Evil Dead: A Fist Full of Boomstick

 Confession time.  Despite being a massive fan of horror books, games and movies I have not seen ANYTHING Evil Dead related.  Not a single thing, not the original 1981 movie, not the new Evil Dead Rise from last year and absolutely nothing in between.  I have drunkenly watched some scenes from the various movies on YouTube with friends but never sat down and watched something from this franchise from start to finish.  Not that I have anything against it, it's certainly on my to-do list, but my watchlist is almost as big as my gaming backlog so its really just a case of being lost in the crowd.  

So as someone who knows fuck all about franchise, A Fistful of Boomstick was certainly an interesting experience.  Series main character Ash Williams (portrayed in game by the actual Bruce Campbell, very cool) gets embroiled in what I assume is yet another encounter with demonic monsters called Deadites and it's up to him and his trusty boomstick to make them go away.  This translates into a pretty generic (for the time) yet quite entertaining PS2 action game where you lay waste to demons while solving puzzles to progress a predictable yet decently entertaining enough plot.  The story certainly feels like a bit of an afterthought, a phoned in excuse to facilitate demon murder but judging from the fact that the franchise is about a man with a chainsaw for an arm I think moaning about the predictable twists and sub-par storytelling would be akin to moaning about the lack of story substance in something like Doom.  It's not what we're here for.

So gameplay is king in this one and it's decent enough.  One button for gun, one button for chainsaw arm, kill most things that move until a cutscene happens and then do it again until credits.  Sounds like something that might get repetetive and boring but the game isn't long enough for that to really happen.  I played through the whole thing in one sitting that took around 6 or 7 hours and right as I was maybe starting to get fed up it had the good sense to finish.  Just the right length.  Aside from the boomsticking and the chainsawing Ash also gets access to a spell book which comes with a few offensive options but is mainly used for solving puzzles.  The problem with the spellbook is that it's such a crap offensive option that it's easy to forget that you even have it and then that forgetfullness causes the game to stall horribly as you flounder around with a puzzle that's easily solved with a quick incantation.  For example there was one part where I got a Possess Deadite spell, a spell that you are supposed to use in order to grab a couple of items stashed behind an unkillable horde of the bastards.  A simple puzzle meant to show you how to use the spell but I died there multiple times trying to run in and brute force it (despite the game telling me not to) because I just flat out forgot that I had even picked up the spell.  I was so comfortable in filling everything full of buckshot that the function of my R1 button had completely left my brain.

Despite my own stupidity in that one instance, the other puzzles in this game aren't much better.  There was one puzzle that required the possession of a dog, a spell I DID remember but it then fails to show you that there is a live dog enemy behind an automatically closing door which led me to run around a mostly empty map for about 20 minutes looking for a different dog enemy to possess.  Like trying to solve a jigsaw where someone has just hidden a couple of the pieces around the house and not told you about it.  Aside from that there was a couple of annoying "put the McGuffin in the right sequence in the thing" which would have been fine if the menuing wasn't so slow and one puzzle that involved finding gems with an alarm thing which gave me Sonic Adventure 2 Knuckles flashbacks and I'd rather not thing about those sections of that game.

The bosses are also an incredibly weak aspect of the game pretty much consisting of low-tier Zelda dungeon bosses.  One where you tennis a projectile back, one where you make him run into a wall and the final boss is LITERALLY just stationary King Dodongo.  I would have liked a bit more out of its bigger fights and it's a shame we got this lame, generic, My First Video Game Boss tier shit.

All in all though, these problems aren't enough to ruin what is a pretty decent movie tie in game.  I'd argue that it's worth it just for some of the Bruce Campbell one liners.  It's not going to blow your mind or change your life but Fistful of Boomstick will give you a decently fun action game experience and a sensible chuckle

CrossCode

 

I'm pretty critical of a lot of games that I play and when there's something I don't like, I can tend to be a little mean about it.  But usually when I play a game like that, I can at least see the appeal of why other people like it, so while I'll be mean towards the game I won't think anything less of the people who do like it.  Breath of the Wild is a good example of this because I think that game is a steaming pile of overly-easy, uninteresting garbage but I can totally get why someone else might really enjoy it.  But every so often I play a game that's so foul, so heinous, so irredeemably shit in almost every way, that if you admit to enjoying it in front of me I will judge you negatively for as long as I know you.  Famously Outlast 2 was one of those games but now CrossCode can be added alongside it in the hall of shame.

Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory.  From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of.  I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics.  Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.  

But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here.  Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well.  The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first.  However the more you play the more it all falls apart.  The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore.  You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack.  You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style.  Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat.  Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar.  After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.  

The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC.  I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could.  Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting.  Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over.  The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck.  These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.  

The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason.  When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life.  All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen.  Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss.  The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door.  The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.

There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art.  Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it.  One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks

Fuck this game

Iron Tank

 

Last night I finished Iron Tank on stream so I wanna say a few things about it

When I first fired up Iron Tank I was expecting something more akin to Jackal but with a tank instead of a Jeep or whatever that game had.  While not completely off the mark it's a fair bit different in that Jackal is quite fast and arcade-like while Iron Tank is a bit more methodical in its approach.  That's not to say Iron Tank is a slow game by any stretch but careful progression into each encounter is very clearly the best route to success with this one.  

The premise for Iron Tank is simple, you are a tank and you start at the bottom of a long map and you're one and only objective is to get to the top of the map and blow up the big bad at the end 

 

While you trundle along the various paths you can get various power ups for your tank that involve a longer range shot, power powerful shots, exploding shots and rapid fire.  There's also a very rare "?" ability which wipes the entire screen of enemies and even some bosses and there's a reserve health bar that you never really get to use because this game is stingy as hell with HP.

Now I'm willing to cut the game a lot of slack given its age but the controls in this game are awful and until you get used to them they will be the prime reason for you eating one too many bullets and blowing up more often than not.  The standard stuff makes sense like moving with D Pad and shooting regular bullets with A and tank shells with B but things get real fucky when you have to start manipulating the direction of the turret.  To do that you have to hold down A and then move in the directon you want the turret to face.  The problem with this is that you cant move the turret by itself so you get into situations where an enemy is right up in your face and you end up taking collision damage because you ran into him when trying to turn the turret to shoot him.  This then has the knock on effect of the turret then being the wrong way so another enemy can come from the other direction and shove a shell right up your exhaust pipe, which is a little annoying to say the least.

But to be fair to Iron Tank, it's EXTREMELY forgiving with its checkpoints.  You get them constantly and each one even comes with a password so you can continue from that check exactly next time you play.  Even if you game over you get to start from that very same check point so considering how mosts games of this era are, Iron Tank is probably one of the most forgiving I've ever played. 

But this idea of fairness goes totally out of the window in the games final stage.  By itself, if you come prepared with items out the arse and you are ready to throw down, it isn't THAT hard.  But if you use your resources getting to that final boss and then dying on him, God have mercy on your soul because you aren't getting back without a fight.  The power up that makes your shot stronger and go through walls (F) is REQUIRED for that final area but there isn't any pick ups of it to refill.  So in my playthrough I made it to the end, pretty easily I might add when I was geared out, but then died to the final guy because if his hitbox comes even 1 pixel on top of you, you die instantly.  This then led to a good while of me trying and failing to even get to that final boss again because I only had a weak shot and the only powerups that the game was giving to me was rapid fire and some useless AOE thing.

What I COULD have done is used a password for an area or two back so I could make sure I had enough F for when I got to the boss but I was at wits end with this nonsense so I pulled out a game genie and gave myself infinite health.  I'm not proud of it really but even with the cheat the boss could STILL kill me with direct contact and that was about the only part of him that was a problem so I'm taking the win, sue me.

Despite my final area frustrations though, I had a lot of fun with Iron Tank and it has a pretty good set of achievements on Retro Achievements.org so I'm more than willing to git gud and give it another go.  It's hard to suggest because of its janky controls but if you feel like thats something you could get around then give Iron Tank a try, a solid 6/10 NES game

Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance

 Baldurs Gate is a series one might be quite familar with if you're into the Dungeons and Dragons RPG games for PC but if you have never played Dark Alliance and expected something similar to those PC entries, then you're in for a bit of a surprise.

Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, released for the PS2 in 2001, does away with the slow, methodical RPG-based in table top style game play of the PC versions and instead goes for a more action oriented approach.  You start the game by picking a Dwarf fighter, a human archer or an elven mage and as far as character creation goes that's where it ends.  You watch a cutscene and then are quickly thrust in a sewer to go kill a bunch of rats, as is common for these kind of games.  The game probably bares more similarity to something like Diablo more than anything else where you go through dungeons, hack and slash your way through hordes of enemies and hopefully collect some sweet loot on the way.

That's not to say that ALL Dungeons and Dragons stuff has gone completely out of the window.  Each monster you slay gives experience and when you fill up your bar you gain a level.  Gaining a level grants you skill points to apply to various feats which are things ranging from hit harder and die less to all new skills to play with depending on which starting class you picked.  The last playthrough I did I chose the Dwarf fighter, so all my feats were pretty much hit harder and die less but I did get one skill called Bull Rush which made traversing the environment a bit less dull sometimes.

There is also a cool multiplayer mode where you and a friend can slay things at the same time but the game doesn't automate any of the loot sharing, it's all first come first serve so if you have a particularly greedy buddy you can expect a few arguments from time to time. My recent play of this game was solo so I'm not entirely sure but I think that experience isn't shared either which is extra annoying if you can't get any killing blows in because your buddy who stole all the good swords is doing all the killing instead.  I'm basing this on a memory from when I played this with some school buddies though so there's a chance my memory is flawed on this one.  

The one thing I can complain about for sure is the bullshit damage values on hard mode.  When I played this game in my younger days, I played it on Normal, a time before I made playing games on hard my personal standard.  Going back to it to record for the stream I thought to myself "this game is easy, I'll play it on hard!" and while it's no Dark Souls by any stretch, sometimes this game takes the piss with how much damage enemies do.  Damage in this game is always done in a range of values, for example a weapon you pick up will have a strength rating of, lets say, 4-19 or something like that.  So when you hit something it's taking that range, plus whatever stat bonuses you have and then it's applied to your strike.  The same goes for the enemies too only I think their ranges are jacked up in hard because sometimes you'll get hit and less than 1% of your HP will fall away and then a moment later you'll get hit by the same guy only he'll one shot you and cause you to reload a save.  The game IS pretty easy and almost all enemies can be beaten hitless by running in little circles around them but it can be annoying when you take a hit and either have to run away chugging HP potions like some kind of addict or you just flat out die.

Overall though it was fun coming back to Dark Alliance.  If you're looking for a sort of brain-off hit the goblins till they die kind of action game then give it a go.  Even if you aren't into table top games AT ALL it's a fun little romp through a bunch of location severing scalps from heads for EXP and gold and it's just generally very much worth playing

Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice

 

This weekend I played through Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice from start to finish on stream and it's another one of those games that completely baffles me because it seems to be rated pretty highly among the gaming masses and yet I feel that unless I play Outlast 2 again, Hellblade is a strong contender for this worst game I will play this year.

The story follows Senua going into hell to save the soul of her lover Dillion.  That's it, that's the entire plot.  There's a bunch of other shit going on with Senua's "mental illness" that I'll talk about later, about her being blamed for a plague and abuses from her father but as far as plot objectives go, the only thing to do is go to hell and save the soul of Dillion and bring his ass back to the world of living. 

Game play wise Hellblade is an absolute snorefest.  Most of the game revolves around "match the shape" puzzles usually in the form of locked doors but sometimes taking the form of broken stairways or bridges.  In the first form you come to a locked door with some runes on them, you study the runes and then walk around the environment until an outline of that rune appears in the middle of the screen.  When that happens you hold down R2 and pan the camera around until you line up something in the environment with the shape of the rune, rinse and repeat 2 or 3 times and then you go through the door and do it all again.  The second type is exactly the same but you just have to look at weird floating bits of debris from a certain angle so the thing you need to cross looks repaired and then it magically repairs itself.  I am not joking by the way when I say that this is EVERY. PUZZLE. IN. THE. GAME.  When you aren't doing that, you are holding up on the joystick and listening to stupid dialogue as Senua walks or jogs VERY SLOWLY around.

Sometimes though things are broken up by a little bit of combat and while the combat has a sort of heavy, satisfying feel to it, ultimately it's extremely boring.  The best way to imagine Hellblade combat is to first imagine the combat from Punch Out on the NES, adding a half assed dodge roll mechanic and then removing every single enemy special attack, that about sums it up.  Enemies will walk slowly towards you and then attack, you can dodge literally every attack by mashing the dodge button, no timing required.  After they whiff, you make a couple of light or heavy hits and you repeat this process until they fall over.  After fighting the crow dude you get a mirror that lets you "focus" which slows down the enemies and lets you go on a big killing spree until it's over.  If you do manage to take a few hits, you can also use focus to fully recover and thin out enemy numbers.  The first few encounters are sort of fun but by the time you've killed the first major boss you'll probably be begging for some combat variety and you definitely aren't getting any.

But the real reason I hate this game isn't the lackluster game play or the crap plot, but for the fact that it's incredibly dishonest.

After the first main combat encounter the game tells you "every time you fall in combat the curse will creep up Senua's arm, and when it reaches her head, all progress will be lost", meaning that if you die too often, the game is going to delete your save file.  Well guess what? It's not fucking true.  You can die as many times as you damn well like in Hellblade and sure as shit, the curse on her arm WILL creep up towards her head but it will never get there.  It gets about as high as her shoulder and then just....stops.  You're in no real danger at all.  I've heard people try to justify this with "but it's a game about mental illness and it's supposed to make you feel some of the anxiety she does blah blah blah I'm a huge dipshit that takes PR talk 100% seriously"  It didn't make me FEEL anything, I don't play games with the intention of letting the enemies or environmental hazards kill me.  You don't need to LIE to me to try and create some fake-tension, there would have been plenty of that naturally if you'd just made a competent game, but ya didn't, so all I got was boredom and anger from that stupid warning.

Leading me finally into the theme of "mental illness", a touchy and very serious subject for sure and something that should be treated with respect.  A subject matter that, if done well, may shine some light on what it's like for sufferers of mental illness for people like me who have never really struggled with it.  Well they didn't do that and I think the best thing to illustrate that was that I had a few people in my chat, people I know personally, people who I know HAVE had some kind of mental health problem and do you know how they described the depiction of mental health in Hellblade? "Insulting"

The game makes such a huge deal of how much effort went into the research and depiction of mental health for the game with a big warning at the start and the credit for the "Mental Health Advisor" being the first credit you see at the start of the game.  Well even an uninformed idiot like me can tell that it's a shitty depiction of mental health because what happens near the end of the game is that Senua goes down a hole to get Dillion's skull that she dropped, finds Garm, the Norse guardian of Hell's gate, kills him and then just sort of gets over it all.  I guess not fully but all the "psychosis" that plagues Senua throughout the game is just gone, poof, just like that, after the Garm fight.  Like I said I'm not expert on mental health issues but I'm pretty sure they don't just recover like that because you killed a big dog.  It's not the fucking flu or a mystic curse that just goes away with a magic spell, it's deep seated trauma and it just vanishes because she put a big glowy blue sword in a dogs face.  

Personally, and this is just a theory (A GAME THE..no sorry), that Ninja Theory put the mental health aspect of the plot at the forefront of the game in order to deflect criticism.  You've seen it before with other media, I think the most famous example of which being the new Ghostbusters movie.  "You can't hate the new Ghostbusters film otherwise you're a sexist".  This is just "This games about mental health so you can't hate it or you're being grossly ableist(?)" A shit ploy to sway peoples opinions, a way of stopping people saying anything bad about your boring, walking simulator-esque shit fest for fear of being seen as looking down on the mentally ill.  Maybe I'm being cynical, or maybe Ninja Theory are a bunch of pathetic fucks who haven't made anything better than a 6/10 their entire lives.

Cynical or not, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an AWFUL game.  Don't let the pretty Unreal Engine graphics fool you into thinking it's an experience worth having because it isn't.  It's a big turd.  A very polished and pretty turd, but still a turd nonetheless

The Last of Us Part 2 leaks and Naughty Dog (Spoiler Free)

The Last of Us Part 2 has been delayed and of course, the internet is not happy about it.  People are (or from what I can tell on Twitter, were) excited for this game and some users in particular are not taking the news of the delay very well.  However as you can probably tell from the title, delays are not the whole story with this, there have been big leaks regarding the story and while I have read them myself, I'm going to write this post without referencing them directly.

Before I get into the real meat of this issue though I'm going to once again touch on the issue of spoilers.  While its true that ruining the big twists of any piece of fiction for a new user makes you a bit of a dick head, at the end of the day, spoilers don't really matter do they?

For example, to take a non-TloU example, imagine that you're playing Final Fantasy 7 (PS1) for the first time and someone tells you that Aeris dies.  No more details than that, they just run up to you, scream that in your face and run away.  If you are the kind of person who, upon hearing that, throws a tantrum and stops playing the game, then I'm sorry but quite frankly you're a little bitch.  If anything a spoiler like that should have you asking questions of who, where, why or how and having you pushing on just to see how exactly something like that came to pass.  Hell, when I was streaming Resident Evil 7 around the time of its launch, some dude came in my chat and spoiled the game for me.  Only his spoiler was lacking in any detail so my reaction was one of more intrigued excitement rather than being upset or angry.   I even ASKED my friend for what happens at the end of the FF7 Remake because I had these ideas about the plot and when he explained what happens it sounded so batshit that it just made me want to play the game MORE so I could hurry up and see it for myself .

But the spoilers are only really half the story here when you start to look into just why these details were released in the first place.  From what I understand there has been some kind of pay dispute between Naughty Dog and an employee and when the company wouldn't cough up the money he was apparently owed, he coughed up the spoilers to the internet.

A quick google search can get you all manner of articles about the working hours and the working conditions at Naughty Dog and they sound pretty bad.  "Crunch" has been a problem within game development for a good while and can have some really negative effects on the people that are being subjected to it.  Hell, one quick Google search of "Naughty Dog working conditions" quickly gets you an article that references a tweet from Jonathan Cooper who states

This isn't cool, even a little bit.  These people are being worked to the bone and for what? so you can have some grimdark movie-game about a not-zombie zombie apocalypse.  Factor these statements in with the apparent reason for the leak and its easy to paint a picture in your head of the Naughty Dog offices being filled with overworked and underpaid staff.

If you're the kind of person who is currently on Twitter throwing a tantrum about <redacted> happening or Druckmann being a "SJC cuck-tard" then you're an idiot that's missing the real problem here.  Sure you can dislike the direction of the story or dislike Drukmann and his attitudes (of which there is good reason to, mind you) but what the real focus of all this SHOULD be is the way that, not just Naughty Dog, but studios in general treat their staff during a games development.  I think this story breaking off the back of "Gearbox (Borderlands) underpaying staff with promise of bonus based on sales and then not paying the bonuses" should have people getting quite upset.

These are the people that make your fucking games for crying out loud.  They put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into these things and they deserved to be compensated for that much work.  You can bitch and moan about the story or the delay but without the team behind this stuff you wouldn't have it any way, shape or form in the first place.  If you want more content like this that you really enjoy you should at least be making sure that the creative teams and minds behind it aren't dropping dead in the process of trying to get it to you because you know, a dead or hospitalized developer can't make games.

There's word in Japanese, 過労死 (karoshi), that literally means death by overwork, its been a huge problem here since long before I arrived in the country.  You HAVE to look after your staff because best case they get mad, leave and spoil your video game and worst case they just fucking die.  It's cool that these people have such passion for what they are doing but if we want to keep enjoying the fruits of their labor then we have to make sure that these people at least don't work in literal hell holes.

It's good that you're mad that this shit got leaked, just make sure your anger is being channeled in the right direction.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo Thoughts

I'm not usually one for demos.  When I'm even remotely interested in an upcoming title I try to avoid as much of the hype and marketing as possible and then just go into it on release day completely blind.  However when I caught news of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo dropping onto PSN my curiosity got the better of me in a BIG way and I practically ran home from work to download it.  Now having played it through I'll share some of my thoughts on it.

The game kicks off with the old opening that everyone whos even has a passing knowledge of the game is familiar with only this time its an absolute trip to see all that 1997 FMV done in all new PS4-O-Vision.  Not long after that cutscene ends you're in control of Cloud and are set upon by a couple of dudes to hack at.  I was playing with the combat on Normal mode but when you start the demo you are given the option of Normal, Easy and Classic and I will be going back to the demo very soon to try out the classic option but at time of writing I've not tried.

There's not really a lot to do in this demo since its just the bombing mission from the start of the game so the focus is really on getting some hands on experience with the combat.  At the start of the demo you have just Cloud to play with.  He can hack away at things with this Buster Sword in 2 modes, one for speed and one for damage or he can do an ability or cast a fire spell.  As you hack at things you fill up at ATB gauge which lets you use those spells an abilities and you can store up to two.  So for example, using the fire spell, a potion or hitting something with Braver uses up one of your meters and then you either have to wait or do some more regular hacking and slashing until you can do it again.  The more you hit things the more you fill up a little stagger meter and when that gets full you do extra damage to your opponent and exploiting weaknesses of enemies helps raise that meter even faster.  Things get real interesting when you get Barret into your party and you then have to manage a second character.  You can freely switch between your two guys and while your inactive guy while wander around the area killing enemies for you, their ATB fills up at a much slower rate than if they are actively fighting under your control.  So while, at least for the demo, its perfectly viable to control Cloud pretty much the entire time (outside of a tutorial when Barret first joins), if you really want to maximize damage then you'll want to be switching between your party members to fill up their meter and then take full advantage of a stagger when it happens. 

The one thing I didn't like about the demo was the English voice work for the characters.  It was hammed up and every time Jesse opened her mouth I got the pangs of cringe through my chest.  I'm sure the full game will have selectable voice tracks but the demo version just uses whatever language your system is set to.  My Japanese PS4 is set to English so everything was in English which means that if you're living in Japan the game will probably have full English support but its a little concerning for those that want the English text but the Japanese voices as there are no language options in the settings for the demo.  

Either way, the more I see about this game the more excited I'm starting to get.  I'm still a little skeptical of the whole, being split into multiple games thing but as far as gameplay is concerned its a solid action RPG experience and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the "full" thing.

My Friend Pedro

Just before my winter holiday started I had the joy of playing through My Friend Pedro on PC and while it is a simple game, it's an extremely fun one that you should check out.

There isn't too much of a story to speak of in Pedro, you wake up in some place and get told to kill dudes by a Banana.  I think you're trying to get revenge on someone but I don't really remember since it was early December when I finished it but the story is basically just background noise as you run through stages shooting dudes and having your banana companion quip at you.

The gameplay however is where things get interesting.  At a basic level you are tasked with running through the stages from the start to the end, killing all the dudes along the way.  You are given a pair of pistols to do this with and you can find a bunch of other weapons on the way.  You are also given a bullet time mechanic to help you line up shots and avoid damage and if you are wielding two guns you  can use the right click to split your aim between two targets.  The game itself, at least on normal difficulty, isn't that hard to just finish, but where things get tricky is the scoring system.  You are given points for each kill, for each kill you make within a certain time frame you are given a multiplier for those points and on top of that you are awarded extra points for being flashy.  So for example, you COULD stand at a distance and pop at guys one by one and play it safe OR you could run into the room, flip off a wall, shoot and exploding barrel and use your split aim to headshot the two guys nearest to you in mid air for big score.  There's also plenty of pans, bouncy thingies and other environmental things to help you with the carnage.  Those who play nice and flashy are rewarded with a rank at the end of each stage AND the game gives you a little gif of your flashiest kill that you can share on social media.

There are a couple of stages that change up the gameplay style such as a bike chase and a part where you're falling off a building but these really just amount to auto-scrollers where you shoot a set amount of dudes and maybe fight a boss.  Each stage also has its own little gimmick which means that you have to juggle planning the best way through the stage to not die and trying to find a way to get the most score.

My Friend Pedro, while a little on the short side, is a great game with quite a bit of replayability between hunting for ranks and extra difficulty modes and at 15 pounds that's a pretty good deal for what you're getting.  So if you're into things like Hotline Miami and other arcadey type, over the top action games, give this one a try. Oh, it's also avaliable on Switch.

Earth Wars: A Godawful Mess

Earth Wars is by far one of the worst indie games I've ever played and I'm the kind of Steam user that spent 25p buying a game called "Oppai Girl" so that's saying A LOT.

Earth Wars is a game that I played on PS4 after getting it for free as part of my PS+ games one month.  I finished it last week after nearly a solid year of chipping away at it because playing it for any more than about 20 minutes at a time made me want to vomit in my mouth.

The story is set after some aliens show up and make a mess of planet Earth so you and your squad have to get in there and get rid of the aliens.  Truth be told, the story had a lot more going on than that but by the 4th area or so I was so sick of it's technobabble that I just started skipping everything.  Aliens are bad and the power suits used by the Earth forces may or may not also be killing them or something like that, who knows and who cares?

Earth Wars really falls down though in it's gameplay department.  Each major section of the game is bookended by a mission where you'll kill a big boss alien.  After you kill the boss alien you are given a real timer that usually counts down from something absurd like 60 hours.  From there you play sub missions which usually involve finding an item, racing around a zone or killing a certain enemy and you are rewarded with skills for completing these quests.  The missions start to get dull and samey right in the first zone but by the end of the game every missions is basically "hey, go kill this major boss again" and it becomes even more tedious.  Finishing a mission reduces the timer by a handful of hours so clearing a few missions gets you to the next big story beat but you actually have to CLEAR the mission for it to count.  Meaning if you spent 20 minutes on one mission only to fail it near the end, then have fun doing that all over again unless you want to leave the game running for 60 ACTUAL hours.

The gameplay within these missions is even worse.  Imagine a game like Odin Sphere or Muramasa but as if it was designed by a guy who was extremely high on very powerful painkillers for the entire development cycle.  It's wooden, unresponsive, nonsensical, confusing and a whole ton of other adjectives that mean bad things.  Your character controls like your controlling one of those paper puppets with the butterfly pins so that the child who made it can manipulate the joints.  The enemies animate just as atrociously so usually combat is dreadful yet manageable but there's one clawed enemy in particular that is so fast and powerful that you are guaranteed to lose about half your life bar to one EVERY TIME.  Everything is just so janky and difficult to control and for a fast paced action game like this that's very clearly trying to be Odin Sphere or Muramasa but IN SPACE it's a massive letdown.

I do want to end on a positive note so I will say that the backgrounds and nicely drawn and the does use an interesting skill system.  You sort of have this network of nodes where one half is stat boosts and the other half is your movements.  So you can junction +X attack to the first, second or third swing of your sword so you can either spread that damage out or just do what I did and make the first attack hit like a truck and then everything else just be a shitty follow up to try and proc the death effect from my sword.  There is also a crafting system that I expect wanted you to make elemental weapons to exploit weaknesses and stuff but you just make a weapon have a death attribute that you can just smack a normal enemy until it gets the effect and then dash around the field until it dies, rendering all non boss combat trivial.

Clearly the developer of this game had their heart in the right place.  It's a terrible, horrendous, irredeemable shitty mess but a clear effort was made and I can respect that.  However that doesn't excuse the game itself from being as bad as it is.  I got it for free and I want my money back

Die Hard Isn't That Bad

So usually when I come to near the end of a game or after I've finished it I'll do a blog post on it,  I've you've been watching the stream you'll have seen I'm doing a 100 game NES challenge and I've not really talked much any of the games I've finished on here so I want to talk about the game that was, so far, probably the most fun.

Die Hard came out in 1990 for the NES and basically follows the same plot of the movie.  You are tasked with stopping the crooks of which there are 40 in the building and you have to kill them all before the timer runs out and they get away with a bunch of money.  It's a simple game and it's easy to pick up and play in short bursts thanks to  the in game timer keeping a single attempt down to about 30 minutes.

Now the game ain't perfect by any stretch.  In fact, there's a hell of a lot wrong with it really.  The two big problems with it, for me, are the controls are sort of crap which makes aiming shots and killing crooks way more stressful than it should be and the foot power gauge mechanic.  I get that it was a thing in the movie and of course, if you walk over broken glass you're gonna fuck your feet up but in this game the gauge drops just from running.  Considering this is a game where time is very much of the essence, the fact that you are punished for running is BEYOND stupid.  This games lack of quality however has been well documented by our good friend, The Angry Video Game Nerd.  The episode he did on this game, while entertaining, I think gave it a bit of a reputation that it doesn't deserve.

If you can get used to the shit controls and stupid foot system it's actually quite clever.  For example if you kill a crook and steal his radio, you can listen in and find out where the other crooks are going.  The crooks will of course wise up to you though and stop radio chatter, but if you used the radio to call the police, they will contact you and tell you where crooks have been spotted throughout the building.  If you go into one of the lower floors and blow up a computer you can fuck with the hackers efforts to open the safe, thus giving you more time to kill crooks or if you spend too much time crawling in vents, the crooks will start attacking you through the vents.  It's nice to see the game react to the way your playing and there's even a way to cheese the game by getting all the crooks to fight you at once at the end but this is stupidly hard to achieve.  There's also a pretty decent number of endings for a game this old, most of them being "you lose" endings but my favorite is that it's entirely possible for you and the final boss to kill each other at the same time and the game will be like "You saved the day but you died as well, GAME OVER" and I can't think of that many games that give you an ending for a double KO.

So if you saw that AVGN video and wrote of Die Hard as just another shit movie tie in game, I implore you to give it a go.  If you have no idea what I'm on about then go give it a go anyway because despite all it's glaring flaws its a surprisingly fun game

Diablo Immortal: Just let it die quietly

So recently Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal and fans are PISSED.  In case you saw that banner and got excited because you didn't catch the story yet, don't get your hopes up too high because it's only a mobile game.  Here's a trailer

If you view it on YouTube instead of in the blog, HOO BOY that dislike bar.

Now I get it, oh boy do I understand your rage.  A series with such a long and respected pedigree being reduced to yet another cash grab, probably gatcha in some way, premium currency pay to win mobile dogshit.  The fact that it's not just some little extra thing that Blizzard developed on the side but a thing that was shoved in your face at fucking Blizzcon like it's something you should be excited for.  The condescending attitude when an audience member asked "will we get it on PC?" and the guy, when booed for saying no, replied with "What, don't you all have phones?!".  You have every right to be boiling mad but just stop and think for a second.

There are tons of generic shitty hack and slash games on mobile already.  I hate to admit it but I sunk quite a lot of time into a hack and slash RPG on mobile called HIT for a pretty significant amount of time about a year ago.  All that time ended up being wasted though since it's just another deleted free game on my app store account now.  At the very least, we know that Diablo Immortal will have a degree of polish to it, so if you're going to play a shitty mobile hack and slash game at least a Diablo flavored one might be worth keeping on your phone for the occasional fiddle with on a bus or while you're dropping a fat shit.

Plus it's not like Blizzard are dropping everything to focus on this one mobile game.  Diablo 3 just got a Switch release so if Immortal really disgusts you that much but you want portable Diablo anyway, just go play that.  You don't see Final Fantasy fans losing their shit over Record Keeper or Brave Exvius, you can at least be happy that Blizzard are still giving D3 the love it needs to keep going for another console generation at the very least.  If you hate the look of it that much, it really is as easy just not downloading it from the app store.

Booing, disliking videos on raging online won't really do anything.  If no one downloads it though, if that game is dead from day 1, THEN Blizzard will know they cocked up.  I get that your mad but calm down and let it die quietly instead of giving it publicity so that all the know-nothings and curious children with a tablet don't end up keeping the game alive for years to come.

I personally will never play it because it'll never stack up to Dragalia Lost.

Earth Wars

Here's a game I'm still playing but it's taking me so long to finish it I felt like I'm just going to go ahead and talk about it now.  It's also not very good

Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens.  I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns.  You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved. 

The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style.  The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well.  Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.

But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play!  Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun.  It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too.  Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing.  Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process.  I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.

Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal.  You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions".  The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit".  Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again.  The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.

But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree".  The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit.  Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard".  That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.

Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it.  Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap.  Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it.  Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off.  Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.

Difficulty Nostalgia

I think everyone gets that nostalgic feeling some time.  When a memory of a game pops into your head and you get this uncontrollable urge to play it again.  When most people talk about their nostalgic experiences with a game they usually talk about a games quality, the game being either just as good or at lot worse than they remember it being.  One thing I noticed that people don't mention too much when talking about their trips into the past is difficulty.

The things I hear the most when people talk about older games the phrases I usually here are "yeah it still holds up today" or "man, that has NOT aged well".  I however had a strange case the other week when I decided to play the Vita remake of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, a game that came out on the Wii in 2009.  As I slashed my way across ye olde Japan the game played EXACTLY how I remembered it, ar least in terms of gameplay and fun factor but I found it to be WAY harder than I remembered.

I seem to remember the game being pretty easy back in 2009.  It was fast paced 2D hack and slash heaven and I don't remember getting a death until near the end of the game but in my current playthrough the second boss is pushing my shit in really hard.  I don't want to believe that I've gotten shit at games in my old age but it's either that or my memory of how well I did is WAY off.

This also occasionally happens in reverse where the game is way easier.  For me it was when I was learning how to speedrun Silent Hill 2 and I was dreading the maze near the end because in my mind it was complex and full of shit trying to kill you.  When it came to it though I blazed through it and none of the enemies came even close to touching me.

It's always fun to go back and play old games and it can suck when it doesn't live up to your expectations.  Although in my mind it kind of sucks a bit more when you go back to a game you thought you were good at only to find that you suck.

Excited For Sekiro

Usually when there's a big upcoming release I try to not get myself too excited for it.  Call me elitist or snobby or whatever but big AAA games, while enjoyable, don't usually live too long in my memory after all the release hype has died down.  However if there's one thing that does consistently impress me with every release it's From Software and it's Souls games.  Now from what I gather Sekiro isn't STRICTLY Souls, but it plays close enough for me.

Just straight off the bat I love the setting and the general look of the game.  Not because it's all Samurai and I'm a huge weeb (that much is only partly true) but I kind of like the idea of having a From Software covering as many thematic bases as possible.  We've got the high fantasy setting of the Souls games, the Euro-Horror feel of Bloodborne and in Sekiro we get a nice eastern touch, it's pretty cool.  Ni-Oh was great and all but now we have an ACTUAL Souls type game in an eastern setting rather than just a souls flavored action game from another company.

Setting aside though, I heard that this game has no real kind of leveling system which excites me greatly.  Some might lament the loss of this but as much as you might hate to admit, stats play a HUGE role in the way a Souls game progresses.  Sure, you CAN go fight those skeletons at the start of Dark Souls 1 but you're going to die in 1 hit and deal no damage in return just because your stats aren't there.  With Sekiro it sounds like it really is a true test of skill.  No more complaining about "artificial difficulty" if that's even still a thing, if you suck at Sekiro it sounds like it'll be because you ACTUALLY suck and now you have no excuse.

The feature that seems to have replaced straight up leveling is the prosthetic thing where you can equip different arms that do different things like a sort of grim-dark samurai Megaman.  I've been avoiding stuff because I want to experience as much of it for myself as possible but there seems to be one item in particular that acts like a grappling hook.  That alone is interesting because Souls have never really had much verticality so how the level design changes to suit this new found mobility is really exciting. 

If you've never played a Souls game before then you should go try one.  If you can't be bothered trying to get into a series 3 games deep then Sekiro (or Bloodborne really) might be a good place to start.  Fingers crossed that From really knock this one out of the park.

One to Watch: My Friend Pedro

Usually when I'm flicking through Facebook videos and something gaming related comes up it's usually some kind of thing that I'll close out of pretty quickly.  Some kind of meme video, top 10 or people getting their jollies off whatever big AAA game du jour is. However when the trailer for this little unheard of title crossed my feed I felt compelled to watch it all the way through.

From what I can tell, My Friend Pedro is a game about a man who seems to enjoy cosplaying as Deadpool a little bit taking instructions from a sentient banana to go into buildings and kill a bunch of bad guys.  As far as the premise in concerned it's not going to win any awards for best writing but let's be honest, with a tagline like "blood, bullets and bananas" were you really here for the plot in the first place?

The game play on the other hand is where this game looks absolutely mental.  With the main character flying around the room blasting dudes like he thinks he's Dante from Devil May Cry or some shit.  There seems to be a big focus on environmental kills as well utilizing explosive thingies or having your bullets ricochet off certain surfaces to kill dudes from the safety of a nearby wall.  There's a part in the trailer (which I'll post at the end of this post) where he throws a frying pan in the air and has his bullets bounce off it to clear an upper room of guys.

The big reason that this game piques my interest is it has a very sort of Hotline Miami vibe to it but only now it's a side scroller rather than a top down game.  I get the feeling that while there is a lot of high octane action My Friend Pedro will probably, like Hotline, be more of a puzzle game with action elements rather than a straight up shoot-a-thon.  Lot's of strategizing and probably a lot of dying with quick restarts is what I envision for the first time player (just speculation) but either way it looks like the kind of game I will get very into very quickly.

Here is the trailer if you want to check it out for yourself, it's really fuckin' cool

 

Since When Was Monster Hunter so Huge?

Monster Hunter World has come out recently and everyone around me is raving about it.  I'm not disagreeing with the raving either, Monster Hunter World looks absolutely fan-fucking-tastic, and while I've not bought it myself because it's like 8000 yen (when new games are typically around 6000) I can't wait to get my hands on it soon.

While it's nice to see a game series I enjoy get so much positive press, it's popularity is somewhat confusing to me though.  In Japan I know that Monster Hunter has always been big, you sort of just bump into it everywhere.  It might be a poster advertising Frontier in an internet cafe or some kind of promotional thing like a Monster Hunter themed design on a drink or something, it's the kind of thing that just pops up in every day life fairly often.  Now I can't speak for America but in the UK it was a different story completely, I only knew 2 people who also played Monster Hunter and apparently there was some little shop in London where hunters could go meet up to hunt stuff on Freedom Unite.

They were games that had good reviews but never much of a following.  I started to get into the series around the time of Freedom Unite and I remember having a grand old time with it.  However, back then I remember getting an armor set and posting a picture of it on Facebook to show some friends and a bunch of people chimed in with comments like "why are you such a sad fuck?" or "this game is for losers" etc.  It wasn't even a high level set, it was a shit early game thing that required no effort too, not that it really matters I guess.

I stuck with the series up to Monster Hunter Portable 3rd on the PSP (so 2008-2010 roughly) and in that time only met 1 other guy who was at all interested.  After that the series moved to 3DS which was all region locked and shit and I was living in Japan so I was sort of locked out of playing it unless I wanted to import or drop money on a Japanese 3DS but even with each DS release I didn't see anyone talking about it.

Now it's 2018, World gets released and suddenly everyone is all "MONSTER HUNTER OMG LOOKS SO GOOD!".  Like, where did this excitement come from?  I spent so much time looking for people with even a passing interest to no avail and now suddenly everyone's a fan? What the fuck happened?  It feels to me that some people are bandwagoning a bit here.  They actually don't know jack shit about the series past World but because of all the praise and publicity suddenly they love it now.

Still, I know I might be coming across as all bitter and sort of gatekeepy like "who are these filthy casuals playing MY game" but that's not the case.  It's confusing but it does make me happy to see a series I like getting so much praise and hype around it.  It all means that when I DO go and buy it I'll have plenty of people it with, finally.

Happy Hunting to newcomers and veterans alike!

Battle Circuit

So today I had a massive 3 hour gap between my driving lessons so I went down to the arcade about 5 minutes from the school to play DDR.  To my dismay however, there were a couple of people already on it and with limited time before my next class I wasn't about to waste it waiting around for those guys to finish.  The place had the usual selection of rhythm and card games but nestled in the back of this place there was an older cabinet running a game called Battle Circuit. 

Now I've never heard of this thing before but Battle Circuit is a side scrolling beat em' up made by Capcom and released in 1997.  After having a quick glance at the wikipedia page to get that date it looks like the game could support 4 players but the cabinet I was playing on only had 2 sticks so that wasn't happening any time soon.

After you put in your money you get to pick 1 of 5 characters to play as.  These involve a strong guy, a tough guy, a speedy guy , "death blow" guy and one that I don't remember.  I went for the strong guy because I like to keep things as simple as possible.

From there is a pretty standard side scrolling beat em' up.  If you've ever played anything like Final Fight or Streets of Rage then you know what you're getting with this.  The screen fills up with dudes and you punch all the dudes until they fall down dead.  There was some kind of story going on about a disk or something but I was just skipping all of it so I don't have a fucking clue.

What I was kind of surprised with though was just how fair the game felt in comparison to a lot of other titles in the genre.  I'm more than willing to admit that I'm not exactly the best when it comes to games like this but it feels like in a lot of titles enemies, especially, bosses will have moves that come out of nowhere, are crazy hard to dodge and do tons of damage.  Also the further you get into these games the more getting hit feels like coin guzzling dogshit than actual challenge.  Battle Circuit however didn't really do this and there was only one instance where I thought I lost life because of the game cheating me.  It was a woman boss with big thighs who liked to kick things (not Chun-Li, called Barbara or something) who would break your combo to spinning bird kick you across the screen which felt a little shitty but, like I said, she was the only one with an attack like that.

The game also had this upgrade system where you could buy moves or improvements for your character by beating coins out of the enemies as you went.  The extra life however was like, 1000 coins and I was only getting like, 200 a level.  There's only 8 stages too so if you're buying extra health meter or the actual useful skills then you can kiss that extra life goodbye.  The only thing I really disliked about the game was that fact you only got 1 extra life but this was offset by the game only being 50 yen a play instead of the usual 100.  I think if I had to put 100 yen for every continue I probably would have quit after my first game over.

Anyway it's a pretty good game so if you can find a way to play it then you should absolutely give it a try.  I think if you live outside of Japan the chances of you finding a cabinet are pretty slim because even in Japan I've never seen this game before.  But you know, MAME is a thing.....

Setting Up Let it Die

I've been very busy recently with a family visit to Japan so content has been a little thin on the ground but for Halloween I tried to do a little stream of Let it Die for the PS4.  If you've not heard of this game it's a sort of free to play hack and slash game made by Grasshopper Manufacture which plays a little like a Souls game and I think it has perma-death.  I've not really had much of a chance to play it however just setting it up was complete bullshit so I want to share my experience.

First of all just getting the game was bullshit.  I hopped onto the Playstation store and found it in the free to play section.  However, there was no download available that was free and I discovered that on the Japanese store the only option for you is one that comes with 2 units of the premium currency which I think is called Death Metals.  This means that the game was 108 yen which granted is only £0.70 but after being told that it was a free to play game I was a little pissed off about being forced to spend money on some in game shit I don't even know the purpose for.  While it was downloading I went and looked up Let it Die on the US and UK Playstation stores to find that on there the game IS actually free.  So really it's only the Japanese getting fucked over but it's still really annoying.

Anyway, the game loads up and the tutorial starts and I'm having a grand old time.  The game looks really nice, plays solidly and Death is a pretty interesting and funny character.  I'll talk more about the game itself once I manage to play it a bit more.  Once I finished the tutorial I was presented with another title screen and once I tried to hit go on that I got a big download message stuffed in my face.  Turns out the game only downloads the tutorial when you buy it and then downloads the rest later which resulted in me falling asleep while I was waiting and now I've not been able to play because I've been busy with family and work.

It looks like a really good game but the whole experience is a true testament to the really shitty side of modern gaming.

Dead Rising

Last weekend I streamed Dead Rising from start to finish and oh boy was it fun.  It took just a little over 9 hours and the last hour of that was pretty grueling but generally speaking this game is pretty fantastic.

If somehow you have never heard of this game I'll take a quick moment to explain.  Originally released back in 2006 for Xbox 360, Dead Rising follows the adventures of Frank West, a photojournalist who gets trapped in a mall full of zombies.  The game was interesting because you only had 72 in game hours to play with and the story segments happened at specific times which, if you missed, would lock you out of the plot for the rest of the game.  What really made this game popular though was that the mall setting allowed for the player to use a whole crazy array of weaponry against the undead.  You could opt for more traditional stuff from a hardware store like a sledgehammer or go nab a gun from a zombie police office OR you could get silly and use gumball machines, shopping carts or children's toys to try and beat the undead back to death.  There are also human boss characters the game calls psychopaths which you must kill to rescue people or to progress the game.  There was a colorful cast of lunatics which made each encounter interesting and you would really have the think on your feet the first time playing if you wanted to win.

I love this game personally, it's one of those titles that is not only fun but sort of doubles up as a stress relieving tool.  If you want to uncover the zombie mystery of the mall, then play the story but if you just want to beat the fuck out of some zombies then ignore that timer and just go crazy.  Once you beat the game there is an Overtime mode which gives a bit of extra story and and endless mode if you want all the zombie killing with none of the pressure.

I only really have two problems with this game.  The first being is that it's too fucking easy.  I said above  that the first time you play you really have to think on your feet with the bosses but once you learn that an early boss unlocks a sort of pocket chainsaw in infinite supply the game becomes super easy.  The pocket chainsaw is SO strong that I think that there's only two bosses in the game that aren't insta killed by it in like 3 very quick hits.  Once you fill up your inventory with chainsaws the game becomes LAUGHABLY easy and the need to have any other weapon sort of goes away.

My other problem comes in the third day of the game.  You end up finishing all the games "case file" missions and then you are left to just sort of wait for your ride to arrive.  The lack of things to do of substance sort of makes the last hour of the game quite dull.  Even the zombie killing comes to a screeching halt as the mall fills up with dudes with machine guns which is a damn shame really.

However don't let my two complaints about the game deter you, if you haven't already played it then you absolutely should go and try.  Oh yeah, finally, don't try to rescue survivors because the AI for this game sucks dick.

The series seems to have taken a bit of a downturn with 3 and 4 since it's trying to be all gritty now from what I can tell but the first game is a ton of fun and fantastically dumb story and dialogue will leave you with a huge grin on your face.  Play it.