Struggling To Care About The PS5 (for now)

 

The new collaborative console effort between Netgear and Sony is around the corner and my social media has recently exploded with people pre-ordering the new PS5 system.  Also before I get into the meat of this post, let me take a quick moment to give a big "fuck you" to all the scalpers I've seen, trying to make a ton of pre orders and then putting those on e-bay for $1000+.  You're a bunch of scumbags and if it was up to me you'd spend the rest of your life having to walk around with shoes filled with Lego.

So of course, excited to see what the new system has to offer I start doing some research and....oh dear, how boring the entire thing seems to be.  I did a quick google search for "PS5 launch games" to see what I'd be able to play and there is essentially NOTHING on the list of launch games that piques my interesting even a little bit.  Assassins' Creed, Rainbow Six, Call of Duty, some Little Big Planet thing, Spiderman, I'm sure all these games appeal to somebody but they sure as fuck do not appeal to me.

The only thing that looks sort of interesting is the Demons' Soul remaster and while it does look very shiny I'm not about to drop $600 on an entirely new system plus another $70 for the game just so I can play something that I've already played to absolute death.  I still have my copy of Demons' Souls, I still have my PS3, if I wanna play it, I'll just play that and save my money.

But you may have noticed in the title the little "(for now)" and that's because I know for an absolute fact that I'm going to end up buying one maybe about a year or so from it's launch date.  This is just the reaction I have to most systems upon launch.  It's how I felt about the PS3, it's how I felt about the PS4, it's how I felt about the Switch and now all of those systems and currently in my possession and get A LOT of use.  It's a shame the launch lineup is so lack luster, but I'm sure there will be some waifu filled RPG or some new FromSoftware game that will make me use an entire paycheck picking it up the day those titles launch.

I'm excited to see what it will offer us in the future, but for now I'm happy to kick back and attempt to catch up with my backlog

Dark Souls 2: Underwhelmingly Good

There aren't many games that I pay full price for anymore.  We live in an age where steam are just giving people free money if you play their free to play stuff and digital sales are so cheap that it barely seems worth it anymore.  That said I'm totally happy that I paid just about full price for Dark Souls 2!

The game is great and I loved almost every second of it.  It was challenging, engaging, interesting and above all, fun.  But as I sat in front of my PC last night watching the credits go buy I cant help but feel a little "meh" about the whole experience.  I know that sounds really weird and contradictory but I'll try to do the best I can to explain myself.

From a game play perspective, DS2 is fantastic.  It takes elements from the first Dark Souls that weren't all that good or just a bit annoying and makes them better while adding a few things of its own and that's great.  The world is also pretty huge and filled with plenty of lore so from a story standpoint it holds up but, and maybe this is just me, the game did absolutely NOTHING to immerse me in it's world.  At no point did I feel like I was on a grand adventure, I just felt like I was going through the motions.

Demon's Souls tells you straight up that the world is fucked because of some fog and it is up to you as a brave adventurer to go and un-fuck it.  That felt like a grand adventure and the icing on the cake was getting to learn all the radical shit about Boletaria.

Dark Souls did a great job of making me feel like I was on a grand adventure by laying on the insurmountable goals thick and fast.  One minute I'm just some prick with a sword or whatever and I have to ring some bells.  So I pull that off and I'm told that maybe I'm the Chosen Undead or something but probably not but just in case I should go and get a big pot from a castle.  So I undergo all sorts of terrible trials to get this big pot and the fucking thing turns out to be empty so I have to travel the land far and wide finding DEITIES to kill so I can steal their souls and put them in my pot.  Then once I've done THAT I have to go and fight what is essentially the father of all creation or some shit and kill him and once that was all said and done I get to decide the fate of all man.

THAT'S FUCKING RADICAL!

Dark Souls 2 on the other hand didn't really have much of anything and it's core plot felt a bit lazy.  In that game I'm just some cursed dude who's drawn to the land of Drangleic for......reasons.  When I get there some bitch tells me to go see the king but to do that I have to go and get 4 very powerful souls.  ALRITE! SOUNDS GOOD!  But once I've done that what comes next?  Well a lot of fucking nothing really.  I explore a castle, kill some bosses, open some doors and when all is said and done I don't feel like I achieved anything.

The final boss of the game is the most challenging boss in a Souls game to date from a game play perspective but I don't really know what the fuck I was fighting there.  The design of the thing made it look like Gravelord Nito's sister or some shit.  [Spoilers] Then when I killed her all I did was have a sit down in a chair and the game fucking ended [End Spoilers]

My reaction to beating Dark Souls 2 was "is that it?", and that's not the kind of reaction I should be having to a game that is supposedly about grand adventure!  Anyway, that was the biggest letdown with the game but it was full of other problems too.

Dark Souls 2 is way, WAY easier than any other Souls game.  The only parts where the game gets challenging is where poison comes in.  There are so many fucking poison segments in this game that it feels like they just forgot how to design good enemies so instead gave everything a poison attack or just make the floor poison or something to make things harder.

But even then the challenge isn't really a big deal because the Ring of Life Protection is repairable and the cost to repair it is super cheap so once you get just one of these rings then you basically never have to worry about losing souls ever again.  Death means -3000 souls while before dying meant that if you weren't careful you could potentially lose fucking everything.

Also the game makes a big deal of you losing a little bit of health every time you die, which is a big thing at the start of the game but after a while human effigies drop like candy and even if you are the worlds most unlucky person you can just buy them so that whole feature of the game just becomes completely pointless.

Despite all my complaints though I still really like Dark Souls 2, just not as much as the other Souls games.  But that says a lot about the quality of Souls as a series when a bad entry of the series is STILL really fun to play.  So even after reading about feelings of slight disappointment with this game, you should still totally go buy it

Dark Souls 2 First Impressions

I'm a little late to the grand party that is Dark Souls 2 but with a few hours played and a couple of dead bosses behind me I think I just want to spend a moment laying down my thoughts on the first hour or two of the game.

I was having some trouble with the opening cut scene but I think the story so far is a little weak.  From what I can tell you're just some guy who goes to some place for some reason and you have to go visit some king or something.  I'm sure as I get into the meat of the plot it'll end up being a lot better than that but I feel like I lack a sense of direction right now.   Still, with a big open ended adventure like this that kind of works in the games favor.

The game play basically remains unchained from Dark Souls but they added a few mechanics from Demon's Souls back in the mixer which made me really happy.  For example, dying makes you lose a little part of your maximum HP so now death feels like it has some kind of consequence while in the Dark Souls it was a mere annoyance for making a mistake. 

I remember being getting quite worried when a developer or something said that they were going to make it more accessible, and I can see what they mean by that but it doesn't ruin the game or anything.  They've opened the gates a bit wider for the new players without pissing off the core fans which is something I have to applaud them for.

Also I seem to recall everyone having a big old moan about the graphics but I don't really see why.  Maybe I'm just not all that fussy about things like floor textures but to me the game looks rather good.  The environments are interesting, the monsters are cool and it has that same Souls atmosphere that I've come to know and love.

It's not every day that I'm THIS happy with a big popular title like this, so if anyone was on the fence about Dark Souls 2 I suggest they get off it and join the fun.

Please Stop Moaning About Difficulty

There needs to be a rule when it comes to video game reviews, where reviewers should not be allowed to talk about a games difficulty at all.  This seems like and incredibly stupid and unreasonable thing to say, but what choice do we have when almost every reviewer is wrong about difficulty in games.

Let's talk about Castlevania for a second here.

A good majority of people think Castlevania is a hard game, and they would be right.  The level design and enemy placement is fiendish, the bosses are tough as nails and with no save or password system it can turn into a bit of an endurance test if you die a lot.  On top of that, you sort of have to know whats coming so that you can make educated choices about your sub-weapon.  This isn't bullshit because the games fairly kind with checkpoints, but overall, castlevania is a hard game.

Now what about Demons Souls, or even Dark Souls, are these hard games?  No, no they are not.  Everything in Demons and Dark Souls is designed to kill you and make your life a living hell if you are not willing to play by the games rules.  It's a game where you have to learn the mechanics well, take in your surroundings and above all be careful and observant.  If you do all these things then chances for survival in Demons and Dark souls is actually rather high, and while it's still a rather challenging game, the levels between these games and basically everything in the 8/16 bit generations is massive.

Let's take another example, Etrian Odyssey 4

Etrian Odyssey is a series of dungeon crawlers designed as a throwback to games like Wizardry and it falls in a genre known for it's difficulty.  A few weeks ago I was made aware of a review on IGN basically panning Etrian Odyssey 3 for being too difficult and unfair.  This is of course bullshit and really it was a case of the reviewer not being arsed enough to learn how the game works and getting frustrated when things didn't go his way.  Etrian Odyssey 4 on the other hand got a great review, because the person in question played it on easy mode and didn't have to learn the ins and outs to get by, and this is sort of sad in a way.

He's right, its a great game but not because there is an easy mode that makes it accessible to newcomers.  That is a great feature but that isn't the reason the game deserves the score it got.   Dark Souls is a challenging game but all the hyperbole being thrown around regarding its difficulty caused people to turn away.

Panning a game for difficulty, especially when you are wrong about it, is not good.  It gives the developers this false idea that people don't like challenging or even hard games.  If you as a reviewer find a game kicked your ass into next year, then say so, but don't pan the whole game because you assume that everyone else is like you and isn't willing to put in time to improve at it.  Until reviewers can talk about difficulty in a mature way, and not just throw a low score at a title because it beat them, discussion of difficulty should be disallowed from reviews.

I swear to god if Dark Souls 2 is ruined because of shit like this I'm going to be rather upset.