Category: ramblings

Adventures in Excessive Hyperbole: Forza Horizon 2

Actually, before we get to Forza Horizon 2, there’s three things on my mind that I should get out of the way first:

1.  I’m currently at just under 7400 words for NaNoWriMo.  As I’d mentioned last week, the topic that I eventually wound my way towards is somewhat emotionally charged, and at this point I really don’t care about hitting 50,000 words; I’m mostly just heavily invested in figuring the thing out.  And it’s hard to carve out time to sit and write about stuff that keeps hitting me harder than I expect it to; it’s tough to come home from work and do that when I’m already exhausted, and it’s even more difficult to find time during the day to do it, when I’m expected to be professional and not, say, an emotional wreck (as was the case last Friday).

2.  I tried giving it the benefit of the doubt, but after wading through 2 1/2 missions of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, I realized I’d had enough.  Because I don’t care about, and totally suck at, the multiplayer side of things, I was only ever going to play their campaigns.  And the campaigns have always been a bit silly and convoluted and contrived (and I’m not even talking about “Press X to Pay Your Respects”, although that’s a perfect example of something silly and convoluted and contrived).  As far as CoD:AW goes, I appreciate that it’s going for this sci-fi not-quite-near-future vibe, giving me quasi-superpowers and such… but at the end of the day it still feels like it’s always felt, which is a very tightly scripted shoot-em-up gauntlet running through blandly pretty corridors.   I don’t play enough Call of Duty to have an already-intuitive grasp of the controls, which makes the campaign trickier than it should be; I try to melee someone and end up throwing a grenade.  There is clearly an audience for Call of Duty, and I might as well come to grips with the fact that I am clearly not it, and haven’t been it for quite a long time now.  (For the record: my 2014 shooter of the year is still Wolfenstein, and that means Far Cry 4 has a very high bar to meet.)

3.  I finished Patrick Rothfuss’ “The Slow Regard of Silent Things“, a slim side-story to the Kingkiller Chronicles.  As Rothfuss himself says, it’s not the book you should start with if you’re new to his work.  I enjoyed it; it’s a bit of an experiment for him, which he fully acknowledges in his afterword, and I think he succeeded rather well.  The book features no dialogue, and only one character, and it does not explain itself – and yet, at the book’s end, you know this character incredibly well, and you’re given a very interesting, very specific slice of the world of the larger two books that you’d never see otherwise, and it gives him an opportunity to be more playful with language than he usually gets.  I’d recommend it – but, again, only if you’ve read the first two books, and only if you’re aware that you’re not reading a “traditional” story.  To say any more would ruin the book’s magical, ethereal quality; that’s something you should experience as nakedly as possible.

Long-time readers of this site (the number of which can probably be counted on one hand) will know that I am prone to excessive use of hyperbole.  I make no apologies for this tic; it is what it is.  When I feel inclined to write about something, it’s most likely because I’m already fired up about it.

So take this with a grain of salt, if you must, but I think I’m ready to say something ridiculous:  I’m starting to think that Forza Horizon 2 very well might be my favorite driving game of all time.*  The only real thing it’s missing is some sort of crash/stunt mode, which is a feature so closely associated with Burnout that it would be damn near impossible to implement without being charged with plagiarism.

Actually, here’s three more minor knocks that keep it from being a perfect game:  (1) the game looks absolutely gorgeous, but it also suffers from pop-in from time to time and it can be somewhat distracting at times, especially when trees are popping up along the suggested driving line.  (2) I don’t give a shit about car culture, and while I appreciate that the “Horizon Festival” is as good a justification as any for why you’re doing what you’re doing, I don’t really need a narrative justification for driving anywhere, especially if it involves something as contrived as the Horizon Festival – though at least the main guy isn’t that annoying.  (3) But if you are going to go through the trouble of having a narrative justification for doing all this stuff, then why not let me create my own character?  True, you’re behind the wheel of a car for 99% of the game, but I’m there in that other 1%, and while I might be a white guy with brown hair, not everybody who plays this game is also a white guy with brown hair.

Those three knocks aside, I’m loving the hell out of it.  It’s everything I loved about the first game, but better and larger and more beautiful, and I genuinely feel bad that my gaming schedule is about to get crowded, because I’d be happy to keep playing this and only this for the next few months.

More to the point:  it’s a fantastic showcase for the Xbox One, and the more time I spend with the Xbox One, the more I really, really like it.  I took a few minutes during the weekend to load up Ubisoft’s The Crew beta on the PS4, and the PS4’s interface is so bland and dumb.  (Also, The Crew is bland and dumb, and I’m glad I saw the beta if only so that I know to take it off of my GameFly queue.)

 

* I’ve been thinking about what my Top 10 list of driving games might look like, and the list is tricky because while there’s no shortage of driving games out there, there’s only a few franchises that really moved me in any specific way:

  • I’m certainly a big fan of the Forza series in general – and I like it more than I ever liked any of the Gran Turismo games I played – but to be honest, Forza 1-4 all kinda bleed together for me; there’s not one particular title that stands out in my memory.  (As I only just bought my Xbox One last week, I have not yet played Forza 5, though considering the scuttlebutt that surrounded it, I’m not sure I ever will.)
  • Certainly I’d put both Burnout 3 and Burnout Paradise near the very top of the list.
  • I’m a big fan of both DiRT and DiRT 2 – the latter is the better looking of the two, but the former had the best replay system (which was inexplicably changed) and had some of the best UI in any driving game, ever.
  • I loved the first two Rallisport Challenge games on the original Xbox.
  • It’s a bit of a lost gem, but does anybody else remember Midtown Madness 3 on the original Xbox?  That game was awesome.  That was the first real experience I had with online free-roam driving, and to this day I still remember all sorts of silly stuff we used to do – like trying to jump as many trucks as we could fit onto the roofs of various buildings.
  • I was also especially fond of both Project Gotham Racing 2 and 3 (4 was the one where they introduced motorcycles, I think, and that’s also where it fell off the rails for me).
  • Split/Second was terrific and criminally overlooked…
  • I will always have a soft spot for OutRun…
  • My loathing of The Offspring is the main reason why I try not to think about Crazy Taxi, even if the game itself is pretty great.
  • I always enjoyed the Midnight Club games, though I never stuck with them that long.
  • I’m conflicted about the Need for Speed franchise, because (a) the driving is fine, but the cutscenes and the “car culture” is just flat-out ridiculous, and (b) while I really enjoyed Criterion’s two Need for Speed titles, it also meant that we weren’t getting any more Burnout games, which is a supreme bummer.
  • Speaking of “flat-out”, I also have a weird soft spot for that first Flat-Out game, especially on PC, because the physics were completely insane.
  • Could I include Night Driver from the Atari 2600?
  • Or Pole Position?
  • Could I get away with not including any Mario Kart games, because I don’t give a shit about Mario Kart?  or Ridge Racer, for that matter?  or Wipeout, or F-Zero?  or F1 on the PC?

Am I missing any?  Feel free to call me an idiot in the comments.

Weekend Recap: Words, Words, Words

1.  I am around 1700 words into my NaNoWriMo project.  I started with a blank page, put on some ambient drones to keep focused, and let my mind wander a bit until it found the story it wanted to tell.  The story is a bit of a surprise, actually, being that it’s decided it wants to be somewhat non-fictional.  For that reason alone, I’m pretty sure I’m never letting this thing see the light of day unless I change all the names and fudge some of the historical record, but I have to admit that it does feel good to talk about some of this stuff.  I’m not sure I’m going to get 50,000 words out of it – and honestly, most of the words I have written aren’t particularly good – but that’s neither here nor there at this point.  The primary reason that I’m doing this at all is to get in the habit of writing every day, without fear of an audience’s reaction, and I’ll worry about the end result when it’s finished.  To that end, I’m probably not going to write about my progress here, beyond word counts, which is just a way of keeping myself honest.  (And is there anything more insufferable than hearing someone talk about working on their novel?)

2.  I finished the Southern Reach trilogy at around 3am this morning, due to some Daylight Savings-related insomnia, plus a headcold.  I’m not sure that I enjoyed the latter two books as much as I did the first one; one gets the feeling that the first book came all at once, and then the next two were meant to fill in the backstory and to answer some of the first book’s many questions.  Still, they’re all quick, fun reads.  Now I’m re-reading The Stand, which is starting off very strong (and which I apparently remembered in more vivid detail than I’d thought).  Even though I don’t have any Ebola panic, it’s not hard to get sucked into the idea of an apocalyptic plague these days.

3.  I did it, I pulled the trigger; I bought an Xbox One.  And it might even be arriving today!  I was able to get the Sunset Overdrive bundle at the reduced price after all, which was a bit of a relief, and so now I hope my long-lost 360 friends can forgive my prolonged absence.

4.  I don’t know how I feel about Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare getting such positive reviews.  The last CoD game I played was (I think) Black Ops, of which the campaign remains unfinished and the multiplayer remains untouched.  That said, if my XBO friends are playing it, I might give it a quick look after all.

Taking the plunge

1.  So I just received the confirmation email that says I’ve officially signed up for NaNoWriMo, which is something I’ve been thinking about doing for years.  I don’t have any particular idea in mind, and November is also the busiest time of year in terms of AAA videogames, so who knows how this is going to work out, but that’s not even the point – if I can’t carve out an hour of writing time every day, then I have no business calling myself a writer.

I had an idea for a novel a few years ago, and I took a writing class to help develop and flesh it out, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to do with it, and it ended up withering on the vine.  I’m not sure I want to attempt to resurrect it for NaNo, either; I know myself all too well, and if I got frustrated with reviving it, I’d give up entirely.  I’m also staying away from Scrivener, even though I’m dying to use it; Scrivener seems to be a useful tool when you already have a plot and characters and scenes in mind, and it’s also useful if you already know how to use it without having to hunt and peck.  And I haven’t turned my Macbook on since I updated to Yosemite, so I have no idea if Scrivener is even working at the moment.  In any event, I’m determined to not let technical difficulties get in the way, so I’m keeping it simple and sticking to GoogleDocs on my home/work PCs.

I suppose there’s a part of me that’s annoyed that it takes something like NaNo for me to get off my ass, but there’s another part of me that’s well aware that this is why NaNo exists in the first place, and so I’m going to try not to beat myself up about it too much.

2.  I am now into the third and final book of the Southern Reach Trilogy, which I am enjoying quite a bit; it’s a very quick read, and makes for an entertaining come-down after the lofty heights of The Bone Clocks.  The second book (“Authority”) wasn’t quite as well-written or as absorbing as the first (“Annihilation”), but the third (“Acceptance”) is immediately gripping and seems to be on much firmer ground, which bodes well.

After I finish this one, I’m not quite sure what I’ll read next.  I still have a hefty backlog to get caught up on, for one thing, and I’m also considering giving the uncut version of The Stand a re-read after polling my Facebook friends on their preferred Stephen King novel – specifically asking between The Stand and It.  “It” was always my favorite, whereas “The Stand” never quite hooked me; I’m willing to give it another shot, though.

Hell, I might as well open up the floor here:

3.  I recently received a preview code for The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game from Croteam.  I’m about 2 hours into it so far; I’m enjoying it, despite some odd tonal dissonance and puzzle repetitiveness.  I’m not quite sure what I’m allowed to say about it – I don’t often receive preview codes – but I will say that it’s certainly a refreshing change of pace after the suffocating tension of Alien Isolation.

4.  I’m having trouble finding the Sunset Overdrive Xbox One bundle at the discounted price, but Amazon has already started accepting pre-orders at the new price for their Assassin’s Creed Unity bundle (which also includes ACIV at no extra charge).  I’ve already ordered the digital version of ACU for the PS4, but given that Ubisoft’s already made it very clear that they’re aiming for graphical parity between PS4 and XBO, I can’t help but wonder if I should cancel the PS4 pre-order and get this bundle instead.

5.  I’m not much of a drinker these days, but I’ve developed a fondness for spiced rum, which is quite nice for sipping during a cool autumn evening.  I’m not sure why I felt compelled to bring that up, but it’s too late now.

The First (and Last?) Few Hours: Alien Isolation

[Before I begin, I’d like to bestow hearty congratulations to Davey Wreden, whose magnificent Stanley Parable has sold one million copies.]

I do not know if I will finish Alien: Isolation, but I’m not sure that I need to.  I’m probably 7-8 hours into it by this point, and a rather large percentage of that time has been spent hiding in lockers and under desks, and, I mean, I get it.

For all its flaws (and it has a bunch, of which I’ll get to in a second), A:I has triumphantly succeeded in a very specific and important way; instead of aping the frenetic shoot-em-up action of the sequel (which would really just make it your standard sci-fi shooter), it understands what makes the first movie so great, which is to say that it’s captured the feeling of helplessness and pure dread better than anything else I’ve played in recent memory.

You have to hide in this game, because you cannot fight.  This is not to say that you’re powerless – you do have weapons, and you can certainly use them to kill, if you must.  But firing a gun will almost always draw the attention of the Alien, and once the Alien spots you, it’s more or less “game over, man.”

And if you’re playing this game with a good set of stereo headphones, every single goddamned noise you hear will set you on edge, ducking for cover, holding your breath and quickly opening your motion tracker to figure out where the sound is coming from.  I’m not sure I’ve experienced ambient noise design this effectively creepy since the first Bioshock.

Unlike other “horror” games, it does not revel in grotesque imagery – indeed, while the game’s environments are graphically impressive, its humans are surprisingly weird-looking, and while there are plenty of dead bodies strewn about, they’re never disgusting or gross – if anything, they’re kinda just sad.  Nor is A:I’s horror mostly based in jump scares; I’m almost never startled.  I mean, I’m in a constant state of worry anyway, because of the sounds in the vents, or because my motion tracker will occasionally beep with alarm, or I’ll see the glowing, super-creepy eyes of the Working Joes off in the distance.  And if I am surprised, I am also then immediately flooded with more worry and anxiety, because the monster is right there, and if I can’t hide in time then not only will I die, violently, but I’ll also lose the last 20-30 minutes since my last save, and ugh.

Now, about those flaws I mentioned.

The save system has been frequently mentioned in reviews as a negative design flaw; there’s no checkpoint system, and because the Alien (almost) never appears in the same place twice, you can either lose 20 seconds or 20 minutes if you’re not careful.  I’ve been a victim of this problem, but I can’t really call it a design flaw; it seems like a deliberate choice, and it’s one of the few ways that a horror game can actually make you feel that there are stakes involved.   That said, it’s a system that can also be abused; if you find a save point, you can also just forge ahead loudly and un-stealthily and see what there is to see, knowing that if you die, you won’t have lost very much, and that you’ll know how to better achieve your objective when you try for real.

The objectives, though?  Those things that you have to do in order to progress?  Ugh.  So dumb.  So inelegant.  So basic, artless, arbitrary, forgettable, cliches that were tired a dozen years ago.   The reason why I don’t care if I see the end of this game is because I barely care about what I’m already doing.  I need to find medical supplies to aid my colleague; but they’re on another level of the ship, because of course they are.  I get to that level; I find a doctor.  The doctor agrees to help, but only if I help him first, and I’ve already forgotten what it is I need to do for him, and in any event I have to do everything myself because of reasons.  Meanwhile, the Alien is near, and while there are lots of people on the ship, the Alien seems mostly interested in chasing me.

Whatever – I find the medical supplies and return to my fallen comrade.  And the head of the ship’s security system is there, too!  How fortuitous!  Except he’s also sending me out on security missions, which is not my job.

It’s great that the player character, Ripley fille, is a tough, no-nonsense woman who holds her own as well as anyone else in the game.  She is nobody’s princess; nobody needs to rescue her.  It’s just a shame that the stuff she’s being asked to do is so mundane.

 

 

Random Ramblings: October edition

1.  What I’m about to write may very well turn you off from reading this site for the rest of your internet-using life, but it’s the honest-to-goodness truth:  I have never been a fan of Halloween.  I love fall foliage, I love the baseball playoffs, I love wearing warm sweaters, I love that it’s finally decorative gourd season, I really love candy, and I am hopeful that I will finally find a halfway decent gluten-free pumpkin pie this year.  But Halloween has never been my bag.

There are two reasons for this.  The first is that the older kids in my suburban neighborhood really got into the pre-Halloween vandalism routine, and even as a little kid it kinda pissed me off to find eggs and toilet paper all over the trees, driveways and mailboxes of my street.  Halloween is “scary”, sure, but this felt legitimately dangerous and personal.  This eventually put me off trick-or-treating altogether, and the honest truth is that I was happier handing candy out than I was going out and begging for it.

The second is that I was terrible at costumes.  Had no brain for it, no passion for it, and while my mom tried her darnedest, I never quite got the hang of it.

333546_10151202549480865_382061926_o 460499_10151202557695865_263349560_o

All this being said, I am determined to prevent my curmudgeonly attitude from rubbing off on my kid.  If he wants to enjoy Halloween, I will put my big-boy pants on and make sure he has as much fun as he can.

2.  I got impatient and decided to buy the digital download version of Shadow of Mordor yesterday afternoon, but it had only downloaded about 68% of itself when I finally got a chance to turn on my PS4.  This ultimately meant that I could only play the first 10 minutes – the early tutorial, right up to the delayed title screen – before the game kicked me back to the main menu.  Obviously I can’t offer much in the way of impressions, though I will echo Carolyn Petit’s annoyed and astute observation that, yet again, a woman has to die so that the (male) hero has something to do.  Someone else on twitter also pointed out (and I’m sorry I can’t remember who) that it’s only the wife whose death is shown on screen – the camera moves away from the necks of the son and the father.

3.  So I ended up going back to Destiny, where I puttered around for an hour or two; ran some patrols, cashed in quite a few bounties, and finally started 2 exotic weapon quests.  (One quest requires me to visit the weekend merchant; as I’m away this weekend, that’ll have to be postponed for another week.)  As it’d been a while since my last visit, I wasn’t consumed with any particular feeling towards it (beyond impatience at SoM’s slow download progress – and I’m sure that being online in Destiny held up the works considerably, too), and so I was able to turn off my brain for a bit and just shoot things to death.  Destiny is a much better experience when you have no expectations and don’t care that nothing makes any narrative, logical sense.  Indeed, this is why it can be pleasurable to zone out to Diablo 3, too; you relax and elect to simply concentrate on your mechanics and technique and before you know it a few hours have gone by.  The bummer of it all is that even after the few hours I sunk in, I still didn’t pick up any gear with keeping, which is why it can be hard to not feel like I’m literally killing time.

4.  Speaking of mindless grinding and killing time, it’s been 3 days and I am fully addicted to Clicker Heroes, this year’s edition of Cookie Clicker.  I urge you to be careful of clicking that link.   If you have already clicked that link and are in the throes of paralysis as I am, well:  I’ve gotten to level 100 and ascended, and now I’m already up to level 50 on my second run, and the whole goddamned thing is absurd and I don’t understand why it’s so compelling and I need to switch my tab over to make sure I’m properly leveled up please god help

Random Ramblings of a Sad Bastard

1.  For various reasons, but mostly due to utter exhaustion, I’ve not played much of anything this week, and thus I’ve not written anything here.  But it should be noted that my day job has sort-of put me on notice that I spend too much time on the internet, and so you should know that this blog be somewhat dark for the foreseeable future.  The timing is terrible, of course, given that this gaming year is finally about to get interesting, and I’ll do what I can to keep writing; but a man’s gotta pay his bills, and The Man takes precedence in this case.

2.  Everything I said above is true (about why I’ve not played anything), but I’ll also say that ever since I hit the level cap in Destiny – and then saw what I had to do to level beyond – I must admit to feeling a bit repelled.  I’ll cop to putting in some time at the Loot Cave; and I’ll also cop to feeling a slight twinge of something when I heard that Bungie patched it out; and I’ll even admit that there’s a part of me that kinda wants to check out the new one.  But it’s a hollow sort of feeling, at the end of the day; I’m not being rewarded for any acts of heroism or prowess, but because I had the stamina to fire bullets into a cave for an hour without having to pause.  I’d much rather play strike playlists and get rewarded that way, but the results speak for themselves; I got more quality loot from 45 minutes at the Cave than I did in 2 hours worth of strikes.  And if the goal of the endgame is loot, then why not shoot at a cave?  Eh, the whole thing just makes me tired and angry.

3.  I almost bought an Xbox One earlier this week; Microsoft had sent me a special email that offered me 50,000 Reward Points if I bought one within a certain time period.  Beyond not knowing what Reward Points are (as I thought Microsoft had moved beyond their proprietary currency in favor of real US money), I didn’t, and I’m still not sure if I will or not – the jury’s still out on Sunset Overdrive, and that’s probably the bundle I’d buy.  But there’s a part of me that’s really itching to play Forza Horizon 2.  Furthermore,  I’m a little peeved that nobody seems to be reviewing the 360 version.  I’m getting the 360 version via Gamefly next week, but I’m almost positive that I’ll be playing it alone; I’m pretty sure that almost all of my 360 friends have upgraded to the One.  Oh well.

4.  Speaking of next week, I’ll also be receiving a rental copy of Shadow of Mordor, which is getting surprisingly great reviews.  Unfortunately, the way Gamefly works, I probably won’t be receiving it until Thursday, and I’ll be out of town until the following Monday, so basically I won’t be playing anything interesting until the week of October 7.

5.  I also really really really want to check out The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but due to money/time issues, I probably can’t get to it as soon as I’d like.

This has been your weekly sad bastard update.

Also:  I’m on Ello as jervonyc.  But, as mentioned in #1 above, I don’t know how much I’ll actually be there.  Still, if you happen to get an invite, look me up.

The Perils of Critical Thinking

This is an excerpt from a comment left on the G+ reposting of last week’s first impressions of Destiny.  (Speaking of which, updated impressions are forthcoming, but I wanted to get this out of the way first.)

Maybe I’m a shitty gamer but it seems like a lot of gamers these days have unrealistic expectations. I game under the following premise does the game make me want to game more if yes then win if no then fail. I realize people think that critical reviews have a place in pop culture. For me they take away from the simple joy that music, movies, and gaming give me.

I’ve read any number of variations on this theme over the last dozen years or so, almost always written as comments to an overhyped AAA game that got a lower-than-expected review.  The commenter wants to justify their enjoyment of a poorly-received game, and so anyone attempting to explain why that game is bad is taking away from the fun.

In the wake of GamerGate, it takes on a slightly different meaning, however – if you dare to explain why you don’t like something, you are not only wrong but you’re corrupt, you are biased, you have an agenda and you’re shoving it down people’s throats, you are part of the problem.  A game is either good or bad, and understanding why is not relevant.  You see this a lot on Twitter these days, that game journalists aren’t objective enough and therefore can’t ever be trusted.

There is a twisted anti-logic to people who get up-in-arms over negative remarks in game reviews.  Let’s remember that the general consumer public – i.e., the people who aren’t pirating ahead of a game’s release date but are instead buying new, unsealed copies – are forming opinions based on preview coverage.  This preview coverage – and any hands-on experience at events like PAX or E3 – is why any of us ever hear about the games we play.

Point being – this general consumer public hasn’t even played the game yet when the reviews finally come out, but they’re freaking out because it’s not getting the scores they expected it to receive.  (I refer, yet again, to the 20,000 comments that followed Gamespot’s 9/10 review of GTA V, because it dared to say that the game – which, again, received a 9/10 (which, in hindsight, is probably pretty generous) –  is “politically muddled and profoundly misogynistic”.  Please note that the review was posted on September 16, 2013, and the game wasn’t released until September 17, 2013.)

One can only presume that the reasoning behind this hysteria is as follows:  critics for big sites examine and point out the ways in which a game is problematic -> less people buy the game as a result -> the franchise dies and there are no more games made ever again.  Alternately, if a game like Gone Home also gets a 9/10, and critics sing its praises about having, for example, strongly written female protagonists, then those are the only games that are ever going to get made.

(Let’s conveniently ignore that GTA V famously made one capital-b Billion dollars in 3 days, and that Gone Home… didn’t.)

Destiny was the most pre-ordered game of all time and that was solely because of manufactured hype.  And I freely admit that I succumbed to the hype, too!  I bought the Digital Guardian edition of Destiny months ago, long before the reviews came out!  And I’m not even that big a Bungie/Halo fan, either!  But what I’d seen and heard of Destiny made it sound like a sure-fire, can’t-miss, awesome game – the best parts of Mass Effect, Borderlands and Halo all rolled into one.

And so when the game finally came out, I went into it with the best of intentions.  I’d spent $70, after all, and all I was expecting was that the reality would live up to the hype.  I was told of the game’s incredible ambition, and I was ready to surrender to its glory.

But the game has problems that are impossible for me to ignore.  Nor am I the only person saying so.  Now, I haven’t finished it, of course; I’m still only at level 14, only two missions into Venus, and so when my other post goes up I’ll explain that I’m starting to understand and appreciate its rhythm a bit more, and that there is a fun game buried beneath the game’s horrendously inept narrative.  But even if the shooting mechanics are solid, I still maintain that what I wanted – or, rather, what I was told I would be getting – is not at all what I have received.

My pointing this out should not affect your opinion, whether you agree with me or not.  I’m not trying to convert you; I’m trying to explain where the game is falling short for me.  Doing so helps me better understand what it is I do like; it helps me better appreciate the thing I’m experiencing.  As I grow older, and as my perspective of the world changes, I find that my tastes change and evolve.  I don’t necessarily like the same music that I did when I was 12, and some of the films I adored when I was younger don’t necessarily hold up now.  That doesn’t negate my earlier feelings; it just means I’m not that same person any more.

But you’d better believe that when I was 12 and obsessed over the stuff I was obsessed with, I’d listen and analyze and tear that stuff apart to understand why I liked it so much.  Yes, there is a simple joy to be had in not constantly thinking about a game or an album or a film; but there is also a different, complex (and arguably more rewarding) joy in deconstructing the stuff you like and discovering what it is that pleases you.  You not only better understand the thing itself, but you learn things about yourself as well.

Look – you can start your own blog if you want and explain why Destiny is the greatest game ever made.  Indeed, I’d much prefer you explain why you think so, rather than just saying I’m wrong.

The First Few Hours: Destiny

Current Status: approximately 6-8 hours in, rolling a level 8 female Titan.  I’ve ventured beyond the content from the beta, and am currently stuck in the 2nd story mission on the Moon.

I know, I know – just a few days ago I said I probably wouldn’t end up writing one of these posts for Destiny.  But I was out sick yesterday, and ended up spending a bit more time with it than I’d anticipated.

Before I get started, I suppose it’s only fair to get my biases out of the way:  I have played and finished Halo 1-3 and Reach, but did not finish ODST.  (I didn’t finish Halo 4, either, but that’s a 343 Studios title.)  I have always found the Halo games – specifically the single-player campaigns – to be competent console shooters; fun in parts, frustrating in others, saddled with narratives that take themselves far too seriously.  Yes, Halo is important for making shooters viable and playable on consoles; but while the action is certainly capable, I’ve always found the stuff that surrounds it to be lacking.

I’ve dabbled in the multiplayer here and there, but I’m simply not good enough to compete in any meaningful way (at least with strangers), and so I don’t pay that much attention to it.

I didn’t play the Destiny alpha, but I did play the beta, and I thought the beta was pretty remarkable; it was gorgeous, the moment-to-moment action felt quite good, even if the missions weren’t terribly innovative; the narrative was a bit opaque, but I wasn’t necessarily paying attention to it, as that wasn’t what the beta was about.  Ultimately, while I’d already pre-ordered the game, the beta made me feel like I’d spent my money wisely.

“You can hear every penny that went into making this thing so oppressively shiny, but you can’t hear any of the force of passion that supposedly caused those songs to come into being in the first place.”

The above quote is taken from Stereogum’s Premature Evaluation of U2’s “Songs of Innocence”, the album that Apple gave away for free to every iTunes member just a few days ago.   It also happens to sum up my feelings about Destiny pretty accurately; Destiny is jaw-droppingly beautiful, and it’s clear that a tremendous amount of hard work went into making this thing a true AAA blockbuster, but it’s also utterly devoid of soul.

You will traverse through meticulously detailed environments which, for all their minute graphical touches, feel uncannily empty.  You will engage in missions that ultimately boil down to “kill this many enemies” or “kill enough enemies to pick up this many collectibles” or “kill enemies until a certain amount of time has passed” or “kill all the enemies, and then the boss.”

It’s a good thing that the shooting feels as good as it does, because it goes a very long way towards making this stuff feel less tedious than it ordinarily would.

Part of the tedium is due to the writing, which is bad and/or bland and/or lazy.  I reiterate my earlier comments about Peter Dinklage – yes, his performance is startlingly bad, but his dialogue is dreadful, and there’s only so much you can do with what ultimately boils down to badly written exposition.  Why would you hire an actor of Dinklage’s considerable talents to speak such boring drivel?  Why would you constrain him to such a limited range?   I noted this bad writing during the beta, but it also didn’t necessarily bother me all that much because I wasn’t really paying attention to it.  Here, though, in its final retail form, I have to pay attention to it because it gives me the context to do whatever it is I’m doing, and I simply don’t care.

The Darkness is the enemy.  But there’s also the Hive, and the Fallen, which may or may not be the same thing?  It’s not really explained.  I don’t know why I’m shooting these things other than that they generally shoot at me first.

Then again, who am I?  In Halo, I was Master Chief, a not-nearly-as-enigmatic-as-they-intended soldier with an iconic uniform and a purpose.  In Destiny, I am… a long-dead (but fully customizable) person who is resurrected at the beginning of the game (without any context) and who is tasked with being a Guardian to attempt to ward off the Darkness’ inevitable victory.  Yes – in the beginning of the game, you are told that the Darkness will win.  I will bet you one shiny nickel that at the end of the campaign, the Darkness will not have achieved victory.

Narrative incoherence aside, the game is just kinda weird.  It’s ostensibly a sci-fi shooter with RPG elements.  You’re not doing any role-playing, though – indeed, you hardly speak, even in cutscenes; and as far as loot goes, well, take it from a dude who just finished Diablo III for the second time – the loot is barely there.  You’ll pick up slightly better weapons and armor as you play, but you won’t necessarily notice any real difference.  (And yet there are all sorts of cosmetic changes you can make to your armor, even though this is a first-person shooter and you can’t actually see any of it.)

Perhaps my biggest pet peeve – and this is something that was highly relevant yesterday, when I was home, feeling dreadfully ill and frequently needing to get off the couch – is that you can’t pause gameplay.  If you need to stop playing for any reason, your only options are to either hide in a corner and hope that no enemies respawn near you, or to summon a menu that removes you from the playing field and puts you “in orbit”, which is essentially a pre-mission lobby.  If you’re in a story mission, you have to restart it from the beginning.  This is all because the game really wants you to play online, but unless you’re doing multiplayer stuff, why can’t you pause and enter some sort of safe, invisible place?  In single-player/coop, you can’t grief anybody (as far as I can tell), nor is there any friendly fire.   It doesn’t make any sense, and it can be incredibly inconvenient.

Ultimately, what we have here is a highly polished shooter without a heart or soul.  There is nothing controversial about it; it takes no risks.  You’re on a desperate mission to save Earth; but we’ve done this before, and the game’s fiction is barely explained.  Sure, you can create your own character, but “you” have no personality, you make no choices, you have no literal voice except for the grunting you do when you jump.  Your enemies are bland and generic in appearance, calling to mind enemy design in both Halo and Mass Effect (in the latter, I refer specifically to the Thrall, who are basically fast-moving Husks).  Your own weaponry is largely familiar (even in the future, you’re still firing bullets) – and the enemy arsenal is also familiar (especially as some of the enemies are essentially using Halo’s Needler).

What’s worrisome about Destiny is what it represents; this is the sort of mindless AAA blockbuster that #GamerGate purports to want, a game ostensibly free from gender and race politics, a game that you play instead of talk about.  As it happens, there’s very little about Destiny that warrants any discussion.

Happy 15th Birthday, Dreamcast

Dreamcast-Console-Set

Oh, Sega Dreamcast.  You were so great, and you could’ve been so much more.

You gave us Soul Calibur, one of the greatest 3D fighters ever made; you gave us Skies of Arcadia, my first JRPG and still one of the best games I’ve ever played; you gave us Shenmue, one of the most wildly over-ambitious messes of all time.  And you also gave us Seaman, which… yeah.

You introduced us to the NFL2K franchise, and coincidentally you gave me my first real reason to hate EA (because they refused to publish Madden in lieu of the PS2, which might as well have been the first domino to fall in your eventual demise).

You gave us the best version of Rayman 2, which remains my favorite 3D platformer and one of my top 10 favorite games.

You also started the unfortunate trend of shitty Sonic games, and you’re also why I can’t play Crazy Taxi anymore, such is my utter distaste for the Offspring.

You were my first console that I owned as an adult (even if it was technically a gift), and your DNA was more or less absorbed into the original Xbox, which was my second.  You were way ahead of your time, and we just weren’t ready for you.

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

7 idle thoughts

I took some melatonin last night to help me sleep, and it worked – I did sleep – but I’m having a gawdawful time waking up, the sort of awful zombie nightmare hangover that no amount of coffee can rescue me from.  Which is not to say I won’t continue drinking obscene amounts of coffee; I’m just acknowledging how futile everything feels right now.

What follows are some random thoughts – because that’s all I’ve got right now – that are either too long for Twitter, or are adapted from IM conversations I’ve been having with my buddy (and long-ago SFTC contributor) Greg.

1.  King games – Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue, and my current nemesis, Bubble Witch 2 – are fucking bullshit, and I hate them, and I hate that I’m still suckered into playing them when they’re objectively and obviously horrible.  The games ultimately feel like carnival contests, rigged against you from the moment you get started unless you pay for power-ups.  Skill is helpful but ultimately useless; I fail most levels not because I’ve messed up, but because the algorithm that governs the randomness of the tools at my disposal makes sure that I can’t win – unless I decide to purchase special powerups (at obscene prices).  I refuse to spend money, though, and so I’m stuck banging my head against the wall.  Ironically, the 30-minute wait to refill one (1) life is actually a godsend, because it means that when I run out of lives I don’t have to reload the page for another 2.5 hours, and I can do something meaningful with my life.

2.  I cannot explain why I’m willing to wait for a game like Divinity: Original Sin to appear in a Steam Sale, and yet I’m actually contemplating buying the PS4 version of Diablo III at full price – a game that I’ve already sunk 100+ hours into on PC, and where I can’t transfer those PC characters to my console.  The aforementioned Greg is playing it for the first time, and he appears to be enjoying himself, and I’d love to play co-op with him, and all the big sites seem to indicate that this PS4 edition is the perfect place to play D3, and that it’s worth coming back to.  I did not want to hear this news.

3.  What the hell ever happened to the Steam Box?  I keep hemming and hawing over the Xbox One but if they announced a Steam Box with decent specs (i.e., better than my 4-year-old PC) at a decent price (up to $700), I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

4.  It’s a goddamned shame that the Burnout franchise appears to be dead.  It’s even more of shame that it had to die so that Need For Speed could live.  I suppose I’m bummed that I’ll miss out on Forza Horizon 2; I can only hope that DriveClub and/or The Crew manages to capably scratch my arcade racing itch.

5.  Likewise, I’m ready for a new PS4 DiRT game.  And if Microsoft wants to woo me back, they could certainly find a way to revive the Project Gotham franchise.

6.  Speaking of arcade racers:  as long as they’re making HD remasters of last-gen games, my buddy Greg and I feel very strongly that Split/Second should get a remastered treatment.  That was a criminally underrated (and undersold) game with a ridiculously fun multiplayer side.

7.  I am not necessarily as down on CounterSpy as my friend Carolyn is, but I see her points.  Truth is, the game was never really described all that well; it’s marketed as a stealth game, and it looks like a Metroidvania game, but neither of those impressions are actually true.  For one, stealth is damned-near impossible – you have to kill everyone you see if you hope to find anything of value before exiting the level.  For another, each level is short and procedurally generated, which ostensibly means that no two levels are alike (even though you’ll start to recognize how the different parts repeat and align).  I also wish it performed better on the Vita than it does, because it’s a perfect mobile title – each level takes around 20 minutes to finish, which is a perfect time for a commute – but the load times are horrendous, and the performance is spotty at best.  It plays much smoother on the PS4, but that’s not where I’d prefer to play it – if I do indeed continue to play it at all.