Yakuza Kiwami 2

 

I just beat Yakuza Kiwami 2 on stream recently so I thought I'd share some thoughts on it.  

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a remake of Yakuza 2 on the PS2 originally released in 2006 but with beefed up graphics and extra content out the wazoo.  Being a direct follow up from Yakuza 1 it follows Kazuma Kiryu as he gets involved in an inter-family war between the Osaka and Tokyo branches of the Yakuza.  There's also a korean mafia involved and a plot involving the police and if I tried to write up a true plot summary this post would take me literally all day considering how many twists and turns it takes.  But really I'm not out to spoil anything in this post so all you really need to know is that the plot is absolutely bonkers and you MIGHT have some trouble following it completely if you have not played this first game.  There is also a remake of Yakuza 1 though (Called Yakuza Kiwami, go figure), so I might suggest giving that a go before jumping into the second one.  

This is a Yakuza game though so the plot is only about 25% of the overall experience because, as any fan of the series will tell you, these games are DENSE with additional stuff to do.  In fact, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is so dense with content that it's basically 3 games in one.

The first game is your classic Yakuza experience.  You wander around Sotenbori (based on Dontonbori in Osaka) or Kamurocho (a made up bit of Tokyo) progressing the story while you fight thugs, goons and other Yakuza clan members.  On top of that there are a ton of mini games including things like; Golf, Majong, Shogi, a karaoke rhythm game, UFO catchers and full versions of Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua On just to name a few.  They may seem like just distractions to pad out the game but not only are they fully formed games that are fun to sink a lot of time into in their own right, you get rewards such as experience and money for engaging with them so they directly help you out for the main game.  On top of that there is also an INSANE number of sub stories dotted around the two towns which also net things like rewards and extra finishing moves for combat.  Some of them are very basic and just involve beating up a couple guys and some of them are fully fleshed out, sometimes with cutscenes, mega side quests that involve going to multiple locations and really getting into the nitty gritty of the weird goings on of the two locations.  There is so much stuff to do in just the main game that you could play for multiple hours and not progress the main story a single beat but be constantly getting fun and engaging story and gameplay.  

But then on top of that you have the Cabaret Grand Prix.  The Cabaret game is unlocked pretty early on and involves Kiryu helping a down on its luck hostess club as it climbs the ranks of a sort of hostess battle tournament where the club with the most profits takes home the prize.

It's presented as a mini game but it's a full on hostess sim where you have to recruit girls, manage their mood, help them with customers during the game proper when you are making money and each segment of it has a full on plot going along with it where you get to know your staff and there's betrayal and intrigue and all sorts of shit going on.  The story and character development here is so well done that if you presented "Yakuza: Cabaret Grand Prix" as its own spin off title I would have bought it.  Also the "villains" of of the plot are cameos of various porn stars (pictured above) which is a fun little cherry on top of the cake if you're a complete degenerate like me.  

This content wasn't actually in the original release of Yakuza 2 and has been added for the Kiwami version.  I've been told it first appeared in another Yakuza game that I've not played and then was added to Kiwami.  I'm extremely looking forward to playing this one again in the other Yakuza game soon.

But even then it doesn't end

Majima Construction is another fully storied, fully fleshed out, could have sold it to me as its own game "mini game" where you have to play a sort of tower defence/real time strategy game to defend construction sites from a bunch of land sharks.  While in Cabaret GP the guest appearances where from popular porn stars, this one includes a rather large cast of professional wrestlers.  If you have ever watched the "No Laughing" series from a Japanese show called Gaki No Tsukai, Masahiro Chono who is well known for slapping a chubby Rakugo man in the face every year, is the main bad guy for most of the adventure, voiced by the man himself.  

This game gets intense too with some of the later missions being quite challenging if you aren't levelling up your team properly and sinking millions upon millions of yen into upgrades.  This is another mini game that was included in a later entry and then reincorporated for Kiwami 2 so I'm once again looking forward to doing it all again at a later date

My only real complaint about the game is that it's too easy.  I was playing on Hard mode and had no trouble beating up all the dudes throughout the story and the main game.  By the end of the game I was so skilled and powered up that I beat the final boss mostly by not moving and just pressing triangle to do a counter when he attacked me.  If you are having trouble with an enemy, the game is also far too easily cheesed but equipping a weapon, chugging an energy drink to fill your heat gauge and then spamming the unblockable heat attack with it until their health meter empties out.  

Still though, despite the lack of challenge Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a fun, hilarious, exciting and sometimes heart wrenching game that is absolutely brimming with content and will keep you going for a long LONG time.  Probably one of the best open world type games I've ever played, and you should play it too

Tau Vs Cole Phelps: Masterminds Clash

 

Last night I started playing L.A. Noire as part of my viewer request segment on the stream.  I'm usually not taken with games from Rockstar if I'm being honest and I didn't think I'd enjoy this one that much, but after 4 hours I'm pleasantly surprised.  I basically had to rip myself from the stream last night because I was so engrossed in playing detective.

I won't comment concretely on the quality of the game just yet because I'm still pretty early on in the story I think but there's something quite annoying about this game that really stands out in a game about being a detective.  You may think that the goal of this game is to use clues and information to work out who did whatever crime your working on but that's not really true.  Your job as the player is to work out what the hell Cole, the main character, is thinking and make sure that the answers you give to a situation match what's going through his mind.

For example, there's a case very early on where you find a car crashed an abandoned in a train yard.  The car is full of blood but there's no body.  In the trunk of the car you find a receipt for the sale of a live pig and by the car you find a bloody pipe and a dropped wallet with, what you assume, is the victims address.  So fine, maybe its a murder or maybe something else is going on.  The next step of this case is to go to the victims house and tell the wife that her husband has been killed...

Now hold on there, Cole

There's no fucking body, I don't KNOW that the husband is dead.  It MIGHT be the victims blood, it MIGHT be someone else's blood or, for all we know, it might be pigs blood.  But no, because Cole thinks the man is dead, I'm not allowed to explore any other avenue, I HAVE to go to the house and tell the wife her husband is dead.  When exploring the house you find evidence of an unhappy marriage, separate bedrooms, train tickets to Seattle and, most damning, a missing pipe from a boiler outside the house that matches the pipe at the scene.  The wife seems to cooperate and tells you about a shifty friend of the victim.  If the guy is dead, this guy might have something to do with it, so down to a bar to go find him and ask him a few questions.

So you get to the bar, ask the guy some stuff and find out that while on trips to Seattle he's fallen in love with another woman and this guy used the pig to "help him out"

OH OK! I GET IT! This guy crashed a car and bludgeoned the live pig in order to fake this dudes death so that he can escape to Seattle and spend his time with his new lover.  So Cole asks the obvious question of where is this guy, and in response you get a sort of roundabout answer where's like "I can't say my hands are tied".  When I pressed the Doubt button on this dialogue, Cole immediately gets mad and starts accusing the guy of bloody murder.  Me as the player meanwhile am facepalming at my monitor screaming "No Cole you fucking idiot, he killed the Pig, we just want the location of the guy, HES NOT FUCKING DEAD"

This sequence ends and you tail the guy to his apartment, find him with the "victim" and then make your arrest and beat the chapter.  Yeah great, but I was penalized at multiple points during the case because my train of logic of the guy not being dead didn't match with Coles' logic of there being a murder.  It's annoying when you get told your wrong during the investigation because your logic doesn't match the game, only to be COMPLETELY CORRECT come the conclusion.  It's an irritating disconnect between character and player and it's exasperated by the fact that the only options you get during an interrogation are Truth, Doubt and Lie and the difference between Doubt and Lie is pretty fucking abstract. 

This isn't a problem exclusive to L.A. Noire.  Personally I find it most common in horror games with no combat where you'll be running from whatever it is through hundreds of rooms and corridors FILLED with blunt and sharp objects that would make an effective weapon but you aren't allowed to pick them up because the dumbass you're controlling isn't allowed to.  Only in L.A. Noires case the problem is made way more obvious because you're supposed to be solving puzzles but you're sort of limited in your approach by Cole's smooth brain.

But despite how much I just wrote about it, I'm still really enjoying the game and I'm VERY excited for another session.  You can come check out the rest of my playthrough and watch me berate Cole for being a dipshit some more a www.twitch.tv/taurinensis 

Days Gone

 

Does anyone actually give a fuck about zombies any more?  The zombie genre, for both games and movies is so played out that whenever I see something that features zombies in it I now reflexively groan and roll my eyes.

Now the big mother-fucker of zombie fiction is The Walking Dead.  While it's not so popular now, just a few years ago people were going fucking CRAZY for that show.  One of the most popular characters in that show was Daryl, a rough and tumble biker type with a lone-wolf type attitude and the kind of guy to not take no shit from nobody, no sir.  So one day a bunch of stupid wankers had the brilliant idea of making a zombie survival game where all the characters were Daryl and everyone behaved like they had fallen off their motorcycles and landed on their heads one too many times.

I'm going to skip a real description of the story to this game because it's very long and very stupid but I'll do my best to give you a cliff notes version.  You play as Deacon St John, the most Daryl-like of all the people in the land, and while riding around the zombie infested mountains you get jumped by a bunch of cultists and your friend, Bald-Daryl, gets his arm messed up by a blow torch.  You then gotta help him out, help out a bunch of camps, kill the cultists, join the army, find your wife and then murder the army before they start an outright holy war on all the people of the land.  The game ends with the army dead and nothing solved as you ride off into the sunset.

But who really gives a shit about the story when its such an obvious "the real monsters are us humans" kind of tale so what we are really here for is the game play.  Well sadly, the game play is simple, generic over the shoulder 3rd person action bullshit like you've played a million times.  The enemies are daft, the zombies are stupid and easy to kill and every mission is basically go somewhere and shoot shit or go somewhere and chase shit on your bike.  The survival elements are non existent because the getting camp money is easy as fuck and even if for some reason your run your supplies down, almost every car, building and bush is bursting at the seams with supplies for you to craft stuff.  

 The games big draw, the one thing that anyone remembers from the E3 demo that they showcased that one year, is the zombie hordes.  Dotted around the map are HUGE numbers of zombies that will all aggro you at once if you alert them.  The problem with the hordes is that throughout my entire play through I couldn't find a reason to give a shit about them.  There's a few missions throughout the campaign where you HAVE to fight a horde but outside of that you just very easily avoid them as you do all your other shit.  The horde fights aren't even interesting either, you just let them chase you around and when they bunch up around something explosive you shoot it.  Throw molotovs or napalm while your being chased and once the numbers thin out finish the job with your gun.  It's a test of patience rather than a test of skill or preparation.  A lot of hype for a non-feature.

But the absolute worst aspect of this game is the bugs, there are, SO MANY bugs in Days Gone that it's actually embarrassing.  I didn't bother to update the game upon first putting the disc in and before the 28gb patch I was getting hard frame rate drops, textures not working, AI bugging out, missions not working, the whole shabang.  There was one mission in particular where I had to rescue a guy from a camp.  Upon arrival one guy took the guy into a back room and I had to gun my way through the other guys.   What was supposed to happen is that when I killed the guys outside, I would jimmy open the door, kill the leader and rescue the dude inside.  What actually happened is that the game bugged out and it would not recognize the henchmen as being dead so I would go to the door and it would just throw up a message saying "clear the area of enemies to rescue to hostage".  The problem is that this was a main story mission and despite many attempts at restarting the game, reloading save files, resetting the mission the thing WOULD NOT PROGRESS at all.  

 That's when I caved and installed the 28gb patch that it was pestering me for on my Playstation menu and that fixed that mission bug but the game still suffered from constant broken textures, crap AI, crashes and there was one mission near the end of the game where collision with the floor just crapped out and I couldn't progress for a while AGAIN because I kept falling into the abyss under the world.  

This game really is the whole package of long, tedious, broken and predictable.  If you saw the E3 trailer all those years ago and were thinking about picking it up, just don't.  Save your money and use it to buy something better than this such as Dying Light. 

How About Get It Right the First Time?

 I'm almost certain I've written things on this topic before but very recently I had a very bad experience with some game bugs so I'm going to talk about it again.  

So if you've been watching the stream you know I've been playing a game called Days Gone and while I have a lot of bile to spill about that game one of the things that really sticks out about it is the number of bugs, glitches and hiccups the game has.

I've had textures not loading in, glitching through geometry, audio bugging out, frame rate stutters when its trying to load the world, escort characters just forgetting what they are doing along with a few other things.  The worst however came during a story critical mission where I had to clear a camp of dudes and then rescue a guy behind a locked door.  What was SUPPOSED to happen is that you kill the dudes and then you use your boot knife to jimmy open the door and save the guy.  What was happening to me was I'd kill the dudes, go to the door and then the game would pop up a message saying "Clear the area of enemies to rescue the hostage".  What I think was happening was that the guy in the room who had the guy at gunpoint that you're supposed to kill last after entering was being recognized as an enemy in the previous area and because he was alive it wasn't allowing me to open the door.  The problem with this, is that if I didn't clear this mission, the story WOULD NOT PROGRESS, I was essentially locked out of finishing the game.

The fix came in the form of a 28 gigabyte patch that I had been putting off downloading because space on my PS4 was running rather low.  In a desperate attempt to not have my time wasted by this shitty game I downloaded the patch, reset the mission and THEN thankfully it worked and while I'm happy about that, I can't help be mad about why the fuck it just didn't work in the first place.

This is a pretty big problem with games nowadays where companies will hype a game up, get it out as soon as they can and then fix shit later which is probably one of the shittiest practices I can think of along side gouging money out of idiots with loot boxes.  When we got the ability to download patches and fixes for our games it was a GOOD thing initially because it allowed developers to fix something unforeseen or missed during development but now its being used as a crutch by shitty companies so they can get your money out of you as soon as possible and then MAYBE fix any easily missed issues down the line.

Now when I've moaned about this shit in the past there's always some half-brained bellend who likes to open his stupid halitosis mouth at me with the comment "But game development is really hard! there's always going to be bugs and glitches in software this complex". and you know what? to some degree they are correct.

What I'm not saying is that I expect every game to be perfect on release, they are complex beasts worked on by many people and a few bugs here and there are probably going to slip through the cracks when being play tested.  This is especially true for small indie teams putting out games as passion projects where they just don't have the time or budget for long, drawn out play tests and they just want to put their labor of love out into the world.  But I'm not talking about those guys, I'm talking about big developers like the gigantic sacks of shit who developed days gone or the gaggle of sad fucks that work at Bethesda putting out AAA, full price games that are so badly broken that they suck to play and in some cases can't even be finished.

Even in those games, especially big open world ones I'm willing to let some shit slide.  Things that don't happen often like path finding going wrong or the occasional fall through the floor I can just deal with but HOW THE FUCK did main-plot, progression critical mission bugging out get missed in the initial launch batch?  A full price AAA game, unbeatable at launch, embarrassing.

Like I said, games are complex and bugs are inevitable but if you're going to charge me $60-80 to play a new game on the latest hardware then you better make sure it at the very least fucking works from start to finish.  But if you're attitude is anything like the likes of Bethesda or SIE Bend Studio then I sincerely hope that you studio goes under and every sandwich you have from this day forward is a bit dry and always has slightly stale bread.

Mirrors Edge: Catalyst

 

Sometimes I like to over-emphasize my opinion on certain games.  Like for example, if I'm feeling particularly mischievous I'll say something like "Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a shit game for twats" and while I don't like BotW personally, I do actually understand why its so popular and why people like it so much.  However I feel like maybe I should stop doing this because it does a disservice to games that actually do deserve it such as Mirrors Edge: Catalyst, a truly shit game for twats.

I remember the first Mirrors Edge coming out for the Xbox 360 when I was in University and I remember liking it quite a lot.  I beat it multiple times, would sometimes listen to the OST while studying and even tried to sort of speed run it.  Not in any serious way but I'd spend quite a few hours finding the optimal route through a stage just to see the little time trial numbers go down.  Mirrors Edge: Catalyst however pissed me off within the first 30 minutes or so of playing and finishing it was one of the biggest chores I have ever undertaken in the 26 years of my gaming life.

I don't even know what it really is.  I thought it was a sequel but it seems more like a sort of reboot more than anything else.  I'd love to tell you about the story at this point in the article but I hated the dialogue in this game so much that I played most of it with my TV muted and just switched my brain off and followed the little red noodle to my mission destinations.

What I can tell you though is that the parkour gameplay isn't actually all that bad.  As far as running around, jumping over, on and around things is fairly functional.  The downside is that it's marred by one of the most boring open worlds in the universe.  The world of Mirrors Edge has nothing in it, nothing to explore or see or experience outside of the set pieces in the main missions.  The only thing the open world is good for is getting from point A to point B and watching a cutscene which means that it doesn't matter how good your parkour gameplay is when you don't fucking do anything with it.

That's not to say that the world is completely void of things to do, it's just that the things to do in that world are pointless bullshit busywork made to prey on 100% wierdos like me.  There are delivery missions when you run from point A to point B, these tower things that you blow up and then run away from and a bunch of random crap to collect throughout the various areas of the world map.  None of this does anything though outside of giving you experience.  However I did a couple of these side shows at the start and quickly gave up yet still managed to max out the skill tree by the end of the game.  It's all literally just pointless bullshit to pad out the game

But let's talk about the skill tree quickly shall we?  One thing I wish games in general would stop doing is including bullshit systems just because it's the "in" thing to do.  The skill tree in ME:C is the most needless token addition to a game I've ever seen.  The developers were so starved for ideas for this token skill tree that one of the skills you unlock is fucking QUICK. TURN.  A feature present in most games as a standard bit of control has been slapped inside a fucking skill tree because whatever gimp decided it was a good idea to have it couldn't think of enough things to fill it.  You may find at that start that certain delivery missions are kind of challenging but NOT because you aren't good enough, it's because the game wont let you move fast enough.  Delivery missions are a breeze once you have quick turn, fast climb, tuck jump and extended slide but until you get these skills the missions are borderline impossible.  If I'm failing something in a game I want it to be because I need to "git gud" not because the dozy idiot I'm controlling hasn't earned the arbitrary amount of points in order for her to "git gud".

Although I'm not saying anything new or controversial with this post, people have been calling it shit since 2008 and rightly so.  I was just late to the party and didn't want to believe it going in so at the end of the day I'm the one with egg on my face.

Breath of the Wild First Impressions

Since about mid December I've been slowly working my way through Breath of the Wild on my Switch.  I've been playing it for a good while now, got a handful of things but I'm sort of teetering on the point where the adventure is really going to get into full swing so before I grab my Master Sword and get in some big ancient robots, I'll post some of my thoughts about this game so far.

First lets get some good things out of the way.  The game is HUGE, and I don't just mean in terms of actual game world but there's also a ton of stuff to do.  I've not even seen close to all of it but I'm constantly finding quests, big enemies, shrines, interesting looking landmarks, towns etc.  There is definitely a ton of fun to be had just running around and looking for things which, in fairness, is what I've spent the vast majority of my time doing with the game up to this point.  With a lot of these open world type games its easy for the world to be big but sort of barren of anything interesting (New Fallout for example) but Zelda just constantly has stuff popping up every which way.  You'll set a goal for some quest or to get to some shrine and then on the way there about 7 different things will distract you, but in a good way.

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But after you get over the vast and varied world, things tend to go downhill a little bit.  Zelda doesn't have your usual set of dungeons to explore and conquer.  In this game you have 4 divine beasts that you must go inside and defeat the boss of and then go hit up Hyrule Castle to go slap Ganons shit in.  Conventional dungeons have been replaced with Shrines which are sort of short puzzle or combat sequences which will net you a spirit orb.  4 spirit orbs give you either an extra heart or extra stamina, that choice is up to you.  Since exploring the world is so fun, the act of hunting around and finding these shrines are cool but the only thing that awaits you on the inside is pure disappointment.  Every single shrine is some kind of brain dead puzzle to solve or some shit, non threatening, easy as hell enemy to defeat.  This wouldn't be a problem if the shrines were not such a big part of the game but doing a number of shrines is VITAL to success.  For example getting the master sword requires you to have a certain number of hearts in order to pull it from its stone and so you have to do a button of shrines to get enough orbs to get those hearts.  Health in general is a problem in this game because of my next big gripe which is the combat.

The combat in Breath of the Wild is shit.  There's no if, ands or buts about it, it's just shit.  Partly it's shit because of the breakable weapons thing that the games decided to use and it seems that there isn't a weapon in the game that doesn't just shatter after about 7 or 8 hits.  This problem however is more of an annoyance than a real deal breaker but the deal is indeed broken when you consider the difficulty of combat.  A combat encounter will only really go one of two ways.  The first is that you fight the enemy for a bit and then it lands a hit on you and you die instantly, this is basically the only way to game over.  The second is that you will fight the enemy for a bit and he lands a hit on you and doesn't kill you instantly.  In this situation the enemy has literally no chance of winning the encounter because if your health becomes critically low, you can just chow down on one of the hundreds of steak skewers in your pockets or just spam apples until you are full HP again.  All this challenge (or lack thereof) means is that there exist little pockets of Hyrule that you can't go to yet until you find either enough shrines to get enough hearts or until you get armor strong enough to make sure you don't die in a single blow, after that, every single combat encounter in this game is free.

The tedium of the shrines and the atrocious combat are my two BIG gripes with this game but I'm fully aware I'm only scratching the surface.  I've not done any of the divine beasts yet and there seems to be plenty of stuff dotted around the world that might make up for these two glaring problems by the time I get to the end.  I don't hate this game, but I think that all the hype I encountered before getting my Switch made me think I was in for something really special when all I seem to be getting right now is a mediocre open world action adventure.

I'll do another post after I finish it to see if my opinion changes at all

Australia, what are you doing?

There are two countries that come to my mind when I think of silly laws when it comes to video games and they are Australia and Germany.

Big news story of the moment is coming out of Australia this time with yet another game being refused classification and therefore being made unavailable within the country.  However this time, people have a reason to be slightly more pissed off than usual.

Ya' see, this isn't the first time games have been censored or banned in Australia.  Things that pop into my head are Manhunt being banned and Left4Dead 2 being censored in the Australian version.  But from January 1st of this year, a new age rating was introduced of R18+ for the purpose of being able to give violent video games a proper classification.  This has worked for certain games like Ninja Gaiden 3, but not for this one.

So what's the problem with Saints Row 4?  Well apparently the classification board doesn't like all the drug use flying around the game.  This, coupled with all the rampant sex and violence means that the classification board have deemed it far too bad for Australian consumption and therefore it can not be sold.

So first of all, what is the point if having the R18+ classification if it doesn't cover this shit?  Why bother going to the trouble of introducing that thing in January if you're just going to ignore it's existence a couple of months down the line.  I'm pretty sure a rating of 18+ covers the games content just fine, it's not so bad that even adults shouldn't be allowed to see it, I'm sure the developers aren't that depraved.

The other thing is that if someone is going to take drugs after playing Saints Row, I'm pretty sure it's because they were on drugs anyway.  It's not like someone is going to come away after a session and think "you know what! I really need to go do some meth!".  I'm pretty sure the Australian people aren't that easily swayed into illegal activities.

I'm not Australian and I don't even like Saints Row all that much, but this is just stupid.  The Australian ratings board needs to sort their life out and they should stop being so sensitive over tongue in cheek open world GTA clones for fucks sake.  It's adults buying these games after all, and if kids do get a hold of it then you have a problem with shit parents, not violent video games, idiots.