The April Retro Haul

Sorry about the lack of content for the last few days, I was entertaining guests! However with those guests, I did a ton of retro shopping!

Outlast Is Terrible

Right, I've had some time to gather my thoughts and now I'm going to write a little bit about why Outlast is so fucking awful.

I'm going to split this piece into 2 parts.  The first being why it's terrible as a game and the second being why it's a terrible story.

The Game

I remember when I saw the first trailers for Outlast, it originally looked like it was going to be some kind of Mirrors Edge but with a horror setting, which sounded radical.  When I played the game I was a little disappointed that the final product was a slow, plodding, shit excuse of a survival horror game with a crappy chase mechanic

Granted you can sprint and vault over things every now and again but this isn't used well enough for it to be at all enjoyable. Ideally, the enemies should have ALWAYS been coming at you and you'd have to parkour through the facility to survive but instead we got a bunch of uninteresting hallways and a few obstacle courses for you to parkour through when they decide it's time for a chase sequence.

Speaking of corridors, the game is FAR too linear.  There is barely anything to explore and the designated hiding rooms are far too obvious.  Also there are plenty of places to hide from enemies but not enough enemies to make the majority of them worth using.  Most of the crazies in the asylum are non combative and once you realise this it kind of kills any tension because you know that chances are they are just going to sit there and spout nonsense.

The game is also formulaic and predictable which thus makes it extremely boring.  You can basically describe Outlast as follows

1) Go through some corridors
2) Come to a thing that needs to be activated but it's broken
3) There will be 2 valves/levers/buttons, one down a left path, one down a right path.
4) Hit these buttons while avoiding ONE enemy
5) Go To 1

The game also has a habit of treating you like an idiot to the point where it becomes annoying.  For example, there was a part where I came to a broken generator control panel.  The panel read something like "Pressure valve 1 and 2 non operational" and as soon as I approached it a big fat yellow message popped up saying "FIX THE PRESSURE VAVLES".  No fucking shit game, thanks for your obvious hint.

The last thing I have to moan about with the game itself is the control, it's garbage.  The character moves far too slow at walking speed so there is no need to not have your pinky locked down on the run button.  There is absolutely no need to never have the camera readied since it doesn't limit your view and you need it half the time to see in the dark. Finally, jumping is bollocks because the character jumps like he has ankle weights on and the auto grabbing of ledges sometimes doesn't work because of reasons.

The Story

The story to Outlast is one of the stupidest things in gaming history.  However I did take long breaks between each session so if I'm wrong about any of the points I'm about to make regarding the plot, please leave a comment and tell me how I'm wrong.  I'm willing to admit I forgot/misunderstood some things if you can give me a good reason.  It's still shit though.

I'm going to take a few characters from the plot and explain why they are dumb.  Doing this should cover all the major problems I have with the story.

Also Spoilers

1) The Wistleblower

The Whistleblower is the character we never see or really hear from.  The only thing we know or at least the only thing I remember is that he is the guy who tipped off the main character about what was going down at Mount Massive Asylum.  But think about all the things we see inside Mount Massive over the course of the game.

1) We see and hear about lots of other freelance journalists that entered the asylum and were killed by the inhabitants
2) One of the first encounters in the asylum is with a dead SWAT team.  The guy on the pike telling you to flee with his last breath
3) This means that this Whistleblower guy possibly tipped off the SWAT team, and then after they failed sent in ONE freelance journo with a camera and somehow hoped he would do better.

A fucking SWAT TEAM was taken out by probably one man with no weapons or intelligence (Chris Walker).  That means that the Whistleblower is a bit of a fucking moron.  But whatever, more stupid shit happens inside the asylum.

2) Chris Walker

His very existence doesn't make any fucking sense.  He is a big hulking tosser with no sense of tactics or stealth and is completely unarmed, yet somehow manages to take out a bunch of dudes with fucking rifles on his own and comes out of the whole ordeal completely unscathed. 

But let us assume that he did/could do that.  It's assumed by some people that the reason Chris Walker is trying to kill you is because he's trying to stop a new host for the Walrider.  This doesn't make any sense because how would he know the Walrider could do that?  The doctor in the wheelchair seemed pretty surprised when he discovered that it had taken over the protagonists body so HOW THE FUCK would a big hulking moron like Chris know that?!

Also if he is trying to stop a new host for the Walrider, why aren't all the nutters who are on the side of that priest guy trying to kill him?  The whole reason for the priest being there is to worship the Walrider, so why would he not be trying to take down an enemy of his faith?  I know he's a big strong guy but the priest had a fucking legion of nutters with shivs at his disposal, I'm sure they could have taken him down, he's not invincible.

3) The Walrider and Billy Hope

I'm going to bullet point these ones because this side of the story is so stupid it makes my head spin

- The Walrider is a swarm of NANOMACHINES controlled by some dudes fucking lucid dreams.  This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

-If they are controlled by Billy, how the fuck do they continue to function AFTER the protagonist killed Billy

-If the Walrider can function without Billy, why does it need to "infect" or "possess" the protagonist?  It could have just killed him

-But let's assume it needs a host and the last point was done as a last ditch effort at self preservation while Billy was dying.  The protagonist is gunned down by a team of dudes right at the end so surely it would shut down because A) The new host is fucking dead and B) I'm going to assume that the protagonist can't lucid dream

-Finally, if it is fucking nanomachines (a thing created by SCIENCE!) why does it need a traumatised host?  Couldn't they just work on the nanites to make them less awkward to fucking use.

So that's it, Outlast is a shit game.  I'll be doing another post soon about survival horror at large so watch this space.

Outlast Part 15 [FINAL!]

FINALLY! It's fucking over

Don't forget that you can send a charity donation to the Alzheimer's Society and request a playthrough or put something towards one of the donation incentives on the right hand side of this page!

The Problem With Hype

I know I made a post about a week ago about how totally hyped I am for the new Gauntlet, but getting hyped for something is not a thing I enjoy doing to myself.

You see, if you get hyped for a game and follow its development and look up all the information you can on it then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.  If the game that you've finally been waiting for comes out and it ends up sucking great deals of ass, then you are going to feel pretty crushed.  This has happened to me on numerous occasions and maybe that's why I'm a little jaded when it comes to new releases.

On the flip side, if a game comes out and you weren't really expecting much from it but upon playing you realise it's actually really good, then that's a really nice feeling.  That's not to say that you should go around hating on any release that gets any kind of press in the name of avoiding disappointment, but not getting too caught up in the whirlwinds of hype will help soften the blow a little if a game you were hoping to enjoy sucks.

But building excitement for a title is what's done for any entertainment medium, it's how sales are generated.  But for me, when certain games start getting a lot of hype or a lot of praise on release, I instantly start raising eyebrows and it causes me to judge a game a lot more harshly that I would have done previously.

Halo is the best example of this that I ever experienced.  Halo (the first one) was a good game, I enjoyed playing Halo on my friends Xbox when it first came out, it's a well polished FPS experience.  However, Halo got a lot of praise and I mean A LOT of goddamn praise.  It was being given perfect scores and hailed as one of the best games fucking ever made in the history of games.

However during the time of Halo's peak popularity, I couldn't help but find all the praise to be very silly.  I really enjoyed playing it but I had a lot of problems and quite frankly it felt like a massive step back from a lot of the FPS games that I played during my youth.  When faced with a Halo fan I would start to nitpick every little thing because of all the hype it received and in doing that I ended up kind of convincing myself that I didn't like it.  It was only when I got over myself and popped it in again that I realised that is IS a good game, it's just not the 10/10 supergame that everyone made it out to be.

It sounds really petty I know, but if you throw down a 10 I'm going to pull out the magnifying glass.

Hooked on Hearthstone

I remember when I first saw Hearthstone, I laughed a hearty laughed and said that the idea of a World of Warcraft trading game game was stupid.  Now look at me, sat in front of my computer logging onto Hearthstone daily for a quick round before work every morning like a big fat chump.

Seriously though, I like trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but the idea of having to drop large amounts of money on little bits of paper really turns me off.  That's why this kind of thing in video game format is so appealing; I get to play the game but don't have to drop as much money on it.  However Yu-Gi-Oh games tend to be full of stupid crap and I find the Magic: The Gathering games to be extremely limiting.

Then Hearthstone comes along, which to most TCG snobs may be rather simplistic but it's fast, fun and best of all completely free.  All you have to do is download some Battle.net thing and you're pretty much good to go from there, just log in and get playing.

The game of Hearthstone is rather simple.  You pick a character based on a class from World of Warcraft and use your deck of minions and spells to drain their health from 30 to 0.  Each card has a mana cost from 1 to 10 and each hero has a special skill that costs 2 mana to perform.  For example the Mage can cast a fireball that will deal 1 damage which is great for a little DPS boost if you have some spare mana at the end of your turn.

Every single card available in the game is available for free, there is no jumping through pay gates to get more cards in Hearthstone.  For 150 in game gold you can buy a booster pack that contains 5 cards.  If you want to buy more packs at the same time it costs money, but the game doesn't limit you to how many packs you can buy.  It's a little annoying that you can't stack gold purchases but it's a small inconvenience.  You earn this gold by just playing the game, there is no way to buy gold from the in game store.  Every 3 wins in normal play mode, ranked or not, nets you 10 gold.  This sounds like getting a booster is a slow process but the game gets around this by providing the player with "daily quests".  A daily quest may be something like "win 2 games with X class" or "Kill X Minions" and each completed quest nets you 40 gold.

On top of that you can spend 150 gold to enter The Arena to get even better prizes such as more gold, boosters or dust for crafting.  You keep playing games until you hit either 12 wins or 3 losses, whichever comes first and you have to do it with a deck built out of randomly selected cards.  Even if you don't own the card you can use it in arena mode if you get lucky with the drafting, so really it's up to luck but your rank or anything like that is unaffected and the prizes are really good so it's worth doing.

Finally you can craft cards using some weird crafting system that I've not really used much since I started.  Basically you can disenchant cards you don't want into dust and then use that dust to craft new cards that you do want.  I've not yet played the game long enough to know what specific cards I want for my deck but I imagine this system will become very useful to me later.

So if you like card games I'd absolutely recommend Hearthstone.  Even if you don't like Warcraft, the game itself is fun to play so if you can get over the theme there's a good game here.  Best of all, you have absolutely nothing to lose.  You can play the game for hours and hours and spend 0 money like I have or you can drop a few bucks and get a nice handful of extra cards, but don't be disappointed if those cards don't give you much of an advantage.

Easily one of my favourite games of the year so far.

Boats and Bridges: A Stupid Cliche

Recently I've been playing a lot of Eternal Sonata on the PS3 and there's a little RPG cliche that pisses me off a little more than I think it should.

As you can tell from the title, bridges and boats are quite possible the dumbest cliche in all of RPG history.  It's just a crap excuse for the developer of whatever game to throw some stupid crap enemy at you, split the party or bring the plot to a screeching halt.

Take Eternal Sonata for example

At one point in the game you fight this fat dude called Tuba on a big rickety bridge.  When you win the fight he doesn't just die like every other boss, he decides to suicide himself and smashes the bridge in half sending your party into the depths below.  This is a load of total bollocks because it's just a crap excuse to have your party split up and forces you to use some of the shittier characters for no good reason.

Eternal Sonata isn't the only game that does this but if you see a big ass bridge in an RPG, you can bet your ass some bullshit is going to follow.

However I can't think of so many games with bullshit bridges, but boats are on a whole different level of arse.  Final Fantasy X is a great example of everything wrong with boats in RPGs

This boat is EASILY one of the most boring sections of the whole damn game.  The plot to Final Fantasy X isn't exactly the best written thing on the face of the earth, but it comes to a screeching halt when you get on the S.S. Liki.  You run around and just listen to people chat about stupid shit for about 10 or 15 minutes and you get some crappy cutscene with Tidus trying to put the moves on Yuna and failing in his usual awkward way.

Then, for reasons, Sin (the big bad) just shows up and you have to fight him.  The boss fight isn't even remotely challenging and he can't even really attack you.  He just throws stupid little grasshoppers at you and you have to fend them off while Wakka kills the big fin with a beach ball.  What's even worse is that if you have some time to kill, you can really fuck the rest of the game by farming AP off the little grasshopper things (yes, I know they are called Sin Spawn, shut up)

But every RPG boat section is like this.  You do a bunch of shit on the boat that no one cares about and then you fight some kind of crap aquatic enemy like a giant squid or a big crab or some shit.  If no that, then a ghost ship turns up and you have to run around ANOTHER boring ass boat filled with stupid ghosts and other cliche undead nonsense.

Fuck boats
Fuck big ass bridges
Come up with some new terrible situation for a party to go through.

Tau Plays Outlast Part 14

Well this one went a lot better