxwCjJXz-pnjlcDkXeMaJ801ov7LEpSUWG_J9MqtgW7GYAfPvG/s1600/herstory2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuK1kFxNBIqKSMYs-hlO1rdrtxBHWO3QV2vE8LNswEkH9H2u9IPxy5iB6UfUyTmXOhlkP6LVaSFIK9rMLlALGyel8lDzUxwCjJXz-pnjlcDkXeMaJ801ov7LEpSUWG_J9MqtgW7GYAfPvG/s400/herstory2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Sure, the FMV search mechanic is an “novelty,” but Her Story is so much more than the disposable diversion that label has come to represent re gaming mechanics. It’s a meticulously crafted, one-of-a-kind experience representing no technological evolution beyond a mid-90s adventure game but glowing with ingenuity in the way that simple tech is used to create something intellectually and emotionally investing.Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-62514967179200224472016-02-14T13:36:00.001-08:002016-03-02T13:38:09.842-08:00Firewatch With Me<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnz5KojKJz2wxlzyEoC9EyfWfA2rgSpamPYlT6G2uivrpI6xSoRGx4cmy24VEh0TJXPbLdHFYDOYuYwnCWesqG3I3zca4JYAQCSR2Cd6dwEdMSzGInHo3C5Ro__bKSRhOR-C0NZjXgTDfM/s1600/Firewatch-Cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnz5KojKJz2wxlzyEoC9EyfWfA2rgSpamPYlT6G2uivrpI6xSoRGx4cmy24VEh0TJXPbLdHFYDOYuYwnCWesqG3I3zca4JYAQCSR2Cd6dwEdMSzGInHo3C5Ro__bKSRhOR-C0NZjXgTDfM/s320/Firewatch-Cover.png" width="222" /></a>Game: <b><i>Firewatch</i></b><br />
Campo Santo, 2016 (PC version reviewed)<br />
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Sometimes you just gotta get away from it all for a while, you know? Firewatch is a game about escape, both physical and emotional, and it just so happens to be a lovely little escape itself. In a brilliant and moving interactive opening sequence, you learn you are Henry, a troubled man whose life is falling to pieces. Henry has opted to spend the summer of 1989 working as a fire lookout for a national park to escape that life and spend some time reflecting on his next move over the gorgeous vistas of Wyoming.<br />
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From the starting moment, Henry’s first major means of interacting with the world is exploration as you hike the two days to his lookout in time lapse, then get acquainted with your new tower home and time period through interaction with objects in the environment. His second means is by way of direct player choice, beginning with a series of life decisions about Henry’s history and followed by the radio dialogue with his new boss, Delilah, that forms the core of his human connection in the midst of the Wyoming wilderness. The real-time conversational system feels like a more subtle, natural, and omnipresent evolution of the “ABC” Telltale menu integrated with a more mature and believable variant of the BioWare dialogue wheel. It’s an intuitive and fluid way to anchor the player to Firewatch’s story and characters, augmented all the more by a near perfect set of vocal performances and some genuinely funny and touching writing.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuMt6cpcH6vCrWjpeA-uafCC8SuEmM40jWbmXUHn3z5vIGLoV15MQPwNVXz04AfaRsuK3xPZKawe1Sw8cp0sQ2NqODUkBbAl-dDqo4zEjvlaP26U2k3lBBn7WSNsZX6NLVtWHoA6q4KGvf/s1600/2016-02-13_00012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuMt6cpcH6vCrWjpeA-uafCC8SuEmM40jWbmXUHn3z5vIGLoV15MQPwNVXz04AfaRsuK3xPZKawe1Sw8cp0sQ2NqODUkBbAl-dDqo4zEjvlaP26U2k3lBBn7WSNsZX6NLVtWHoA6q4KGvf/s400/2016-02-13_00012.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes they are, Firewatch. Yes they are.</td></tr>
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The third major means of player interaction, and the one that feels both most beholden to and iterative upon Gone Home, is the direct control of Henry’s body and his second-to-second physical choices in the world. Having just recently experienced SOMA for the first time, I was almost giddy to find so quickly another game that captures the tactile feeling of its controls, extending in design philosophy here to a minimalist UI and a Far Cry 2-style in-world map and compass. The physicality of Henry’s animations and his freedom of environmental manipulation also go a long way toward grounding the player’s sense of presence and investment in his story. Like Gone Home and SOMA, much of that object manipulation is used to read inscriptions or gather narrative clues, but most of it exists to further that sense of player presence by fleshing out Firewatch’s natural grandeur with lifelife (mostly human) details.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnkxTaLevna-_ec8-jgr4nMHSBfkB39X40O9PQ85KmXW9P2W3Nfx7NOb2n4D67r5Zia2jGMC_HYpqV9Dyn0U3JrGDWLv1WeK6kgriaAaUlzP1XegjLi3FIYtKZVln5R3U8b_YFGSXpJ4dT/s1600/2016-02-13_00002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnkxTaLevna-_ec8-jgr4nMHSBfkB39X40O9PQ85KmXW9P2W3Nfx7NOb2n4D67r5Zia2jGMC_HYpqV9Dyn0U3JrGDWLv1WeK6kgriaAaUlzP1XegjLi3FIYtKZVln5R3U8b_YFGSXpJ4dT/s400/2016-02-13_00002.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A man could get lost in this world. Especially if he has my sense of direction.</td></tr>
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It’s just one of many ways in which Firewatch succeeds at the level both of, if you’ll forgive me, the forest and the trees. The natural grandeur is truly<i> </i>goddamn grand, making Firewatch a gorgeous game to explore and snap screenshots of, no doubt about it; the devs wink about this by quickly providing the player with a cardboard disposable camera with which to take in-game photos, yet another tactile anchor into the UI-free world. It somehow manages to evoke real awe at its colorful mountains and burning sunsets even while being hyper-stylized in a jagged, angular cartoon way reminiscent of Team Fortress and Wreck-It Ralph, particularly in the character design. It would be nice if your journey were a little less constrained to trodden paths, and the narrative progression through them a little less linear, but given its production limitations Firewatch provides a commendable degree of freedom to explore.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGp_kZ8ssHhl_WIaGYqLfM16kDFos7-dRlpkkkDP7w_QbvsK14R5CKojtNlGFfQtc2BqxtZKQSvGS6j0jxbKektzWfcPPk7AJleobCfhhyyhie40imw7RKb3Y-Sz9ZKlVn1vGtU89p0mgp/s1600/2016-02-13_00015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGp_kZ8ssHhl_WIaGYqLfM16kDFos7-dRlpkkkDP7w_QbvsK14R5CKojtNlGFfQtc2BqxtZKQSvGS6j0jxbKektzWfcPPk7AJleobCfhhyyhie40imw7RKb3Y-Sz9ZKlVn1vGtU89p0mgp/s400/2016-02-13_00015.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The only fire I need to watch for is the one you set in my heart.</td></tr>
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Yet for all that big picture beauty, Firewatch’s true heart lies in the almost stream-of-consciousness flow of walkie-talkie dialogue between Henry and Delilah, to whom you can “Report” not only fires but a staggering number of verbal observations about the world. Mad Men’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1360860/">Rich Sommer</a> and The Walking Dead game’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4047315">Cissy Jones</a> thoroughly sell their roles across thousands of lines of criss-crossing dialogue that shift shape and tone in impressively subtle ways depending on the player’s actions. Conversations and character outcomes are affected by choices as small as whether to pick up an abandoned bottle of whiskey or accidents as quotidian as taking a wrong turn to a dead end on your patrol, in addition to the slightly more obvious “big decisions” for which a Telltale game would’ve provided the reminder “Delilah will remember that.”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9IlqxyK1OdLRrxx2xE1gOklSZdiQPFC0xxgft-YwtmLd_NLXiM1XkNNUSSb8vxoVhIMltgo46T6LNjAH7cxdQs366KBmtQ4P1fojNihThlPZo0PxDdUGiib1KZc0V54-MZHMnLeEDkY0i/s1600/7bb34c20-8bee-417a-8d95-03ab8ce258a4_normal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9IlqxyK1OdLRrxx2xE1gOklSZdiQPFC0xxgft-YwtmLd_NLXiM1XkNNUSSb8vxoVhIMltgo46T6LNjAH7cxdQs366KBmtQ4P1fojNihThlPZo0PxDdUGiib1KZc0V54-MZHMnLeEDkY0i/s320/7bb34c20-8bee-417a-8d95-03ab8ce258a4_normal.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I’m happy for you, Firewatch, and I’mma let you finish. But first I’m gonna sit and stare a while.</td></tr>
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I’m loathe to discuss details of these conversations and thereby spoil discovery of any of these little moments, so suffice it to say Firewatch, for all its tremendous sense of humor, goes some Deep Places and asks the player to question, along with its characters, some serious stuff about relationships, human needs, selfishness, personal responsibility, and social connection. It’s almost paradoxical that a game could manage to be such a surreal escape from real life while forcing us to confront some of its harshest realities and the very real consequences of escapism, but that’s kind of the point of Firewatch, or it would be if I were forced to say it has just one.*<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtxETjmS1-w4fKx9SqIjXuzUGUMS_McHrYSqGtmYZztyP6ktv0zs3-eH2u1CnrohhpXmWiGteXWh2HfFFyM29THK43KU_P0ZV_9y6k1A5iRKu1YdPY_e5SdFexyY9bN_L76RcJoZ5NWc_N/s1600/2016-02-13_00004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtxETjmS1-w4fKx9SqIjXuzUGUMS_McHrYSqGtmYZztyP6ktv0zs3-eH2u1CnrohhpXmWiGteXWh2HfFFyM29THK43KU_P0ZV_9y6k1A5iRKu1YdPY_e5SdFexyY9bN_L76RcJoZ5NWc_N/s320/2016-02-13_00004.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You mean you’re actually gonna make me <i>work </i>to get places?</td></tr>
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If Firewatch has one glaring flaw it’s that it doesn’t really deliver on all this emotional buildup. It crescendos to something of an anticlimax after unsuccessfully attempting to pull off Gone Home’s same narrative bait-and-switch, which now looks even more like a clever once-and-done “trick” of genre subversion that can never again be called upon with the same effect. There are other signs that development might have gotten a bit rushed in the final act, with environmental bugs showing their ugly faces for the first time, conversation becoming much more sparse for what feel like slightly contrived reasons, and narrative choices playing out in the finale in hasty and somewhat unsatisfying ways.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhisGTfubddEVvh1z2FGzHvUpC5CWikDA7pmr_XfGbsI_SB3WnFb4THW8jmkhETipUeYlpE4Wut2N_DLCSNIfjX4WpwNnsaYFI2uIYWs6hxKwkMRUre_vbfi2CCNydzDLyC7HaOHYrt_upD/s1600/2016-02-13_00022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhisGTfubddEVvh1z2FGzHvUpC5CWikDA7pmr_XfGbsI_SB3WnFb4THW8jmkhETipUeYlpE4Wut2N_DLCSNIfjX4WpwNnsaYFI2uIYWs6hxKwkMRUre_vbfi2CCNydzDLyC7HaOHYrt_upD/s400/2016-02-13_00022.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Don’t mind if I do.</td></tr>
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Disappointing conclusion notwithstanding, Firewatch has occupied my thoughts almost constantly since the credit rolled. I’m tempted to hand-wring about its problems keeping it just shy of greatness or make some equally silly and premature judgment about its place in gaming history vis-à-vis release proximity and superficial similarities to something as affected as The Witness. The more honest truth is that I found Firewatch easy to love at its best and difficult not to recommend at its worst, and it doesn’t need favorable comparisons to a diametrically opposed game in order to shine.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* It doesn’t. </span><br />
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<img alt="Really liked it." border="0" class="stars" src="http://www.calebwimble.com/images/pixel_star_text_4.png" style="border: none;" title="Really liked it" /></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-30288000545249346202016-02-10T19:51:00.000-08:002016-02-11T06:45:50.101-08:00Game of the Year #5: Which Witcher Whipped Which Witch Hunter?<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Witcher_3_cover_art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Witcher_3_cover_art.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none;" width="225" /></a><b>5. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt</b><br />
CD Projekt Red, 2015 (PC version reviewed)<br />
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<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #5 title on my personal countdown: CDPR’s The Witcher 3.</i></blockquote>
I have a strong bias in favor of interesting games. Not just good games, but games that push or break boundaries in novel ways. Games that take risks and diverge from formula. Games that aren’t afraid to be weird or to flout conventional design wisdom if it makes for a more uniquely engaging experience.<br />
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is none of these things. There’s hardly a piece of it we haven’t seen a hundred times before. It’s an iterative evolution on The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, mostly in that it follows the trend of trading discrete levels or load areas in favor of an almost completely open-world map design - sometimes at the expense of detail and intentionality in the design of individual areas. The combat has been modified from an awkward hybrid of point-and-click MMORPG combat and a Diablo-style action RPG to an awkward hybrid of Arkham-style rhythm combat and direct input Souls combat. The interface and menus are are only slightly less byzantine and unwieldy than before, or just as unwieldy in different ways, an RPG vice we’ve less gotten used to than just learned to accept. The basic open-world RPG formula of “follow map to quest giver, follow map to quest cutscene, kill/gather quest MacGuffin, follow map back to quest giver” remains the sole script in play.<br />
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So why is something as uninteresting The Witcher 3 one of my favorite games of 2015? Because it knows what it is, it knows its strengths, and it throws money and manpower and talent at those strengths until they’re stronger than anything else like it. This is most immediately apparent in the production values: The Witcher 3 is a gorgeous game, not only in its breathtaking technical facsimile of real cities and real people, nor in its colorful art design and sense of haute-renaissance-meets-high-fantasy style, but in the sheer awe it generates through combination of these elements in a gigantic, vividly lifelike world. This fidelity constantly tempts you to stand in the middle of a city watching the crowds mill by with purpose that would put Assassin’s Creed to shame, or to stop and stare at a tangerine sunset at the end of a long day’s journey and enjoy the best melancholic orchestration a big studio budget can buy.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://images-eds.xboxlive.com/image?url=imbJM3vwvcwNUnV76aRa..5z_aIeRojI3AjLwryZfF164nSwxM9bxsGrCdjbJpWRRZOM.xLumQAKiYBlhJLnb3IP6KJLOVnCkzTkPxFmowib4g8_dKlPxO9Dxxsj9t2sA5ho6HpCBG2JALOZausFXLs7PdrzlE4FRgM8IQ95SBY-&format=png&h=320&w=648" height="224" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You might stop and take a moment to enjoy the view. Probably many moments.</td></tr>
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The Witcher 3 finally delivers on the promise Oblivion made and broke a decade ago when it introduced us to a superficially huge and beautiful world that then immediately fell apart at the seams when we met its dead-eyed robot residents, mechanical encounters, and suffocating lack of personality or variety. The Witcher 3’s residents not only appear alive but <i>act </i>alive, both in their mundane habits and reactions and in their shockingly human expressions and dialogue when interacting with one another or with Geralt, our titular Witcher. The writing and acting aren’t themselves groundbreaking - we’ve seen similarly high quality in BioWare and Obsidian’s work for some time now - but combined with such stunning graphical fidelity and animation it all makes for an extraordinarily engaging experience in CDPR’s environments and with their characters.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You don’t need Ciri to solemnly swear she’s up to no good.</td></tr>
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Geralt himself is transformed from the unrelatable, emotionless cypher he was in the previous titles to a genuine human being (albeit a mutant one) simply through the subtleties of his expressions. A slight grimace at his mouth’s edges here, a glint in his eye or raised eyebrow there - each reveal something of the inner life of a person who’s not so devoid of feeling as he’d like the world to think. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in Geralt’s relationship with and search for his adopted daughter Ciri, the driving central quest of the narrative as she flees from the Ringwraith-like Wild Hunt. We can <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/extra-punctuation/15173-AAA-Video-Game-Dadbods">speculate some meta reasons why fathers seem to have become the de facto protagonist of AAA games</a>, but there’s no denying it carries tremendous emotional heft for a leading man as detached as Geralt had always been, and that it grounds the narrative in intimate realities in a way I wish more fantasy games would.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="249" src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/shacknews/assets/editorial/2015/05/Geralt-beard.jpg" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Secretly a huge softie.)</td></tr>
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That’s the Witcher 3’s core strength, really. It’s this vast and sprawling and epic thing, a dauntingly realized universe filled with more quests and characters than you could start or meet in a hundred hours. Yet for all that the game never loses sight of its humanity, even in its monsters. It’s as much the little things - the tiny touches of life - as the big ones that make The Witcher 3 great.Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-12113221861728179032016-02-09T06:21:00.000-08:002016-03-02T23:14:39.862-08:00Ceci N'est Pas Un Jeu<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpAuh060QWDgfyhndkimABAvkfJUG8cDHH5yJTY_SQ6C5Nmhlb0ZCBlUfVqnt1_ej3zEqzPlhb-79rVM4woOExXXqf023Wq__DdDifzqShKNlOOaAdlLOrwi-fJF6BJQC16X2VPws7jfBn/s1600/WitnessPoster.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpAuh060QWDgfyhndkimABAvkfJUG8cDHH5yJTY_SQ6C5Nmhlb0ZCBlUfVqnt1_ej3zEqzPlhb-79rVM4woOExXXqf023Wq__DdDifzqShKNlOOaAdlLOrwi-fJF6BJQC16X2VPws7jfBn/s320/WitnessPoster.png" width="209" /></a>Game: <b><i>The Witness</i></b><br />
Thekla Inc., 2016 (PC version reviewed)<br />
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I can’t be fair to The Witness. Not that it needs me to, mind you; despite avoiding reviews it’s been impossible not to hear about the heaps of critical acclaim being showered upon Jonathan blow’s seven-years-in-the-making follow up to Braid. But it’s worth saying right off the bat that I came to this game already fed up with the hype, less than enamored with Blow’s cult of personality, and frankly a little shocked by the $40 asking price. This left me disinclined to be charitable to it. It’s also worth saying that I liked Braid quite a bit and should be exactly the overly-analytical, found-narrative-obsessed target market that The Witness seems to be looking for.<br />
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But I really didn’t like The Witness; in fact I kind of hated it. That’s confusing, because I liked quite a few things <i>about</i> The Witness. I love the way it looks, for starters. You’re dropped onto a blazingly colorful island best described as a giant Myst puzzle box thrown into the middle of The Wind Waker’s archipelago. It’s completely deserted save for a few biblically ominous salt pillar people, and immediately brimming with mystery and mystique just begging to be untapped. I love the sense of atmosphere this mystery creates. I appreciate the loneliness and desperation for discovery it imparts. I like the way it sounds, invisible animal ambience interrupted only by the soft hum of derelict electronics left behind for your repair. I like walking round through this world, gravel crunching convincingly beneath my feet as a fully model-rendered shadow trails behind me, a sole reminder of my lonely humanity.</div>
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And yet I hate the way it plays. I hated almost every minute of it more than the last. Almost immediately upon arrival, you learn that your movement through this island is impeded by a seemingly infinite series of locked doors and contraptions, all (with unmentionable exception) opened by solving a sequence of two-dimensional line drawing grid puzzles reminiscent of the ones you used to find on the back of cereal boxes, only infinitely more fiendish. And that’s basically it. You solve these line-drawing puzzles on a screen to power a second screen. You solve the line-drawing puzzle on that screen to power another screen. Eventually these screens open a door behind which there are more screens. And you keep solving line-drawing puzzles to power more screens to open more doors, and hours later when you realize it’s never going to end you start to scream.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/files/2015/09/Image928-585x300.jpg" height="205" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">No buts about it, this is lovely, lovely looking game. But.</td></tr>
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Now I have it on good authority that The Witness does in fact end. All these hours of attempts later, I have no intention of finding out for myself. If you enjoy these endless line-drawing puzzles on any level, those days of investment might be worth your while. If you despise them as much as I do, you quickly learn that the reward for enduring misery in The Witness is...more misery. </div>
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I do mean misery. The puzzles start out simple enough but, thanks to often woefully insufficient tutorials and my own lack of skill, quickly become inscrutable. There’s generally nothing interesting about them from a uniquely game-specific perspective; most of them (again with limited exception) could just as easily - probably more easily - be played on pen and paper, preferably in short bursts, which may lend better to the eventual iOS port. As the core mechanic for exploration in a massive exploratory simulator, they are perhaps one of the most frustrating pieces of game design I have ever encountered, and their absurd degree of conceptual simplicity almost seems to mock the player for wanting something more at every turn. At least if you’re as bad at figuring them out as I am. In that sense it is every bit the Anti-Portal, whose puzzles not only serve as gateway to a rich and humorous narrative experience but which develop and evolve in ever-increasingly conceptually interesting ways. These mazes exist to teach you more mazes.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/16/161818/2440801-witness3.png" height="218" style="-webkit-user-select: none; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Get used to this. You’re going to be staring at it a lot.</td></tr>
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I say this as someone who’s otherwise a glutton for punishment in games, assuming that punishment pushes me to self-betterment and serves as the gateway to a more rewarding gameplay experience, as in Dark Souls or Dota. The Witness’s puzzles serve no such purpose. Mastery of one particular type of puzzle only means the introduction of a new and utterly alien type of puzzle whose solution spits on any wisdom you might have gleaned from previous experience. There is no joy, no satisfaction in conquering these puzzles - only relief, quickly cut short by the arrival of another. There is no narrative reward for your progress beyond access to more empty areas, no promise of rich storytelling of the Souls variety or even of a Firelink Shrine at which to rest and reflect on your visible progress. At best you might after many painful hours unlock a few faux philosophical audio logs and rejected TED Talk videos from Jonathan Blow’s tumblr. At worst, the reward for your misery is, say it with me: more misery.</div>
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Maybe that misery is the point. Maybe Blow is the mad genius The New Yorker and a sizable cadre of followers proclaim him to be. Maybe the message of The Witness <i>is </i>the misery, the cold and uncaring judgment of an absent Designer God who has condemned you to suffer through a superficially lovely purgatory to teach you a lesson about the Meaning of Games and the ascetic need to remove from them the concept of fun or player engagement on that quest for Meaning (the rather unsubtle reading Blow himself has pointed toward in interviews and pre-release teasers). Maybe these audio logs and textual tidbits <i>aren’t </i>the pseudointellectual, bombastic drivel they seem to be or that Braid’s heavy-handed storytelling frequently was. On the other hand, there’s some indication in the text that Blow is in on the joke and thinks this is all every bit as ridiculous as I do, and maybe <i>that </i>is the point. If so, it’s a cruel one, albeit one plenty of people are happy to be a part of.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8_zHh8n5jqZjKUaR1N6ui3l69RqkriiYhi8tSxHD0ZwV6Yqegm8OqcyWZJp7orNVrWeDEOxPpNj6R3cw5wLN6D8vOdM8jnJmHp1UVfX70_uvcW4T7mf3fRp8GgXfQeDjyZ6eJWibZDxhT/s1600/thewitness3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8_zHh8n5jqZjKUaR1N6ui3l69RqkriiYhi8tSxHD0ZwV6Yqegm8OqcyWZJp7orNVrWeDEOxPpNj6R3cw5wLN6D8vOdM8jnJmHp1UVfX70_uvcW4T7mf3fRp8GgXfQeDjyZ6eJWibZDxhT/s320/thewitness3.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">“Are gamers willing to pay $40 for a series of $4 iPhone puzzle games dressed up in pretty environments so long as those environments proclaim themselves to be Meaningful?”</td></tr>
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The Witness promises much and delivers little, unless its core and only puzzle mechanic happens to click with you. It’s a sad, tantalizing, almost beautiful glimpse into a world of imagination that instead reveals itself to be full of nothing but half-baked ideology, somehow more self-important in its failures than Braid’s (largely ignorable) writing ever managed to be.</div>
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But hey, your mileage may vary.<br />
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<img alt="Hated it!" border="0" class="stars" src="http://www.calebwimble.com/images/pixel_star_text_1.png" style="border: none;" title="Hated it!" /></div>
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-89860470866730311032016-01-28T21:48:00.001-08:002016-01-28T21:48:21.476-08:00Game of the Year #6: GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAL<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwC5IUz29NKbuUH62uqWh16HfM3RI_hx7J4iBOHJ8I1iRskFigaJ11OrRLvYp16PRknCx0BdwjPc2oRWdH0p3t09GmsUzQo3XkLNif7FEGMOwhix2lnxO4tjgwmYFPcdMbjlKPfEA26XYA/s1600/rocketleaguecover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwC5IUz29NKbuUH62uqWh16HfM3RI_hx7J4iBOHJ8I1iRskFigaJ11OrRLvYp16PRknCx0BdwjPc2oRWdH0p3t09GmsUzQo3XkLNif7FEGMOwhix2lnxO4tjgwmYFPcdMbjlKPfEA26XYA/s200/rocketleaguecover.jpg" width="200" /></a><b>6. Rocket League</b><br />
Psyonix, 2015 (PC version reviewed)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #6 title on my personal countdown: Psyonix’s Rocket League.</i></blockquote>
“Rocket-powered car soccer” doesn’t begin to do it justice, because the combination of those two elements render it something utterly novel and endlessly engaging. Even in a time of local multiplayer resurgence, Rocket League stands out as a damn near perfect example of how to build a 4-player experience anyone can pick up and enjoy in minutes yet that still offers genuine depth for those willing to put in a longer investment. It’s a joy not only to play but to watch, inspiring the kind of cheers and hoots and crowd investment beyond what you’d ordinarily get for a “real” sports match as cars and balls fly through the air and explode in technicolor glory.<br />
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Rocket League excels at every level of presentation and performance. Online matchmaking is refreshingly quick, reliable, and generally low-latency. Psyonix has gone above and beyond in offering regular updates not only in the form of cosmetics but in entirely new gameplay modes and “mutators” to shake up the core formula in ludicrous ways (giant cubic balls anyone?). There’s frankly not much else I can say that will encapsulate exactly what makes such a simple (albeit polished) game such a singular delight, but at the launch price of $19.99 (free for PSN players at the time of its release) it doesn’t require much of an investment to find out for yourself. In a year of blockbuster multiplayer releases like Battlefront that left me cold after just a few hours of, I find myself, my friends, and my family coming back to Rocket League on a near-constant basis.<br />
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But perhaps a few GIFs can explain it better than I ever could:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNONk_-HQanaJzTlx9plDv0b05gHYyoPrUdDF4QKYh5lgEy4ApasuVgSIrqlEfDfpsnzYoNF49pp-3UC3zOoUwrYL6uIjsavg85b8OTJ2aYGk55aDMM-qu58PZTULygsFKp89Aruhba_T5/s1600/rocketleague1.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNONk_-HQanaJzTlx9plDv0b05gHYyoPrUdDF4QKYh5lgEy4ApasuVgSIrqlEfDfpsnzYoNF49pp-3UC3zOoUwrYL6uIjsavg85b8OTJ2aYGk55aDMM-qu58PZTULygsFKp89Aruhba_T5/s400/rocketleague1.gif" width="400" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVQwA7b_XggLKZO95Z7bbgO8ICnrfBEdsa41TA3lcgLpKB62io2AjqdWTTJzuyI9dVvQYonfuHytCtqwEANnxcwfSXPks7-VkgDqKG2PXea2idXwLVWlgrrUB_9aKA2j9pSBECYyqGq3JP/s1600/rocketleague2.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVQwA7b_XggLKZO95Z7bbgO8ICnrfBEdsa41TA3lcgLpKB62io2AjqdWTTJzuyI9dVvQYonfuHytCtqwEANnxcwfSXPks7-VkgDqKG2PXea2idXwLVWlgrrUB_9aKA2j9pSBECYyqGq3JP/s400/rocketleague2.gif" width="400" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfIcjeR-ObxaPH1dA2ojm2y1cHqPx4xpZ2VViszvWdtBc74ooqDdW9jI1vS5bN6ujjP5ipKArCzAtkomDbQtHEXBS3_7ZHu5XMQtB-iHC7jpgnTm9SEoLFtTZvQv4BB2VVgzZd_DSwZFO2/s1600/rocketleague3.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfIcjeR-ObxaPH1dA2ojm2y1cHqPx4xpZ2VViszvWdtBc74ooqDdW9jI1vS5bN6ujjP5ipKArCzAtkomDbQtHEXBS3_7ZHu5XMQtB-iHC7jpgnTm9SEoLFtTZvQv4BB2VVgzZd_DSwZFO2/s400/rocketleague3.gif" width="400" /></a>Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-16407620060195748262016-01-26T10:32:00.001-08:002016-03-02T13:39:29.268-08:00Game of the Year #7: Time May Change Me, But I Can't Trace Time<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEBc-x2DX-bNdN2STcTMJv9hw2I7tH8LTovQ5obN10Zxmmh8wYnB-0VcY-vhNNWWvazY_7OQz0kVKsZW13cRU97Lye0in759nzrKQKzyV77yGWGswfYe9CNNCx-NO5p1NKIZ5OEP4IF_Bh/s1600/lifeistrangecover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEBc-x2DX-bNdN2STcTMJv9hw2I7tH8LTovQ5obN10Zxmmh8wYnB-0VcY-vhNNWWvazY_7OQz0kVKsZW13cRU97Lye0in759nzrKQKzyV77yGWGswfYe9CNNCx-NO5p1NKIZ5OEP4IF_Bh/s200/lifeistrangecover.jpg" width="200" /></a><b>7. Life Is Strange</b><br />
Dontnod Entertainment, 2015 (PC version reviewed)<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #8 title on my personal countdown: Dontnod’s Life Is Strange.</i></blockquote>
Reloading is a mechanic so old and so ubiquitous in PC gaming that we rarely think of it as a mechanic except when we are reminded of its absence, as many of us were with our first Souls games or the roguelike resurgence. In a medium traditionally defined by fantasy fulfillment and superhuman protagonists, reloading - and, by extension, the “savescumming” it incentivizes - is perhaps the greatest gaming superpower of all. Who hasn’t ever wanted to take back a phrase, undo a mistake, or use present knowledge to improve our past? I would guess a majority of us have daydreamed about it at least once in the past 24 hours.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEianhWiMx_ik3r-Yavt6OIVDO4ce_9RsL3QVuEthxZo7jqW4mSkW6i1RqwRkDLOb9MgbTtmF-TQEptb9Bq1XLK1vYqWwOWflMPfZWDDqhlVjwpSzZbPrs-9rzCYQF1gKK3CkI6Mr1ntolv9/s1600/Life-Is-Strange-Ep2-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEianhWiMx_ik3r-Yavt6OIVDO4ce_9RsL3QVuEthxZo7jqW4mSkW6i1RqwRkDLOb9MgbTtmF-TQEptb9Bq1XLK1vYqWwOWflMPfZWDDqhlVjwpSzZbPrs-9rzCYQF1gKK3CkI6Mr1ntolv9/s400/Life-Is-Strange-Ep2-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Life Is Strange obsesses over reflection, expressed in part by its own self-awareness of its indebtedness to stories like Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko, and Blade Runner.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Life Is Strange takes that daydream and transforms it into not only its central mechanic but the MacGuffin on which its entire plot rides. Max Caulfield,* a shy 18-year-old who’s returned to her small Oregon hometown on a photography scholarship to a prestigious art school, wakes up from a daydream of a (super?)natural disaster in class to find she’s developed the ability to control time and space, at least in a limited sphere around her. Max quickly does what any of us would do and uses her power to replay embarrassing moments, upstage her personal Regina Georgean nemesis, and impress her teacher crush. Max’s interventions quickly take a turn for the critical, however, when a drug-addled trust fund brat shoots her childhood best friend Chloe before her eyes. Max instinctively rewinds time to prevent the gunshot and thereby sets off a chain of events that rekindle her relationship with Chloe and plunge them both into a bizarre and possibly otherworldly conspiracy behind the peaceful facade of Arcadia Bay, Oregon.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM_RfyU-oI_0lB2n2AZkSm4YNEGIkqDPPGjgksHTfdZdvJRIE8I0BJ_BRWLyDPISRjM6CDX2RnxaVEUt6-UKeYuVRTmwaJLmV7T9pr52F_-M5sCROX91CR2jbIUcYcYeQvTG-HgAt7JZWJ/s1600/lifeisstrange3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM_RfyU-oI_0lB2n2AZkSm4YNEGIkqDPPGjgksHTfdZdvJRIE8I0BJ_BRWLyDPISRjM6CDX2RnxaVEUt6-UKeYuVRTmwaJLmV7T9pr52F_-M5sCROX91CR2jbIUcYcYeQvTG-HgAt7JZWJ/s400/lifeisstrange3.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In a year dominated by memorable characters and human moments, rebellious punk rocker Chloe might be the most memorable and human of all.</td></tr>
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In many games this protracted introduction would all have taken place in cutscenes, but like the Telltale adventure games Life Is Strange places these moments in the player’s hands and allows them to shape Max’s interactions with her classmates and town. Unlike a Telltale game, however, time presents no pressure; Max has the ability to reflect on the consequences of her actions and freely invites the player to undo their decisions and explore alternative possibilities. Often you may wind up electing the same path all over again, but there is something hugely satisfying and validating about being able to test immediate outcomes and choose the best, or at least “least worst,” of all possible worlds. Playfully aware of its dependence on and twist of the Telltale branching consequence formula, an early Life Is Strange sequence allows Max to intervene with a dispute in such a way that prompts an angry character to lash out, “You’re part of the problem, missy - I will REMEMBER this conversation.” Which, of course, he won’t, unless the player decides otherwise.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3p_yOrcZPQGYllviYZfucqVXcB61wTQcPqNbinRMhM-7TVEyj1D-AZq8fvfOW2pk3dSgyM6ICXWcS4PB8oUu_0O209jUJerAgmR9FJrJsz6gu-7o9qv6vRObOz1CbFykrmcQsb0MLVh9x/s1600/lifeisstrange4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3p_yOrcZPQGYllviYZfucqVXcB61wTQcPqNbinRMhM-7TVEyj1D-AZq8fvfOW2pk3dSgyM6ICXWcS4PB8oUu_0O209jUJerAgmR9FJrJsz6gu-7o9qv6vRObOz1CbFykrmcQsb0MLVh9x/s400/lifeisstrange4.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It may look like a “Press X to comfort” formula, but developing Max’s relationships in Life Is Strange takes a lot more time and effort than you might expect from this genre.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Occasionally Life Is Strange gets too cute with this formula and goes overboard attempting to present two options as equally desirable or undesirable, nagging the player with Max’s self-persecutory introspection and abuse from her friends even when she has every reason to be confident she made the right decision. Sometimes it jumps the gun completely and chastises the player for decisions they were never even presented with if they missed a particular moment or character while exploring. But more often than not the game allows Max to learn and grow in wholly believable ways from her time-turning experiences, forcing her into early maturity as she wrestles with questions presented by her immense power and responsibility that expand well beyond playful schoolground pranks to choices of life, death, and existence itself.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBimElsRZ2o3VNvAevNkXUeCUdKbx14CcUsONJbS5i0jrRgUolDryLWHgzAjLWtv5mmgqkU33V6misW3DOYXHk-fUkemokrw2H9atN9GJhTsME_BELhxoOwRXIJpjQYaDg5rhV4XzP_R2c/s1600/lifeisstrange2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBimElsRZ2o3VNvAevNkXUeCUdKbx14CcUsONJbS5i0jrRgUolDryLWHgzAjLWtv5mmgqkU33V6misW3DOYXHk-fUkemokrw2H9atN9GJhTsME_BELhxoOwRXIJpjQYaDg5rhV4XzP_R2c/s400/lifeisstrange2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photography is a central motif of the game, as is personal reflection. In some ways Life Is Strange is a game <i>about </i>selfies, and the ways in which they do or don’t reflect and project our identities.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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These moments let Life Is Strange shine, not through the mechanical weight of Max’s decisions but in their effect on her as a person and on the people around her. With a few jarring exceptions, the cast and writing do an admirable job imbuing Arcadia Bay with a level of humanity and psychological realism that was until recently almost unheard of in video games - especially not ones involving superpowers. Life Is Strange is far from perfect - at times the core mechanic itself collapses under some weak design decisions, particularly in the last and unfortunately weakest of its five chapters - but at its best it reflects emotional truth so rich it arguably elevates the genre.<br />
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Like its much less reverent contemporary Tales from the Borderlands, Life Is Strange could go toe-to-toe with award-winning television serials and more than hold its own from a directorial perspective, even as it centers the player in a narrative that could only be communicated through gaming. And what could be more a more appropriate way to signal the medium’s coming of age than a game whose narrative is the most literal coming of age story of all?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Can we as a species covenant never again to name a teenage protagonist after any kind of reference to <i>Catcher in the Rye - </i>oblique, half-assed, or otherwise?</span>Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-92121514872728237502016-01-23T11:08:00.000-08:002016-01-23T11:15:49.833-08:00Game of the Year #8: BROS GONNA BRO, BRO<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8iPQG3T0ocXgfEBkhmB7can2yneuycQNaKGvrkxjKh-HrpuIfS0GP0cq4frM2f3EnoPUWFoc-oAitS44-CrapbFNlsBtaM1xmjHPbT5w06-0i5cDZDSgytZ-Byjm7zUH4R3XNj_svdKdW/s1600/2728814-7740550763-1boxs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8iPQG3T0ocXgfEBkhmB7can2yneuycQNaKGvrkxjKh-HrpuIfS0GP0cq4frM2f3EnoPUWFoc-oAitS44-CrapbFNlsBtaM1xmjHPbT5w06-0i5cDZDSgytZ-Byjm7zUH4R3XNj_svdKdW/s320/2728814-7740550763-1boxs.jpg" width="232" /></a><b>8. Broforce</b><br />
Free Lives, 2015 (PC/Mac versions reviewed)<br />
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<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #8 title on my personal countdown: Free Live’s Broforce.</i></blockquote>
It doesn’t take long to know if you’ll enjoy Broforce. In fact you won’t even have to get past the title screen. You might as well just take a look at it now and not bother reading this rest of this, because it will tell you absolutely everything you need to know. Hell, even the launch trailer will do. And I say as someone who otherwise has zero use for video game trailers, especially ones without gameplay. Here’s the exception:<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Feel the freedom.</span></div>
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What did I tell you? You know right now whether you’re going to love this game, don’t you? You don’t have to read another word. </div>
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But in case you feel compelled to anyway, here’s the lowdown: Broforce is a one-to-four-player, ultraviolent, superficially retro side-scrolling shooter evoking classic Contra and Metal Slugs had either of those series featured fully destructible pixel art environments in the vein of Terraria. That is, if Terraria were in a constant state of explosion orchestrated by an enormous roster of barely-disguised, over-muscled Hollywood action heroes like Rambro, Bronan the Brobarian, and The Broniversal Soldier.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Yes, all the Bros have some variant of “bro” in their names. Even if they are not, traditionally speaking, a bro.<br />
(We’re all bros here.)</td></tr>
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These Bros band together to spread the screeching eagle of AMERICAN FREEDOM across the world and LIBERATE the inhabitants of locations like VIETMAN (yes, you read that right) from the FREEDOM-HATING FORCES OF TERROR led by SATAN THE DECEIVER himself. Mostly by blowing everything up, then shooting the devil in the face. It’s cheeseball satire of American politics and hypermasculinity sufficiently over the top to make Paul Verhoeven look downright subtle. Like the best of Verhoeven’s movies it works through sheer gleeful commitment to its absurdity and a genuine (if conflicted) love of the (mostly) mindless action films of which its characters and set pieces are parodies.<br />
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At first the game plays like a cartoon chaos simulator, particularly if you jump right in with friends. Bros die after a single point of damage, and so everything from stray bullets to falling debris to suicide bombers can mean instant death for a Bro or (way more frequently than you’d think) set off a chain reaction of explosions and ricochets that leaves your entire team dead in seconds. No big deal, though - you can jump right into the action and try again. Levels are small enough that they can be blasted through in minutes once you’ve gotten the lay of the land and decided how to “solve” their destructible environmental deathtraps in any one of thousands of possible ways. More often than not, the path of least resistance it to take the slow, stealthy approach - much easier as a solo player than with a team of enthusiastic IRL bros - but blowing the crap out of everything and dodging the fallout bullet-hell style is always an option and frequently the most effective way to blow off frustration at an especially difficult area. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">It’s raining men, hallelujah!</td></tr>
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The wonderful thing about Broforce is that it enthusiastically supports so many unique playstyles. You can have a blast treating it as a solo environmental physics puzzlebox - and the levels are exquisitely designed to support this choice - or you can turn it into a contra-esque speedrun affair, testing your ability to zip through levels and put a bullet in Satan’s head without taking a hit, <i>or</i> you can just laugh it up with friends and turn the whole comedic affair into a high-octane silly death party. Every Bro controls and combats in completely unique ways, some even breaking entirely from the Attack/Special Attack/Melee control schema to introduce all sorts of whacky shenanigans, like Mr. Anderbro (Neo)’s ability to hurl his body through the air like a human rocket and stop bullets in flight, or Brobocop’s precision targeting system that allows him to plot the path of his bullets, or Indianna Brones’ ability to whip enemies into frightened submission and swing around like Spiderman. Dynamite turkeys are also involved. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Things are actually going pretty well here. For somebody.</td></tr>
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Broforce pays brilliant homage to traditional arcade run-and-guns while taking full advantage of modern innovations. The narrative isn’t anything especially heady (shocker), but it is full of some wonderful surprises of its own. Broforce is a ludicrous, joyful thing and easily my favorite “traditional” co-op experience of the year, which to my mind more than merits its place on this list.</div>
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-75624433302691087092016-01-11T12:36:00.000-08:002016-01-11T19:12:41.215-08:00Game of the Year #9: In Defense of Defense (of the Ancients)<br />
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<b>9. Dota 2</b></div>
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Valve, 2015</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #9 title on my personal countdown: Valve’s Dota 2 Reborn.</i></blockquote>
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It’s hard to know how to begin to talk about Dota. Though you wouldn’t know it from my current MMR score, I’ve been an alternately avid and casual player since its earliest days as a Warcraft 3 map, when I somehow managed to claw my way up the clan rankings on a 2001 Compaq laptop connecting to Blizzard’s US East servers over a 28.8k modem connection. At least on days when the power wasn’t out for our half of southern Thailand. Best of times, worst of times, etc.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A little-known passage from Sun Tzu’s <i>Art of Controlled Chaos</i>.</td></tr>
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A lot’s changed since then. A little-known subset of mods once called Aeon of Strife clones (after an old Starcraft map) have risen to become the billion dollar e-sport industry known as “MOBAs,” an acronym for the stupefyingly vague label “Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas.” Dota was not the first of these, nor is it the most widely played. The younger, pay-to-play League of Legends - founded by a former Dota co-developer - rose up to swallow the largest market share while Dota was still struggling with matchmaking as a Warcraft mod and while its clone Heroes of Newerth failed to pull the playerbase to a commercial standalone client. But despite a delayed entry, the Valve-backed Dota 2 client has rapidly shot to prominence as the world’s most “serious” e-sport this side of Starcraft. Or, at the very least, the one with the most serious level of competitive play and earnings prospects for professional gamers. Seasons of Dota now involve dozens of annual tournaments on a global scale, culminating in a once-a-year blowout tournament known as The International that has now surpassed the Masters golf tour in prize pool totals, the winning team of which received twice as large a prize as the Wimbledon men and women singles champions.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the few surviving screenshots of Aeon of Strife.</td></tr>
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Yet for all the pomp and ludicrous piles of cash now involved in professional Dota, the game itself has retained the same core characteristics across its decade-long lifespan and has codified these basic elements for the genre. While this year saw a massive update to the underlying engine and the user interface components of the out-of-game menu in Dota 2 Reborn (which also reintroduced a version of the Warcraft World Editor that made mods like Dota possible in the first place), those basic elements have barely been touched even as new playable heroes are introduced and balance is altered.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pick your poison. Don’t worry, there are 112 flavors of death to sample.</td></tr>
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For anyone who’s missed this boat entirely, it’s helpful to know that “Dota,” lack of caps notwithstanding, is an acronym for Defense of the Ancients. Because that’s what the game basically boils down to: defending your Ancient, either the Radiant World Tree or the Dire Throne, with a team of five player-controlled heroes attempting to destroy the other’s. The player (usually) only has control of their personal hero (selected from a pool of over a hundred), while a rudimentary AI controls the waves of “creep” troops laying siege to the enemy tower defenses across a central dividing river. On either side of the river is “the jungle,” a series of locations populated by neutral creeps and secret shops, the control and “farming” of which can turn the tide in the overall battle. In a cave at the end of the river waits Roshan, an enormous draconic boss who typically requires an entire team to defeat but who drops tide-turning gold, experience, and items.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With years of careful study and experience, <br />
you too can understand what the hell’s going on here!</td></tr>
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And that’s basically it. Matches play out along this basic formula for anywhere from 20-60 minutes, but the actual course of each battle is utterly unique to the heroes and players involved. For the most part, players will fall into a series of loosely defined roles like “carries” (who require huge amounts of gold and experience to become useful but who ultimately carry the team to victory), “supports” (who typically possess the most spell power early on and can dedicate their gold to buying helpful items for the rest of the team), “cores” (a dependable hero something like a carry who requires less babysitting but doesn’t scale as well in the late game), and “tanks” (especially in the early years of Dota, a hefty damage sponge in the vein of a World of Warcraft tank, but typically with a strong disabling spell or two). Victory requires not only strong performance in each of these roles but constant, constructive communication among team members. There are no lone wolves in Dota, other than dead ones. The team that trusts and cooperates with one another more cohesively is almost always the team who will win.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilhGH8OZ4CqVv_LMrU068pK-Xxfm2-tLSSM4zloQvk1cxpVkKhcOkdKtIe_Jh4k79o9eLsKdww-qLyjSgi51wZ6tcwjAVwICmd1Ejsl-h87NEhisReBCbdAVUSfAkY0TAcH8hm75uEFpBF/s1600/dota_2_6_million_screenshot_moba.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilhGH8OZ4CqVv_LMrU068pK-Xxfm2-tLSSM4zloQvk1cxpVkKhcOkdKtIe_Jh4k79o9eLsKdww-qLyjSgi51wZ6tcwjAVwICmd1Ejsl-h87NEhisReBCbdAVUSfAkY0TAcH8hm75uEFpBF/s400/dota_2_6_million_screenshot_moba.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Trust me, something <i>really cool </i>just happened in this one.</td></tr>
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It’s difficult to describe in writing - hell, in anything less than many hours of firsthand experience - exactly what makes this formula so compelling, or why Dota does it so well. For one thing, it can be almost incomparably frustrating. A game that requires you to invest as much as an hour of uninterrupted time, the fun of which is wholly contingent on you and four other (often anonymous) teammates getting along in the midst of a struggle, leads either to tremendous thrill and satisfaction or to outrage rage and irritation. Small wonder that the lower ranks of Dota’s public matchmaking have a (partly deserved) reputation for housing some of the most toxic human interactions on the internet.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTI0iFTG7XfFrjZr_TFlK_MOGKf61eu6GoqgLm_2VStE0VN2lYJlogaMEDJQ3PnBISEvxW1NiQCkExYYFHRjkb0uzXWIdAwPFpoqsmvpARERl9loXFXATRByMmK_W1HEts32RVfZmLX6_p/s1600/dota_2_sunday_screenshots_9_111809+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTI0iFTG7XfFrjZr_TFlK_MOGKf61eu6GoqgLm_2VStE0VN2lYJlogaMEDJQ3PnBISEvxW1NiQCkExYYFHRjkb0uzXWIdAwPFpoqsmvpARERl9loXFXATRByMmK_W1HEts32RVfZmLX6_p/s400/dota_2_sunday_screenshots_9_111809+%25281%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jakiro is a two-headed fire-and-ice-breathing dragon. Yes, he cracks lots of silly temperature-related puns. <br />
Everyone cracks puns.</td></tr>
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But when everything goes right - when you find yourself matched with friends or friendly strangers, when you’re each giving your all and playing your part, and when you find yourself learning and improving not only in victory but from defeat - when all those stars align, you discover in Dota the most transcendent moments in multiplayer gaming. The learning curve is brutal, and even with Reborn’s much-improved tutorials Dota often requires an investment of dozens of hours before the fun sets in and hundreds before a player reaches basic competency with a handful of heroes. As with Dark Souls, the fact that so many of us endured through that and have remained loyal players for years is a testament to just how worthwhile the journey can be.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizPLUas49ABCqIDQopKVnNrj8LlU2k8W_q7O3y4sZEjS8WuKAGcrkvhdH5B0nHF0Rbr7J3per3WEc_0y_EaLW_uTCpOSfA8gtzqI7Q6Ina1mxBwY5vNDrqR3movEVSDxHYooVcubVswQJa/s1600/dota-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizPLUas49ABCqIDQopKVnNrj8LlU2k8W_q7O3y4sZEjS8WuKAGcrkvhdH5B0nHF0Rbr7J3per3WEc_0y_EaLW_uTCpOSfA8gtzqI7Q6Ina1mxBwY5vNDrqR3movEVSDxHYooVcubVswQJa/s400/dota-2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">“Undying” is more or less always a misnomer in Dota.</td></tr>
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Dota’s community at their <i>best </i>moments are what elevate the meta experience of the game to those heights. The game’s history as a community mod with sequential authorship and just goes to show how tightly jolly cooperation is wound in its DNA. That legacy received new life in this year’s Reborn update, which in addition to numerous client improvements reintroduced a version of the Warcraft World Editor that made mods like Dota possible in the first place. In just the few short months since its arrival, the modding community has used the Reborn editor to recreate hundreds of classic Dota 1 mods and game modes as well as dozens of entertaining new ones. Now after ending a particularly draining match players can jump into a far more casual round of co-op Spin Tower Defense, a chaotic 3-team king of the hill game of Overthrow, a zany 10 vs. 10 variant of Dota itself, or any endless number of mini (and not so mini) games created by the community using the Reborn toolset. If this is what the community could accomplish in just half a year with Valve’s new toy of, and if the old Warcraft mod scene that spawned Dota itself is any guide, then we can probably expect even greater things to grow out of Reborn in the coming years.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_BsV1XeQ_GFcmU8klm4j9P7iNnWjPpDAaj2xcYy1_A5H2KOB10X5KQhJOTwC8HuKl1BAOa8uurkDNNs3dSkVNzx50hT8ySijv2Ln5qaUDqoC0yhhxWPCJGk4O_nx7XxkXg2aYGfhRFBH7/s1600/Dota-2-Reborn-64bit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_BsV1XeQ_GFcmU8klm4j9P7iNnWjPpDAaj2xcYy1_A5H2KOB10X5KQhJOTwC8HuKl1BAOa8uurkDNNs3dSkVNzx50hT8ySijv2Ln5qaUDqoC0yhhxWPCJGk4O_nx7XxkXg2aYGfhRFBH7/s400/Dota-2-Reborn-64bit.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And to think in a few moments they’ll be screaming racial epithets at each other.</td></tr>
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So, there you have it. It’s a touch odd to be discussing Dota 2 as a 2015 game of the year, given its decade of life. But between the Reborn reboot, the unparalleled spectacle of the International 5, and the big return of the Dota mod scene, this is Dota’s year in a lot of ways, and as appropriate a time as ever to give it its due. It may not be for everyone, but for those who know Dota and love it, there’s nothing else quite like it.</div>
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Oh, and did I mention it’s free?</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFsdj-pfAu611xxkhKUn3FJcQ_WWJN0dhehyphenhyphenKO1XVZpcfUhXiKgcKPK9mxQ3eCANk3c4M6w2381wuWM4TphGPbleC5iTKZHa4dJ4itOGd7z1_h0Re2PcpghiskBEztlIt-c5a7sBpA3DOh/s1600/2016-01-11_00001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFsdj-pfAu611xxkhKUn3FJcQ_WWJN0dhehyphenhyphenKO1XVZpcfUhXiKgcKPK9mxQ3eCANk3c4M6w2381wuWM4TphGPbleC5iTKZHa4dJ4itOGd7z1_h0Re2PcpghiskBEztlIt-c5a7sBpA3DOh/s400/2016-01-11_00001.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Don’t worry, there are plenty of ludicrous hats to buy.</span></td></tr>
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Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-40698113326949579292016-01-04T17:46:00.000-08:002016-01-11T12:43:48.511-08:00Game of the Year #10: A Garbage Land of Sand and Sadness<br />
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<b>10. Tales from the Borderlands</b></div>
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Telltale Games, 2015 (PC version reviewed)</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>It’s that time of year again: the time when everyone who writes about games feels compelled to catalogue their experiences into top ten lists and award some lucky contestant the meaningless title of Game of the Year. It’s a fun way to collect our thoughts, reflect on how the medium advanced (or didn’t advance) since the last time around, and, most importantly, argue endlessly about why everyone else’s list is wrong. So without further ado, here’s the #10 title on my personal countdown: Telltale’s Tales from the Borderlands.</i> </blockquote>
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It can seem impossible to talk about a Telltale title without landing yourself in a preliminary debate about What It Means to Be a Video Game. On PC and consoles, anyway, Telltales’ particular brand of Adventure Lite has, rightly or wrongly, come to symbolize the extreme edge of what constitutes a “casual” game or - somewhat absurdly - something not a game at all. Phrases like “interactive television” get thrown around as if they were pejoratives, and self-styled “hardcore” gamers feel seemingly compelled to let you know that, however much they might enjoy the occasional Telltale, they ordinarily only ever play “real” games.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT7ZzYmYfXArI0muTyo5S2MxqJNbZ9mSNdPtKwOXjCYLFSxWqKznpZo7u50mR9GSDRHrZ3rmUvQK3MQfiMSEeUMGqCCDi-WCZRzzDMRXHb5PcUgiG17acH9iXeorzsKMGGkyyJAXnsYkWv/s1600/2524095-tales_fionadialogue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT7ZzYmYfXArI0muTyo5S2MxqJNbZ9mSNdPtKwOXjCYLFSxWqKznpZo7u50mR9GSDRHrZ3rmUvQK3MQfiMSEeUMGqCCDi-WCZRzzDMRXHb5PcUgiG17acH9iXeorzsKMGGkyyJAXnsYkWv/s400/2524095-tales_fionadialogue.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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If this all sounds a little ridiculous, that’s possibly because it is, and I promise won’t spend much more time on it. In a medium as fluid and expansive as games, the notion of policing titles for purity feels as absurd as it is restrictive. At the end of day, all I know is that my experience with Tales from the Borderlands was wholly different from any I’ve had in other media - tv, books, or otherwise - or any I can imagine having elsewhere. It’s a game about choice above all else - genuinely moreso than any previous Telltales - and the player’s ability to mould the characters and narrative into a version of the story they’d like to tell. And if that doesn’t get at the heart of what makes games unique, I don’t know what does.<br />
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In some ways, Tales from the Borderlands is the most Telltale game out there. We’ve clearly reached some critical point where they’ve ceased to be adventure titles in the oldschool sense, for starters. There are exactly two moments in all of Tales where you’re required to rub an item on something to advance, and if you blink you might miss them. Inventory, consequently, feels almost vestigial, with the exception of a couple key items that will automatically be available to you in relevant story moments. Exploratory free movement sections are few and far between, to the point that it feels almost strange whenever the cinematic camera cuts to the flat, classic adventure perspective. The only major element that still clearly hearkens to the genre of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle is the EchoEye™, a cybernetic eye implant that allows Rhys (protagonist #1 of 2) to scan objects and characters for no reason except to read some of the most hilarious faux-corporate-wiki captions ever written into a game. It’s a cute excuse to get some Hitchhiker’s Guide color commentary layered into the whole thing, and it never fails to amuse.</div>
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The vast majority of the game, however, is spent in a cinematic mode that feels closer to the story beats of modern BioWare than anything in the adventure genre, peppered with thousands of dialogue options and quicktime event-like action controls. So, the usual Telltale stuff, but more of it than ever before. Unlike most previous Telltales, however - and unlike BioWare’s recent titles - the choices present a lot more variety than the “Good Guy, Bad Guy, Sarcastic Asshole” selection we’ve all come to roll our eyes at. Perhaps partly because *everyone* in the Borderlands universe is a sarcastic asshole, the choices in Tales typically reflect four or so distinct varieties in approaches to a conversation or decision that could *reasonably be outgrowths of that character’s personality*, allowing the player to decide who Rhys and Fiona will gradually become in the course of their adventure. I don’t know how better to describe the improvements here than to say that this is the first Telltale game I have a strong desire to replay, and that nearly every available option was so interesting, funny, and dynamic that I almost immediately wanted to rewind each chapter to try different routes.<br />
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Did I mention this game is funny? Well it’s not. It’s the <i>funniest</i>. No, really, it is. Even in a year boasting Undertale, this may be the most consistently drop-dead hilarious writing in a game since the point-and-click Lucasarts heyday. The vocal performances are spectacular, with voice-over veterans from Troy Baker to Patrick Wharburton to Laura Bailey giving 110% over the most cartoonishly expressive comic book facial animations this side of Venture Bros. The script itself feels like the kind of story that Borderlands was always meant to tell but never had a chance to within the confines of a first-person loot-em-up. The series’ signature ultraviolence serves here not only as a source of clever commentary but as a legitimate key ingredient of the narrative and its broader themes.</div>
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And that, more than anywhere else, is where we begin to get at what makes Tales special. Telltale has told rich, mature stories before; A Wolf Among Us took all the most interesting character elements of the Fables comics and actually brought them a layer deeper. But in Tales they’ve managed something even more impressive. Every character is a source not only of their own unique punchlines but of genuine human feeling and conflict, even at their most caricatured. Your average Great Game is lucky if it can give us even one, maybe two lasting, memorable characters who stand out in our thoughts of the game long after we’ve finished it. Not so with Tales from the Borderlands. Like Undertale, there’s not a single damn one of the cast I don’t already want to spend more time with or have the opportunity to see another side of on replay. Even the many antagonists - only one of whom is a genuine villain and murderous psychopath - are either downright likable or at least empathetic personalities in the mad, mad world that is Pandora. I spent most of my time with Tales (literally) laughing out loud, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I shed more than a couple tears at the more somber moments.<br />
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So call it a “casual” game, call it interactive tv - I don’t give a damn. Tales is among the best examples of what big budget storytelling has to offer this medium, and I for one love that that medium affords us narrative experiences as diverse in one year as The Witcher 3, Dark Souls II, Her Story, and Tales from the Borderlands. It’s a big tent, and there’s room for everyone who brings something to the show.</div>
Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-27676832402313139962015-11-24T07:09:00.002-08:002016-02-27T12:18:55.592-08:00Out of the Shadow of the License<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Game: <i style="font-weight: bold;">Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Monolith Productions, 2014 (PC version reviewed)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>Who would’ve thought a licensed Lord of the Rings film tie-in would handily surpass both Assassin’s Creed and the Arkham series as the king of the Open World Action Rhythm Combat Stealthy-Stabby Things, or whatever we’re calling this genre now? Shadow of Mordor not only perfects the crowd combat and parkour mechanics that have become the core signifiers of these games but introduces the remarkable “Nemesis” system to bring its open world to life. Without going into much detail, since it’s been written about extensively elsewhere, Nemesis essentially creates a procedurally generated army of orc leaders each with their own personality and personal history with whom you as a player develop your own stories and conspire to infiltrate Sauron’s forces using a kickass set of magical mind control powers. However simple the mechanic sounds on paper (and it’s not; the tactical variations of your abilities are nearly limitless), it animates and elevates every enemy encounter in SoM into a piece of your own epic narrative and keeps Mordor’s mooks from ever feeling like the mindless masses of the Assassin’s Creed series or the inconsequential overworld encounters of the last few Arkham titles.<br />
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Slip of a story notwithstanding, SoM’s presentation actually succeeds in making Lord of the Rings’ lore compelling in a way I can’t remember any of the other games doing in a long time, even if it does behave over-seriously about the whole affair. It certainly helps that (a) the world actually feels lived in and (b) it doesn’t litter everything up with cutscenes from the films or tangential tie-ins to the actions of the Fellowship characters, some unnecessary Gollum cameos notwithstanding. SoM avoids Assassin Creed’s cardinal sin of becoming an endless icon hunt by being confident enough in its core gameplay to eliminate nearly all the half-baked minigames that have become unfortunate staples of the genre. It’s also not afraid to steal the best elements of Far Cry 3 and 4’s base design and wildlife interactions, which add even more exciting variability to the whole affair.<br />
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Despite offering two massive open world battlefields, SoM doesn’t overstay its welcome, offering enough content to keep you coming back potentially forever but wisely keeping its core story trim and free of fat. I comfortably completed the main quest in about 15 hours while taking advantage of a good chunk of the side content, which felt like exactly the right length for this kind of game and a refreshing change of pace after the endless bloat of the last dozen or so Ubisoft open-world titles. The campaign does conclude rather abruptly, but it’s more a factor of the final mission feeling a bit rushed than any problem with the narrative, which wraps up rather nicely even while leaving open a clear path to a sequel.<br />
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I could go on about SoM’s other strengths endlessly - the near-perfect pacing and challenge scaling, the almost total lack of load times, the smooth introduction of all its systems without obnoxious tutorializing, the extraordinarily competent cutscenes, the beautifully fluid character animations - but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention at least a few of its shortcomings. A few of the unskippable cinematic conventions, like the theatrical WWE-style introductions of the orc captains, get tiresome really quickly and can royally fuck up the flow of combat. Although the parkour mechanics manage to be far more reliable than Assassin Creed’s, there are still those inevitable moments of frustration when you try to scale sideways from wall to corner and wind up lunging fifty feet down to a waiting army because the contextual pathing misinterpreted your command. Stealth is a bit too forgiving, offering a temptingly simple way to undo careless mistakes and avoid the very interesting procedural consequences of player death (upon which the world advances and Sauron’s army grows and evolves while you spend some unseen downtime in the grave). And despite some gorgeous environmental design, Mordor’s fortresses can get a bit samey, with frequent deja vu confusing your infiltration strategy.<br />
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But while SoM may not be perfect, it’s as damn near perfect as any triple-A studio title of last year or this one, learning all the right lessons from its inspiration sources and introducing radical innovations so successfully as to become the definitive new standard for the genre. In an era defined by big budget failures and genre stagnation, wherein tiny indie titles have come to dominate the market of inventive ideas, Shadow of Mordor is an excellent argument that there are still some things money <i>can </i>buy when it’s thrown at the right people.<br />
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<br />Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6402834265790348380.post-46555956707082465392015-11-23T10:15:00.001-08:002016-02-27T12:20:55.485-08:00I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKT9btRYp8wDmaS85mSTYmhQwCNAzdv_4vGkG0IHwhoPglw4uLCMUabiAI0tcVIqYDal5dqujVCgynv8tFca9iWyNvw980mLn1Z4PrmLFYKfijKjbqLfL6LXOZn1czVUNPXr86IOhPpIb6/s1600/Fallout_4_box_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKT9btRYp8wDmaS85mSTYmhQwCNAzdv_4vGkG0IHwhoPglw4uLCMUabiAI0tcVIqYDal5dqujVCgynv8tFca9iWyNvw980mLn1Z4PrmLFYKfijKjbqLfL6LXOZn1czVUNPXr86IOhPpIb6/s320/Fallout_4_box_cover.jpg" width="278" /></span></a><br />
<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Two weeks in, I think I'm ready to call Fallout 4 a broad failure. Beyond the usual Bethesda technical mess that's becoming less and less acceptable with each passing decade of this engine, the game is so regressive in terms of writing, quest design, and NPC interaction as to make me wonder what on earth the studio has been doing with the seven years and hundreds of millions (billions, by some estimates) of dollars in income they've been raking in since Fallout 3. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">***Minor early-game spoilers below the jump***</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Comparisons to Fallout: New Vegas aren't helping the situation. I didn't expect Bethesda to emulate Obsidian's superior dev crew, but I did at least expect them to pick up on a few of the lessons and improvements already made in that title rather than double down on the worst elements of Fallout 3. In the past we've made a lot of excuses for the series based on intangibles like the "sheer size and wonder" of the Wasteland, but as time goes on more and more games like Witcher 3 and Divinity: Original Sin are proving it's possible to create a massive, hugely interactive world while still paying close attention to detail and the core gameplay experience.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">New Vegas offered a host of interesting factions and characters and gave the player carte blanche to ally with them, fight them, ignore them, or manipulate them at will. Missions were carefully designed and as varied as infiltration of an emperor's personal guard to mafia murder investigations to crashing a cannibal dinner party; there were always numerous possible outcomes and opportunities to resolve situations through charm, guile, or violence as you saw fit.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">In Fallout 4, there is with limited exception one kind of mission and one solution only: kill the hell out of everything. That's basically it. Align with your morally repugnant faction of choice, ask no meaningful questions (because you can't), then enjoy schlepping from Point A to Point B with the unavoidable goal of murdering every living being you encounter in between mule breaks to drop off your mountains of junk. Don't worry about reasoning with these people - 99% of Wastelanders will shoot on sight, and options for dialogue resolution are virtually nonexistent. Don't waste your time being sneaky either - you can no longer solve anything through theft or infiltration, and virtually omnipresent turret/rocket chokepoints will ensure you don't have fun trying anyway. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Some people might find the crafting and base building elements interesting; they felt pretty half-assed and perfunctory to me. And after my third attempt to build a contiguous wall (for whatever reason) using the primitive construction interface, I dumped that particular distraction. It's not really clear what the purpose of all the settlement systems are anyway, other than MOAR SETTLEMENTS and providing you with a couple easily scavengible resources along with "defend the settlement" radiant sidequests. The game expends no effort to explain why your character would take a break from the whole "finding your stolen child" thing to plant a potato farm, and even less effort to teach you how to do it effectively or what benefits the system will bring you.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">And ah yes, the "finding your stolen child" thing. You have to wonder if anyone on Bethesda's writing staff is a parent or has ever actually met a parent, because the nonchalance with which your character's <i>single overriding motivation</i> is treated ranges from the disturbing to the downright hilarious. Immediately after watching your wife get murdered and your child abducted, you burst out of the Vault all primed to figure out what the hell is going on and who you can kill to get your son back, only to find that your dialogue options with the first NPCs you meet are "What's up?" and "Care to trade?" </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Smooth, Bethesda, real smooth. As good of an example as any of the distance they've traveled from the whole "role-playing game" thing in favor of a Borderlands-esque Junk Collection and Child Neglect Simulator, minus the multiplayer or less questionable shooter mechanics. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Other problems abound. As everyone already knows, Fallout 4 is a mechanical mess, so save-scumming is a must if you care about reversing game-breaking bugs. The Pipboy interface is still a navigational nightmare, only slightly mitigated by switching from mouse and keyboard to gamepad controls. Huge swaths of the Commonwealth Wasteland are empty of all but constant-aggro enemies and a few bits of junk; Bethesda's traditional insertion of personality into bits of lore and scraps of side stories found in notes and computers is nearly absent here. Follower AI is a joke, with companions alternating between rushing straight out into death, giving away your stealth position, and blocking you into corners - but at least they can carry your stuff. While the new conversational camera angles are a nice break from the Bethesda Death Stare, the addition of a player voice does little to offset a disastrous dialogue system, as the line delivery is often wildly different from what the text selections would lead you to believe and oscillates only between Sarcastic, Whiny, Mustache-Twirlingly Evil, and Naive Idiot modes, generally with the same outcomes.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; line-height: 20px;">In spite of all the above, Fallout 4 is still big enough and baseline functional enough to be a decent open-world FPS, but a frustrating and surprisingly boring one, and certainly Bethesda's least impressive effort to date. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">-TL;DR - </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Fallout 4 chugs along like a particularly large piece of Fallout 3 DLC, improving little and taking some big steps back from Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas. </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; line-height: 20px;">There's still life in this thing to be salvaged, but not much soul to keep you there.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; line-height: 20px;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span>Calebhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18374497545791328382noreply@blogger.com0