Tag: ps4

The First Few Hours: Child of Light

As noted yesterday, reviews for Ubisoft’s highly anticipated Child of Light are a bit all over the place; they are generally positive, but some are much less effusive in their praise than others.  I tempered my excitement accordingly before firing it up last night.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that it’s absolutely gorgeous, and in this I absolutely concur.  The game uses the same engine as the fantastic (and equally gorgeous) Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, and to great effect – every pixel seems to be lovingly hand-crafted and placed with delicate care.

Another thing that people seem to be noticing is that the game is told entirely in verse… and that the writing is not particularly good.  I also concur with this.  I’ve got no problem at all with a game or book or film told in verse, as long as the verse itself is artful and uses the form wisely and to its advantage.  Here, though, the writing is in verse ostensibly because it’s a bedtime story, but there’s no poetry in it – it’s awkwardly written and often seems forced.  After an hour or so of reading this crap, I came to the following conclusions:  either (1) an executive gave a note to the writers to make the poetry a bit less flowery so as not to antagonize dudebros and the writers basically threw their hands up in disgust, got drunk, and rewrote the script in about an hour before storming out of the office, or (2) the decision to go with verse took place at the very last minute, and the writers (or interns, or someone’s friend who had some free time and could work cheap) scrambled to put at least a first draft in place before the code went off for submission.  Or, alternately, what’s in the game is the first draft, and the subsequent revisions got lost in the shuffle.

It’s a shame, basically, because it’s so distracting from what’s otherwise a beautiful fantasy.  The game itself is a Metroidvania adventure-RPG with a sort-of turn-based timed battle system – you gain abilities as you progress and level up and previously inaccessible areas become open for discovery; there are treasure chests (though no real loot to speak of, at least not that I’ve yet come across); there also are some light puzzle elements.

I’m having a nice time with it, and I’m certainly curious to see more of where it’s going.  It’s just a shame that the writing is so dumb.

The First Few Hours: Trials Fusion (PS4)

Current Status:  I’m around 2.5 hours in.  I’ve gotten gold medals in all of the first 2 locations (“Easy”), I’ve completed the third tier with silvers (“Medium”), and I just unlocked the trick system, which also opened up a whole bunch of locations, costumes and bikes (including 4-wheel ATVs).

I have been a heavy-duty Trials fan for what feels like years now, even if I’m nowhere near an expert.  There was an early, PC-only version (whose name escapes me at the moment) which I was terrible at, but when the Trials games appeared on Xbox 360 I immediately devoured them, even as I repeatedly beat my head against the wall of “Hard” difficulty.  Last year, when I was in my hard-core PC gamer phase, I even went and bought the Trials HD edition on Steam (which combined those first two XBLA games, plus added some bonus content) and tried to play that for a little while, although that PC version is kinda terrible.

And as I think I mentioned earlier this week, I’ve become fiendishly addicted to Trials Frontier, a completely new game for iOS, with a free-to-play model that is surprisingly not terrible.  The game plays just fine, but the reason why it’s worth bringing up here is that it’s also made some significant tweaks to the Trials formula – namely, it’s now a kind of RPG, in that there’s a narrative, a “bad guy”, and a host of NPCs that give you tasks that reward you with XP, money and blueprints for new bikes.

What this iOS game ultimately succeeded in doing is to make my appetite for a proper, next-gen edition all that much more difficult to sate.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait very long.

There are good and bad things to discuss with regards to Trials Fusion.  Let’s start with the good.

It should come as absolutely no surprise that Trials Fusion is drop-dead gorgeous.  I’m aware that the Xbox One version came with a day-one patch that upped the resolution a bit, but the PS4 version arrives fully formed in glorious 1080p, and a frame rate that feels pretty rock solid despite the craziness of the backgrounds.  And, man – there is a lot of craziness happening in the backgrounds.  Buildings explode, wind farms collapse, dams break – and the draw distance is deep, so everywhere you look there’s something bananas going on, even if it’s something that looks 5 miles away.

The game also feels great, and a lot of this has to do with how much better the PS4 controller is at handling the fine-tuned movements that are vital to landing certain jumps or climbing steep inclines.  I do not find myself missing the 360 controller, which says pretty much all that needs to be said as far as that goes.

And the level of variety in each course is astonishing.  Again – I’m still towards the beginning of the game, but each course is radically different and shows off a hell of a lot more than I ever saw in the last-gen games.  I have no doubt that the creator community is going to go absolutely nuts once they get their hands on the tools.

There’s also, like in the iOS version, a quasi-RPG system, though it doesn’t yet appear to serve any real purpose.  You gain XP and money for completing levels and meta-objectives (more on that in a second).  I think I hit level 20 last night, but that doesn’t really mean anything as far as a noticeable increase in my skills or in my bikes – all it means is that I’ve reached certain plateaus where previously locked bikes and clothes are now available for use.*

* I think it would be neat, eventually, to have an RPG system in a Trials game that actually improved your skills dependent on how well (or how often) you executed them – like in Skyrim, or (digging deep here) Aggressive Inline.  So, for Trials, if you show that you can land flips regularly with ease, you should have greater control over your spin with a heavier bike, for example.

Those meta-objectives are interesting, in that they can be tough to ignore.  The levels are already pretty challenging, but once you see that you can earn bonus XP for landing 10 flips in a zero-fault run, or if you avoid touching certain colored obstacles on the course, those things are tough to un-see, and so it adds an extra layer of stress to your run.

The biggest change to the Trials formula is probably the trick system, but since I only just unlocked that before calling it a night last night, I’m not quite ready to discuss it.  It’s a neat idea, though, and I suspect that it’ll give multiplayer matches a lot more depth.  (Oh, yeah, there’s multiplayer.  Haven’t tried that yet, either.)

Alas, not all is perfect in Trials Fusion.  In a game famous for giving you the ability to immediately restart a race at the touch of a button, the biggest grievance I have is the interminable waiting that happens after you finish a run; there’s a period of what may be only 30 seconds but feels like 20 minutes as the game does… something… after you finish.  Perhaps it’s sending your run to the uPlay cloud?  I’m not sure what the cause is, but it takes WAY too long and completely ruins the flow.

The weirder aspect is that there’s also an attempt here of some sort of narrative.  There are two disembodied voices that you hear – one is a male announcer, making either kinda lame jokes about how it’s only been 14 minutes since the last workplace accident, and to “keep up the good work”, or else some weird attempts at giving the weather.  The other is a female AI named Cindy, who walks you through each tutorial phase and who also tends to chirp in from time to time to comment on the male announcer’s ramblings.  Between the futuristic laboratory environments and the AI companions, it’s almost as if they wanted to set a Trials game in Portal‘s Aperture Science, but forgot to hire funny writers.

And, also, the writers they did hire did not factor into account how many times you might restart a race – which, if you’re like me and you’re determined to get as close to gold as you can, is an awful lot – and so you’ll hear the same quips over and over and over and over and over again, until they stop making any sense (if they ever did make sense), and you kinda just wish they’d shut up.  Cindy keeps making these odd comments about how nice it is to see you – or, at least, this version of you, anyway – and this is strange in a game that takes such gleeful joy in ragdolling your rider in increasingly bizarre and convoluted ways after each finish line.  Is the joke that we’re just a bunch of clones?  Is that the big twist?  That’s not really that big a stretch.

Anyway – long loading times and weird storytelling aside, it’s a next-gen Trials game, and if that’s the sort of thing that tickles your fancy, well, you’ve probably already downloaded it.

 

The first few hours: Infamous Second Son

CURRENT STATUS:  I’m around 3-4 hours into Infamous: Second Son; I’ve acquired smoke and neon powers; I think my karma is whatever Level 3 Good is called (“Champion”, perhaps).

ON THE ONE HAND, Infamous Second Son is a graphics whore’s delight.  It is, without question, one of the most beautiful-looking games I’ve ever seen.  It is so pretty, in fact, that I now feel fully justified in upgrading to a PS4.  I don’t know how to articulate the game’s beauty in a technical sense, so I’m linking to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry analysis of the game’s first hour in case you need to know how and why.  What I can tell you is that even in spite of some minor frame rate jitters, the game is jaw-dropping to behold.  Seeing neon light reflected in puddles – or even just the way the ambient light fades as you absorb the neon from a nearby sign – is stunning.  The animation is also quite spectacular – there’s so many subtle details in the way the main character Delsin moves, or how his hands articulate as he runs (or even as he stands still).

And while I still wonder why Sony feels it necessary to make sure that every game uses the Dualshock 4’s touchpad whenever possible, at least it’s used wisely here – and by “wisely”, I mean “very quickly and very infrequently.”  The game also uses the controller in a novel way whenever Delsin starts tagging, Banksy-style; it’s a little gimmicky, sure, but it’s not offensively gimmicky.

And I’d also be remiss in mentioning the supercharged move you get when you max out your karma combo meter specifically with the neon power – it feels like a summons right out of Final Fantasy, except it’s you doing it, and it’s spectacular.

ON THE OTHER HAND, though: the game is really, really difficult and frustrating.  I expected this sort of thing in Dark Souls 2, and even though it’s part of the experience it annoyed me so much I nearly broke the game disc in half.  But I didn’t expect it here, and that’s what’s so dumbfounding – especially since, unlike in Dark Souls 2, a lot of my deaths feel horrifically unfair.  Regardless of how many superpowers Delsin might absorb, he can only take a miniscule amount of damage – and the enemy is really good at juggling you in place so that you can’t escape.  When I die, I die a lot, and it makes me feel less inclined to explore and do certain side activities, at least until I’ve powered up my abilities a bit further – and I haven’t seen anything in the way of upgrading my defensive abilities, like taking more damage or the like.  I find myself stopping a play session not because of time, or because I ended in a chapter break, but because I’m frustrated and can’t figure out how the hell I’m supposed to defeat this wave of enemies without getting chopped into bits.

And while the virtual Seattle on display is absolutely gorgeous, I don’t really have a good feel of the city since a lot of my travelling is along rooftops and such.  It’s the same sort of disconnect that I had with Saints Row 4 – the city feels abstract because I’m not really in it the way that I am in, say, GTA V‘s Los Santos.  I suppose at some point I should write up a thing about cities in open-world games and why some of them work better than others, but in the case of I:SS it’s really just that I’m constantly moving around and so I don’t really have a sense of where I am at any given point.  A waypoint appears on my map, and so I head in that direction.  There’s no home base, no point to return to, and so the experience of being in the city is somewhat ethereal and transient.  I’ve already been to the Space Needle, the harbor and a bunch of other places but I couldn’t tell you how I got there, or how I’d get back.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Delsin as a character.  After about 10 minutes it becomes clear that the developers couldn’t hire Nolan North, so they hired a sound-alike; the problem is that Delsin is all over the place as a character.  He’s charming, he’s a wise-ass, he’s well-meaning but very high-strung and confrontational, he’s bad-but-also-good.  He changes from scene to scene but not in any noticeable direction, so there’s no sense of journey or arc; almost as if his interactions with other characters were written by completely different people and then shuffled out of chronological order.  I’m still early in the story, so there’s certainly plenty of room for him to eventually land, but right now it’s hard to relate to him.  (I’m not even sure I know how old he is; his older brother, a cop, looks 20 years older than him and in the pre-release trailers I thought he was Delsin’s father.)

The graphics go a long way towards keeping me engaged, and I’m certainly going to stick with it for the foreseeable future.  I just wish I was having a bit more fun.

Poor Impulse Control: a continuing series

Longtime readers of this blog should know that there’s a “consumer whore” category here for a reason; newcomers can probably figure it out.  I bring this up because, in a moment of weakness (borne out of confusion, which I’ll get to in a second), I accidentally-on-purpose bought and downloaded Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes last night.

(The confusion:  remember, earlier this week, I’d mentioned that PSN was having this thing where if you spent $60, you got $10 in credit?  Well, I’d spent my $60, but didn’t know where the credit was, and so I put MGS:GZ in my cart to see if it would show up… and, well, it didn’t.)

I played MGS for around 10 minutes (or, roughly half the game – HAHA, LOL) and then called it a night.  Honestly, before I deliver any sort of impression, I need to mess around with the control scheme a bit – the default scheme feels incredibly strange and weird and bizarrely unintuitive, and I seem to recall hearing that there’s a different setting that’s more in tune with what the vast majority of 3rd person action games use; if that’s the case, then I’ll get around to checking it out.  And the thing is, even though I’ve sworn up and down that Metal Gear is the most overrated franchise in the history of any and all media, there’s a part of me that’s genuinely curious to check this one out.  Everyone’s complained about the alleged length of the campaign, but there’s supposedly a ton of replay value – alternate side missions and objectives and self-imposed playstyles and such, and most reviewers say that they’ve clocked in at least an extra dozen hours or so after beating the main campaign.  So that’s OK, as far as I’m concerned.

I also was able to download and install Infamous Second Son this morning before leaving for work, although I didn’t get a chance to play anything beyond the very first cutscene.  As this is the first true “next-gen” game that I’ve actually been excited about, I’m hoping to give it a thorough examination over the weekend.

The wife and I will be running errands this weekend and while we’re out I’m also possibly going to pick up this PS4 Gold Wireless Stereo Headset, since I like my surround sound but don’t actually have a surround sound system.  I am also very tempted to check out a Vita.  Yes, I’ve seen that a few brick-and-mortar stores are selling the Xbox One – including the Titanfall bundle – for $450, but I’m still not needing an XBO just yet, and Titanfall isn’t going to be the game to change my mind.  But the Vita is looking more and more like a thing I’m going to need.  Being able to play those new Oddworld remasters on the go feels very necessary; and I’ve got a bunch of PS1 games on my PS3 that I would like to actually play, too.  (Plus – my PS3 is not in an ideal gaming environment at the moment, and I’m really hoping to check out those FFX HD remasters.)  So, please, whatever you do – don’t tell my wife.

Saying goodbye to Dark Souls II (and the 360, for real)

This will be a quick-tangent post, because I’ve had nothing but weird nights of sleep all week and there’s apparently not enough coffee in the world.  [UPDATE:  There is plenty of coffee in the world, and I might’ve had too much, as it turns out.]

SO:

Yesterday’s post was about asking whether Dark Souls II would still be considered a fun game if everything about the game stayed the same but the difficulty was turned down a notch.  It wasn’t necessarily meant to be rhetorical, but as this blog has little reach and nobody comments here, it might’ve come off that way.  Still, I’d said that I intended to give it a second chance, and that I’d made a wee bit of progress, and that I intended to keep pushing on for a little bit – at least until Infamous Second Son became available to download.

Last night I popped the game in… and rage-quit about 15 minutes later, immediately sealing it up in the Gamefly envelope to prevent me from snapping the disc in half, and then, as I quietly seethed on the couch and engaged in some light retail therapy on the PS4 store*, I started to feel a little sad that it might very well have been the last new game I play on my Xbox360**.

There is clearly an audience for the sort of masochistic experience that Dark Souls II promises, and to them I say:  go have at it.  And to myself I say:  you are not one of them, stop falling for it.

—–

*  There’s been a promotion on the PS store where if you spend $60, you get $10 in credit.  Being that I’m probably going to do a bit more digital downloading on the PS4 in the coming months, I figured it was worth investing in.  I wasn’t sure if my digital pre-order of Infamous counted or not, but in any event I was pissed off about Dark Souls and I had some extra cash, so I bought Strider, Rayman Legends, and Steamworld Dig.  I’d played the demo of Strider and liked it; I’d already played Rayman Legends on 360 and PC, but figured why not play it again; and I’d heard lots of great things about Steamworld Dig, and that brought me up past the $60 threshold.

—–

**  I’ve already written my long goodbye to the Xbox 360, but at the time I was still somewhat invested in GTA V Online and making vague promises to see the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3.  Point being, I hadn’t yet disconnected either of the last-gen consoles, nor had I acquired a new one.  Now, though, I’m thoroughly invested in the PS4, and a quick glance of my Gamefly rental queue reveals zero 360 games on the list.  This makes me sad; I wish I’d given it a fonder farewell.  Again, I wasn’t necessarily expecting to fall madly in love with Dark Souls II, but I’d heard enough about it being more approachable for newcomers and so I didn’t expect to hate it so violently, so quickly.  So I guess South Park will go down as the last 360 game I finish.

I may have to start doing a feature where I revisit all the 360 games I still own, if only to say goodbye to them one last time before tucking them back in to their bookshelves.  (And it now occurs to me that, since we anticipate moving within the next year, it very well might be the last time those games are still within easy reach; our move to the suburbs might require my outdated games to hang out in boxes for a little while.)

—–

This (poorly-written) tweet was inspired from a conversation I’d had earlier in the day with my buddy Gred.  We’d been talking about Dark Souls and Final Fantasy XIII and other such games where the overall impressions we’d been hearing were “It starts out slow, but after 12 or 13 hours it starts getting really good.”  And I just found it hilarious that gamers, as a whole, can freak out about Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes being beatable in 10 minutes, and also that Gone Home is only 2 hours long but costs $20; and yet we are also generally OK to waste a dozen hours of our life just to get to the good part of a game.

I’m really only posting this because I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention Gred’s fantastic Dark Souls comment (in response to my impressions):

“…i’ve always had the impression that the difficulty was barring my access to ingenious game design, when, apparently, it was apparently just a fancier flappy bird.”

 

the first few hours: Dark Souls II

So I think I’ve established here that I am not the target audience for Dark Souls II.  I’ve never particularly enjoyed “difficult” games, irrespective of the perceived “fairness” of those games; and in the brief time I spent with the earlier games in this franchise, I was able to glean what the game was going to be like, and then know that it wasn’t for me.

That’s all well and good; not every game is meant for everybody.

Anyway, here’s a hypothetical question:  if Dark Souls II was a game of average difficulty, as opposed to notoriously unforgiving difficulty, but in every other respect was the exact same game – would anybody care?  Is the game’s difficulty and obscurity the actual appeal?

Because last night I did in fact give Dark Souls II a second chance.  I made it to the first town, and then to the first bonfire outside of town, and I killed things and got killed, and so while I acknowledge that I’ve seen but a tiny sliver of what the game has to offer, it also showed me plenty:

  • Utterly strange sound design, where (for example) walking through tall grass sounds like a very stiff whisk broom sweeping across ragged sandpaper
  • Ponderously dull voice acting.  This has been true in the limited time I’ve spent with the previous two games, so I guess it’s a franchise trademark, but still.  There are other ways of instilling gravitas in your dialogue besides asking your voice actors to slowly drone the words.
  • Striking visual design, to be sure, but marred by surprisingly bad visual fidelity.  I installed the game to the 360’s hard drive – usually that helps – but MAN, this game has moments of supreme ugliness and jank.  Definitely does not look like a late-era 360 game – there are plenty of games that look a lot better than this.  And considering how terrible the PC version of Dark Souls I looked, I’m not necessarily holding out hope that the PC version of this game looks remarkably better.
  • Unintuitive control schemes.  My very first death in Dark Souls II was from trying to jump and instead plummeting into a lake.  Jumping requires being in a “dashing” state (i.e., pressing B), and then clicking the left thumbstick.  In most games, jumping only requires one button press.  I get that this isn’t a platforming game, but considering how cheap some of my deaths have been (like accidentally falling off cliff-sides and such), having to perform such an awkward maneuver to achieve a simple action is a bit off-putting.

Essentially, without the unforgiving difficulty and the willful obscurity of your objectives, the game is kind of a mess, and probably wouldn’t be all that interesting.  So, then:  am I going to bother playing it for much longer?  Especially with Infamous and MGS arriving later this week?

The Next Few Hours: Thief

It is much easier to describe what’s wrong with an OK game (or film, or book, or album) than what’s right.  Problems/mistakes are often very specific and universally recognizable, whereas positive traits can sometimes only be felt, and then only after a few hours of play.

To that end, let me at least start off this post by saying that I don’t actively hate Thief anymore.  My original list of problems still holds true, and I’ve been able to identify a bunch of new ones (which I will list below), but I’ve managed to become intrigued by what I’ve seen, and I must admit that I am enjoying the actual moment-to-moment gameplay quite a bit.  I’m still playing as non-lethally as I can – even avoiding takedowns whenever possible – and pulling off a mission without being spotted is quite a thrill.

Basically, if you can ignore the incoherent narrative, the bizarre design choices, the choppy voice acting, the strangeness of the City’s lack of any definable characteristics, and the juvenile, puerile titillation of the first half of the brothel mission (which is the mission I just finished), and you just concentrate on straight-up thievery and stealth, there’s some genuine fun to be had.

But it can be very, very hard to ignore all that other stuff.

[It occurs to me that some of the stuff I complain about below could be design choices that were in the original games, and that the developers felt obligated to keep for that reason.  I hope that’s the case, actually, instead of the alternative; but in any event, the fact remains that those original games came out a long, long time ago, and game design has evolved considerably since then, and some of these issues simply should not be there anymore.]

1.  Polygon’s Ben Kuchera recently wrote a great piece about checkpoints, and how difficult they are to properly design and implement.  Thief’s checkpoint system isn’t necessarily terrible, but it can be incredibly frustrating and/or annoying.  More to the point:  unlike, say, Tomb Raider (another Square Enix joint), which automatically saved every time you found a collectible item, Thief only saves under three conditions:  (1) you manually save, (2) you enter a new area, or (3) you hide in a closet without being in a combat state.  So if you’ve been cleaning up the town for a bit [see 1a below for more on this] and then accidentally get into a scuffle – and if you didn’t engage in one of those 3 conditions above – you will lose all of your progress since your last save if you end up dying.  As I said before, I’m trying to play non-lethally, and as such I’m deliberately not equipped to go toe-to-toe with anyone; if I get discovered, I more or less just give up and reload and try to figure out another approach.  But if I haven’t manually saved in the last 2o minutes, after scooping up a few hundred dollars worth of loot?  I’ve gotta do it all again.  Which sucks.  

1a.  Again, this isn’t necessarily that big a deal, BUT:  loot can be found anywhere, especially in places where it has absolutely no reason to be (i.e., coin purses in bird nests; golden ashtrays on raised wooden planks where no smoker would dare to loiter).   While this serves as a useful enticement for fully exploring the environment, it’s also without any logical sense whatsoever, and so it feels incredibly artificial and breaks any suspension of disbelief.  Another way to say it is that it doesn’t feel like I’m stealing so much as I am simply picking up litter.

2.  The map is useless.  If you find a hidden passageway the game will alert you that the map has been updated, but it literally doesn’t matter, because the map makes no sense.  It serves no useful function; it shows neither direction nor location, but rather a bunch of interconnected rectangles.  The game has an objective marker in your field of view anyway, and so all you need to do is head in that direction in any way you choose.  But if you find a hidden area and want to remember where it is?  Or if you want to go to a shop to resupply before going on a mission but can’t remember where the shop is located?  Too bad, there’s no ability to set a custom waypoint.

3.  Further to that last point, the game does not explicitly give you an opportunity to resupply yourself before a mission, which is insane.  I’d managed to scoop up a bunch of loot after the first mission, and I knew there were tools that I could now afford (specifically, the wirecutter) that I wanted to play with, and I sort of assumed that I’d find a vendor before heading to the brothel mission.  But aside from randomly stumbling across a vendor in a very out-of-the-way corner (who was only selling different kinds of arrows and basic supplies), I was not given a chance to buy the things I needed, and I didn’t know that the only place I could buy that stuff was in the complete opposite direction.  And once I figured it out, I still had to remember where the shop actually was, and the map – again – was utterly useless in that regard.

4.  This is less of a complaint and more of a bug, I think; I often stumble upon throwable objects (which come in handy if I need a pesky guard to go somewhere else), but the game will tell me that my inventory is full and that I can’t pick it up.  Except my inventory is not full, and whenever I need to throw something, the game tells me I have nothing to throw.  Does this mean that I can only carry a certain overall total of tools, and so if I’m carrying too many water arrows I can’t carry throwable bottles?  Or does this mean that the game is simply fucked up?  I can certainly carry infinite amounts of loot (which don’t weigh me down or make any noise, either)…

5.  I’m still very early, and I’ve not seen all there is to see.  But the brothel mission is so weird.  For starters, the brothel itself feels larger than the City that encloses it, and this is to say nothing of the second half of the mission (which feels substantially larger than the brothel that encloses it).  Then there’s the brothel itself, which features a lot of boobs and simulated screwing and a lot of dialogue that sounds as if it were written by overly horny 14-year-olds (who should absolutely NOT be playing this game, if only for this mission alone).  The mission also involves this weird hidden rune thing and a cipher that you use to crack it, except I don’t remember picking up the cipher in the first place, and in any event the controls you use to interact with it are backwards.  (Plus, there seems to be another bug; the game only starts identifying these runes as significant once you find a certain one.  I’d been staring at a different one first, for 5 full minutes, trying to figure out what it meant, before moving on and finding the one that “triggered” the cipher.)

You see what I mean?  This post is over 1200 words long and I spent at least 1000 of them describing the game’s problems, and only 200 or so saying I was having enough fun to stick with it.  Criticism is a tough business.

The First Few Hours: Thief

I played just over one hour of Thief last night; I finished the prologue, and then made my way to the clocktower (via the jewel store?).

Look, I know literally nothing about game design or programming or really anything about the game development process, and yet the things that are wrong with Thief leap off the screen almost immediately:

1.  Horrendous voice acting / even more horrendous voice casting.  This shouldn’t necessarily be at the top of the list as far as deal-breakers go, but JESUS CHRIST.  If you want to convince me of the reality of the world you’ve created – and if the world you’ve created is not a melting pot like modern New York City, but rather some medieval European town – try to make at least 50% of your townspeople sound like they’re from the same place.  And if, for some unknown reason, such a feat is not possible, try to not cast people who sound like they’re former cast members of Jersey Shore.

2.  Using the PS4 controller’s touchpad as the inventory screen.  The touchpad can be used for many things, I suppose – it is quite responsive – but the way they’ve designed the inventory management is so mind-boggling that it kinda makes me want to not use anything if I don’t absolutely have to.  My understanding is that the Xbox One version uses a radial menu system that makes some degree of intuitive sense; without seeing it in action, I can’t comment on it, but it must be better than what’s happening on the PS4.

3.  Unintentionally ugly character models.  Especially Garrett.  Thank goodness you don’t see his face all that much.  It’s not uncanny valley-bad; it’s just bad.

4.  If you must open your story with a well-worn trope of the brash young apprentice vs. the master, at least try to make at least one of the characters sympathetic.  Garrett is a whiny asshole, and the girl – I’ve forgotten her name already – is an even whinier asshole, and I was not in the last bit sorry when she died at the beginning of the prologue (if that is in fact what happened to her – considering how predictable the story is already, I’m sure there’s a good chance she’s not dead at all).

5.  Speaking of which, what the fuck happened between the prologue and the first chapter?   I’m willing to suspend my disbelief when necessary, but I literally have no idea what happened.  I’m hoping this gets explained soon.

As far as the rest of it… well, it’s not really all that terrible, which is what’s frustrating.  The comparisons to Dishonored are apt, though honestly I’d rather be playing Dishonored.  Since I’m here, though, the sneaking and thieving and hiding and such are all pretty good and satisfying to pull off.  I am determined to play as sneakily as possible, which includes not knocking anybody out if I can avoid it, and so cleaning out a jewelry store while a guard was patrolling the same room did feel pretty awesome.  Of course, the guard’s AI pattern was pretty easy to decipher, and so it wasn’t necessarily as tense as it could’ve been, but still – the act of thieving (in that particular scenario) was well executed.  So, there’s that.

Like I said the other day, I’m coming to this game with very low expectations; I never played the original games, and I was let down by the 2004 Xbox game.  I’m playing this mostly because I want to keep the dust off my PS4, and so I’m doing everything I can to keep myself interested and motivated.  It’s just… man.  It’s hard not to be disappointed when you can see the potential for greatness being overwhelmed by all the junk being poured on top of it.

weekend recap: bones

1.  The newly-announced Titanfall / Xbox One bundle sounds intriguing, it really does.  Except… I still kinda don’t give a shit about Titanfall.  Which is, of course, not Titanfall’s fault; my friends who were in the beta say it’s pretty awesome, and I’d expect nothing less.  It’s just that:  (a) I’m still not all that into multiplayer shooters, and (b) with each new major multi-platform release, comparisons between the PS4 and the XBO make it that much clearer that the PS4 is the better-performing console.  I’d get the XBO if there were a true killer app for it that specifically appeals to my tastes – and, indeed, that day may yet come – but for now, I’d rather keep that $500 in my savings account if I can.

2.  I was curious to try the Final Fantasy 14 beta over the weekend, but the installer kept crashing.  After spending 20 minutes signing up and creating passwords and squinting like mad to read the fine print (is there really no way to expand the internet within an app?), everything seemed like it was OK, but then the installer would conk out once it hit 20%.  It’s just as well, I suppose – I can’t really afford to get sunk into an MMO right now anyway.

3.  I continue to make progress in Bravely Default; my party is level 35 or so, my town is pretty much fully rebuilt, and the difficulty level is now starting to weave all over the place; dungeon mobs are still mostly one-turn kills, but bosses and “asterisk fights” are ludicrously hard.  It is not quite getting tedious, but I think that’s because I’m still only playing in short bursts.

4.  Reviews for the new Thief are all over the place; mostly negative, but some reviewers are willing to cut it some more slack than others.  Here’s the part where I tell you that I’m aware of, but never played, the original, highly regarded trilogy, and so my interest in this game is purely out of wanting something to play on the PS4.  I did play one Thief game a while ago – was it the the one on the original Xbox? – and it suffered from a lot of the same problems that Deus Ex II did, which makes sense since I think they were using the same engine.  And I wasn’t particularly good at it, though I think that’s because my experience with stealth games was largely influenced by Splinter Cell, and you really can’t play Thief like you’re Sam Fisher.  So I’m hoping that I can be a bit more patient with this one, if only so that I can not send it back after 10 minutes.

5.  Speaking of having (or not having) patience, here’s a funny story.  I rented Far Cry 2 when it first came out in 2008; played for 5 minutes, died in the very first shootout, and said “fuck it”; sent it back to Gamefly.  In the intervening years, Far Cry 2 has taken on this mythical “greatest game ever” status among certain critics and people I greatly admire, and there was always a little part of me that wondered if I gave up on it too quickly.  Fast forward to this past weekend, where Ubisoft had a massive Steam sale.  I looked up at one point and saw that Far Cry 2 was being sold for something like $2.49.  Picked it up immediately.  Loaded it up.  Died in the exact same first shootout, screen faded to black.

BUT THEN THE SCREEN FADED BACK UP AGAIN.  And a man was talking to me and the game was teaching me how to heal myself.

All this time, I’d thought I just sucked at Far Cry 2.  I never knew that you’re supposed to get knocked out in that first shootout.  I am an idiot.

*     *     *

Today’s subject title is from the excellent self-titled album by The Forms.

A Series of Transitions

This is not an apology for not writing this week, but rather an explanation of sorts:  the day job has been extremely busy and hectic and stressful, and I’ve been going to bed on the early side of things when I get home.  Not much time for writing or gaming.

Though, that said, I did manage to finish Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition (PS4) this week.  It is still a fun and worthwhile experience, and the graphics are noticeably improved from the already-impressive previous version.  The narrative is still a bit whackadoo, and I’m still weird about seeing Lara thwack a dude to death with her pickaxe (which somehow counts as a stealth kill), and I’m not entirely sure that this is worth $60.  But I’m glad to have played it, and to have let the developers know that I’m still on board for this sort of thing, thank you very much.

Also downloaded Outlast (which is this month’s free Playstation Plus game, even though I already have it on the PC).  I played right up to the first real jump scare (which is about where I got to on the PC), and turned it off.  It doesn’t look to be enhanced in any way for the PS4, but – more to the point – it looks like the PC version with all the settings turned way up, and so that bodes quite well as far as I’m concerned about the PS4 getting quality indie games.

Speaking of quality indie games, I will be writing a review of Jazzpunk for the NYVCC, which should go up later next week.  I have not yet touched it – I’ll be buying a retail copy like a regular shmoe – but everything I’ve seen indicates that it will be a wacky good time.

And speaking of the NYVCC, the 3rd Annual Critics Awards are happening next Tuesday, and I’m going to be one of the award presenters!  Which is very exciting indeed.  My category is Best Mobile Game…

…and speaking of best mobile games, I cannot recommend enough the new game Threes, which came out last night.  (This Polygon piece about the game’s development is a must-read, by the way.)  It’s made by the guys behind Puzzlejuice, and it is absurdly addictive, and I can’t stop playing it.  Also worth picking up is Spell Quest, which is a free word-search RPG (similar-ish to Bookworm Adventures).

I am also working on a slightly more ambitious piece for this here blog about games and memory, although I suppose I’ve already jinxed it by mentioning it here while I’m currently stalled out on it.  That will go up whenever it’s ready, which who knows when that will be.