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too soon, too much

I’d love nothing more than to write a “First Few Hours” post about Borderlands 2, but, ironically enough, I feel like I haven’t played enough of it yet.

I mean, the whole point of a First Few Hours post is to specifically relay first impressions, gut instincts, surface-level observations about how the game looks, moves and feels, without getting into larger-scale topics like narrative and overall value.   And since Tuesday, I’ve played around 2 hours of Borderlands 2; my soldier is now level 7, I’ve killed a whole bunch of monsters and people, I’ve collected dozens of guns (and left dozens more where they lay, as my backpack is too small to carry them all), I’ve completed some challenges and cashed in some Badass Tokens (yielding results similar to Fallout’s “perks”).  I’ve also died a whole bunch, and I’ve run out of ammunition more times than I feel comfortable admitting.

About the only real thing I can definitively say at this point is that the game feels absolutely massive.  And I’ve only seen a tiny, tiny slice of it.

I think that once I get to Sanctuary, the first real town/hub, I’ll have a bit more to chew on.

In the meantime, iOS has been killing it this week.  Rayman Jungle Run is, sadly, not a port of Rayman Origins, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from seeing the game in motion – it looks absolutely gorgeous.  Instead, it’s a one-button auto-runner, where your objective is simply to catch all 100 lums in a level.  It’s got a steep difficulty curve, but each level is so short that you hardly notice how many times you’ve died.  That sentence sounds like a slam, but it’s really not – it highlights the quick reloading and the addictive quality of the action.

Also out this week is The Room for iPad, which – thank GOD – is not based on the Tommy Wiseau “masterpiece” but is instead an absolutely gorgeous puzzle game.  It’s been compared to those “escape the room” flash puzzles that were all the rage a few years ago, but to me it reminds me a bit more of the adventure game Syberia, in that the puzzles you solve are less about making non-intuitive inventory combinations and rather about figuring out how to open locked doors using intricate mechanisms.  I finished Chapter 3 last night (each chapter is its own locked box), and I’m not quite sure how much is left, but I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen thus far.

And, also, the long-awaited Lili is out, though I haven’t yet played it.  And Horn, from the people who made The Meadow, received a hefty price drop this week, so I picked that up too.

Tonight, I may give Torchlight 2 a try – if I can pull myself away from either Borderlands 2 or my iPad.

the week’s agenda

Busy week for games!  My 360 copy of Borderlands 2 just arrived, but so did the Indiana Jones bluray boxset.  And while we watch Raiders tonight, I will be downloading the Resident Evil 6 demo on my 360.  Then, on Thursday, Torchlight 2 unlocks on Steam.  In the meantime, I’m playing the shit out of Fieldrunners 2 HD on my iPad, which is highly enjoyable (even if I’m still somewhat afraid of it).

The wife is away from Thursday to Sunday, so there will be lots of gaming time in my future.  If you want to get into some online co-op with me (in either Borderlands 2 or Torchlight 2), drop me a line – my 360 tag is JervoNYC, and my Steam tag is jervonyc, and I will be ready.  (And I’ll most likely be trying Torchlight 2 in Big Picture Mode, which I can’t wait to try.)

random ramblings

1.  As mentioned a few posts back, I’m in something of a spending freeze for the foreseeable future.  That being said, I must admit that I’ve started to notice a subtle but stubborn itch in my brain that’s making me want to maybe get a Nintendo 3DS.  There are a couple reasons for this.  For one thing, the software library isn’t totally terrible anymore, and there are a few games coming up that I really want to play (Paper Mario, Professor Layton, etc.).  For another, I’m finding that I’m having a hard time staying engrossed in my iOS games.  I’ve bought a few RPGs for my iPhone but I almost never play them, and I find that if a game doesn’t let me listen to my own music (or podcasts or Spotify or whatever), I tend to ignore them, too.  Whereas back when my DS was in regular rotation, I’d absolutely plug in my headphones and allow myself to be fully engaged in the whole experience.  (Obviously, puzzle games like Picross don’t really need sound, but you get my point.)  Of course, yesterday’s announcement of the iPhone 5, coupled with my eligibility for a free upgrade in December, means that given my budgetary restraints, I can only choose one, and I am MOST DEFINITELY getting that new iPhone.  (And I’m still not ever getting a Vita.)

1a.  As I was writing the paragraph you just read, Lifehacker came out with a relevant article titled “How To Get Off The Upgrade Treadmill.”  So, there’s that.  (Still getting an iPhone 5, though, so there.)

2.  Speaking of Nintendo (and upgrading technology), I do not give a FUCK about the WiiU.

3.  My wife goes out of town next weekend, and I think I’m going to take that opportunity to move my PC tower into the living room, hook it up to my 40″ HDTV, and give Steam’s Big Picture Mode a workout.  I’m kind of afraid that I’m going to love the shit out of it, because there’s no way I can keep my PC in the living room without making my wife and my dogs very unhappy.

4.  Mark of the Ninja continues to impress.  Last night I figured out whatever the hell it was I was doing wrong and got past the figurative wall I’d run up against, getting a new ability in the process that will MOST DEFINITELY come in handy when I go back and try to ace the previous levels.  Goddamn, that game is great.

5.  Speaking of stealth games, I have a question:  do people actually enjoy the cutscenes in Metal Gear games, or do they enjoy them ironically, like they would with, say, The Room?  I bring this up because the Giant Bomb crew talked about the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes on last week’s Bombcast and they all seemed to acknowledge that the franchise as a whole is fucking insane, but enjoyably so, but the key phrase is still:  “fucking insane.”  Which it is.  (Feel free to read my posts about MGS4 which break down that game’s specific insanity in much greater detail.)   And yet I’ve come across plenty of people – fans, journalists, etc. – who take that franchise very seriously, and who get very, very defensive when people point out how ridiculous it is.   Ultimately, I found myself enjoying the gameplay of MGS 4 quite a lot, and was genuinely awed at the graphics and presentation, but I was also in utter disbelief that anybody could take that game’s narrative even remotely seriously.  Kojima is an enigma to me – I have no idea if he has any self-awareness, which is why I don’t know if I’m supposed to enjoy his stories as the camp that they clearly are, or if he’s actually sincere about this craziness.

a few words on Mark of the Ninja and Big Picture Mode

Goddammit.

I was around 600 words into a post yesterday afternoon about the excellent Mark of the Ninja, and about stealth games in general and why they seem to scratch a particularly satisfying itch, but work got in the way and I never had a chance to sit down and polish it and make my point.  And then, by the time I got home, I saw that Kotaku had already beaten me to the punch.  Very stealthy and ninja-like, in fact.

Their article more or less says exactly what I was trying to say, so much so that trying to polish up my own piece feels futile and empty.  Anyway, if you haven’t read it already, go check it out.  And then, when you’re done, download and play the hell out of Mark of the Ninja, because it is excellent.  Top 10 in GOTY for sure, even though I’m near the end and have hit a massive difficulty spike – which is just as well, because instead of beating my head against the wall, I’m going back and playing all the earlier levels better than I did the first time, which is just as satisfying.

In other news,  I tried Steam’s Big Picture Mode last night, although only on my widescreen monitor – but even in my brief time with it, I can confidently say that it’s the best console interface I’ve ever seen.  Beats the living shit out of the 360 and PS3 dashboards.  Fast and responsive, elegantly designed, super-easy to find the things you’re looking for.   I am very much wanting to figure out an easy way of moving my PC tower into the living room to try it out on my HDTV.   I kinda can’t believe I’m saying this, but if Valve were to actually make a living room console, I very well might forgo the next Xbox and Playstation altogether.

 

The Year So Far

My desire to one day be a professional game journalist is tempered by the fact that, well, sometimes there just ain’t very much to write about.  And I’m trying to figure out how to maintain a semi-regular content stream here without it simply being a diary of what I’ve been playing.  (And let me tell you, this current release lull that we’re in – the cocktease of Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders 2 coming out on the same day, followed by a month of nothingness until Borderlands 2 – is not helping.  Indeed, I finished Sleeping Dogs over Labor Day weekend and now I find myself doing a New Game+ of Darksiders 2, because why the hell not.)

I’ve toyed with the idea of updating this blog more frequently with links to other articles I find interesting, but Patrick Klepek already does that quite well with his weekly “Worth Reading” column, and in any event reblogging is a lot easier on Tumblr than it is on WordPress.

I’ve similarly toyed with the idea of a “What I Would Have Said” column, wherein I respond to certain topics of interest in various game-focused podcasts.  (Indeed, I still might do that – this week’s Giant Bombcast features a brief digression from Jeff (who never, ever, ever goes off on tangents) (j/k) about game reviews and their relevance/purpose in today’s game media, and I (as a consumer) have certain things I’d like to say about that.)

[I’m also very much wanting to talk about the new Xbox360 dashboard, which I received access to a few weeks ago (along with half the world, probably), but I don’t know if talking about it here violates an NDA.  I will say this, though – even before the update, everything moves so.  goddamned.  slow.  And they’ve made it too hard to find the stuff I want.]

Here’s the thing, though.  Most of the time, I do this blog in my down time at work; this down time is infrequently spaced and full of constant interruption – I started this post around 3 hours ago – so it’s hard to really buckle down and focus and write something engaging and interesting.

So,  since my time to blog here is so limited anyway, and since I’m wanting to talk about something even though my brain is whirring in a million different directions which makes talking about something of actual substance an exercise in futility, I’m going to take the easy way out and simply do a preemptive Best Games of 2012: So Far column.  Because, well, let’s face it – the rest of the year looks pretty bleak, and it’s highly probable that there will be few substantive changes between the list I make today and the list I make in December.  Seriously – check out my Fall Preview column from July – as far as this console generation goes, this holiday season has got to be one of the saddest.   (Like I said there – I have high hopes for Borderlands 2 and for Burnout Paradise 2  Need for Speed Most Wanted, I expect the Firaxis XCOM game to be great (and I expect that I’ll play it exactly once, on the easiest difficulty setting, before being too intimidated by it), and I’d like to think that Dishonored will live up to its hype.   I don’t really know what to expect out of Resident Evil 6 – I’m one of the few people I know who will admit to liking Resident Evil 5, and I’m definitely one of the only people on the planet who thought that RE4 was incredibly overrated, so I’m clearly not the target demographic.  I have less than high hopes for Assassin’s Creed 3, though I’ll play it; I don’t really care about Halo 4, though I’ll most likely play that as well; CODBLOPS 2 and Far Cry 3 are things I’ll rent if I’m bored.)

So, then.  My Top 10 of 2012 so far- not counting iOS stuff, although iOS has been more miss than hit lately, too – looks something like this:

  1.  Mass Effect 3
  2.  Darksiders 2
  3.  Journey
  4.  Fez
  5.  Trials Evolution
  6.  The Walking Dead
  7.  Max Payne 3
  8.  Diablo 3
  9.  Sleeping Dogs
  10.  Spec Ops: The Line

First off – I’d be surprised to see Sleeping Dogs and Spec Ops still on this list at the end of the year, frankly.  I enjoyed those games quite a bit, and was pleased to see that they had ambition and effort and weren’t just cookie-cutter experiences, but I don’t know that I’d call them capital-G Great.

Secondly – I’m also not entirely sure that ME3 will stay in the top spot; I just don’t know what I’d put there.  I didn’t hate the ending the way other people did, but my problems with that game weren’t really about the ending anyway.  I don’t know if Darksiders 2 will remain that high, either; right now it’s up there because I’m still enjoying the hell out of it after playing the hell out of it for 30 hours or so.  I don’t know that I can put Journey in the top spot, because while I found it exhilarating and intoxicating during my time with it, it didn’t really stay in my bloodstream for very long after I finished it (though that sand surfing sequence is something special).  Honestly, the game I spent the most time with in terms of raw hours is probably Diablo 3, and I’m at the point right now where I don’t even want to think about that game anymore.

If anything, I might move Max Payne 3 up a few slots.  I’ve been replaying it on the PC during this lull period, and there’s a certain quality about it that I find really intoxicating.  I’ve been finding that I’m playing it better on the PC (even though I’m still using a 360 controller) – I’m using the slow-mo and the jump dodge a lot more, and killing dudes in that spectacular way still feels fucking incredible.   Max 3 got a bit of a bad rap, and I guess I can understand why, but it’s struck a chord in me – similar to the way L.A. Noire did, in spite of all its flaws.  (Maybe I’m too much of a Rockstar fanboy to be truly objective, though.)

What about you guys?  What am I missing?  What did I forget?  What else should I play before the year runs out?

the first dozen hours: Sleeping Dogs

It’s times like these where I’m glad that I’m not a professional game writer, because then I’d have to be a bit less wishy-washy when describing my experience playing Sleeping Dogs.

On the one hand, I greatly admire what it’s trying to do.  It’s true that the number of GTA clones has decreased considerably in recent years, but even so, there are still 2 directions that most of these open-world games seem to take – there’s the batshit crazy direction, best personified by the excellent Saints Row 3, and then there’s the serious, thoughtful, contemplative direction first explored in GTA4 and then in Red Dead Redemption.   Sleeping Dogs, to its tremendous credit, is aiming for something serious here – or, at least, is doing everything it can to avoid being unintentionally funny, which is a verydifficult thing to do when you have Chinese accents peppering a game meant for ‘Murican audiences.  (There are too many YouTube-able instances of prominent American celebrities/sports stars/newspeople saying stupid shit like “ching chang chong” as a shorthand for Chinese for me to link to here, but I’m sure you get the idea.)

It also brings a lot to the table in terms of gameplay.  First and foremost, it’s probably got the best melee combat we’ve yet seen in an open-world game, and while it’s not quite as good as the recent Batman games, it’s still great fun.  (By the same token, some of the fights are quite difficult, which can be frustrating – but when you do win a fight, it’s all the more satisfying.)

And enough can’t be said about the open world itself.  Hong Kong, even if it’s fictionalized, is an exotic and unique locale for this type of game – or, indeed, any game, really – and the city is incredibly well-designed and is a lot of fun to explore.  If I were to make a Top 10 Best Open World Cities list – and I very well might, when the next generation of consoles launches and I need to do a current-gen wrap-up –  I’d probably put this in my top 3.  It’s that good.

But where there’s a sandbox, there is also jank, and Sleeping Dogs has some very strange jank.  Not the usual jank, where there’s bugs and broken AI and shit – more like inconsistent game design.  Without spoiling anything, your player character is an undercover cop, and you will be performing missions for both the police and the gangs you’ve infiltrated. After each mission, you receive performance grades that reflect how you did for both factions.  Now, here’s where this gets weird; regardless of which faction you work for, you will get docked points for the police faction if you do anything wrong – if you shoot a civilian hostage while aiming for the bad guy behind them, if you crash your car into a civilian vehicle during a chase even though the civilian car drove through an intersection, if you happen to run over a streetlight.  And yet, during the missions, you are not only beating up thugs, but you can brutally murder them by, say, impaling them on a pallet of swordfish heads, or by breaking an aquarium with their face, etc.  Indeed, you get rewarded for such brutality.

There’s also a bunch of weirdness in the story – it feels like certain scenes may have been edited out without smoothing over their rough edges.  Characters suddenly appear out of the blue and yet interact with your character like they’re old, trusted friends.  A wedding takes place out of the fucking blue.  And then there’s the character of Winston’s mother, which I can’t talk about without spoiling it, except to say that it is SUPER FUCKED UP and your character seems more than willing to help her do the things she does.  Which, as a cop, he should maybe not do.  Is all I’m saying.

I have no idea how far along I am in the story, but I’m enjoying myself for the most part, and it’s certainly worth a look if you’ve got some free time.

Death takes a holiday

Finished Darksiders 2 over the weekend, and I’m finding myself in the weird position of urgently wanting to talk about it and yet having a hard time finding anything to say about it besides “yeah, man, that game is awesome.”

I think I read (or heard) someone describe DS2 as a game that was not ashamed of being a game.   Which is to say, it’s not trying to be something it isn’t – it’s not an interactive movie, it’s not a “work of art”.  It is telling a story – an interesting story, actually, with strong dialogue and excellent voice acting – but it’s also got furious combat and puzzle solving and pleasurable platforming, and lots of side stuff to do simply for the sake of doing them.

It’s true that the first game wore its influences very clearly on its sleeve, and I think it’s very safe to say that this second game is very much more its own thing.  Indeed, if I had to compare it to anything – and I really honestly don’t feel like I have to, but for the sake of argument I will – I’d probably compare it to Rocksteady’s Batman games.  They’re similarly paced, they take place in huge, detailed environments, they very rarely hit a wrong note.

DS2 rarely stumbles.  But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the combat can be a little tedious at times – the Soul Arbiter’s Maze, for example, was goddamned ridiculous.  And occasionally the bosses can feel cheap – quite a few bosses can teleport, which is rapidly becoming my #1 pet peeve.

I did most (but not all) of the side quests pretty much right before the very last quest, and it also should be noted that some of those quests are, also, ridiculous, in that you’re simply travelling from one “world” to another, relaying a conversation that you yourself aren’t even involved in.  This form of quest is not uncommon in these types of games, but they are unbearably tedious in a game like DS2, where travelling from world to world – and then travelling from portal entrance to quest objective – takes time.  Surely these creatures have email, or smartphones, or even a goddamned telegraph.

Those minor quibbles aside, it’s a magnificent game, and I’m sure I’ll engage in a New Game+ playthrough during the next lull in the release schedule.  Right now it’s somewhere in my top 3 for the year, and I imagine it’ll stay up there as the year winds down.

a brief sojourn back into Hell

Well, first – thanks for everyone’s feedback yesterday.  I ended up buying my rental copy, and I also decided that I will check out the DLC – as long as it’s not, like, shitty.  That way, everyone wins.  Darksiders 2 is a game I can see myself playing more than once, which is something I’ve been known to do (i.e., a rather high percentage of my Steam library are games that I’ve already played on the 360).   Hell, right now, even though I’m finished with the 2nd “world”, I’ve gone back to the 1st world just to finish up all the side quests that I somehow missed – I somehow spent the first 15 hours of the game without finding the Lure Stone, which led me to believe that it was a thing that only unlocked with a new copy.  (I kept seeing all these bright, shiny gems sticking on every wall and was unable to do anything with them, and it was driving me up the wall.)

As to the topic at hand – I didn’t have access to the TV last night, so I decided to revisit Diablo 3 and see what the hubbub about 1.0.4 was about.  I’d put the game down rather abruptly a few weeks ago, once I saw that I was still getting utterly decimated by elites in Act 1 of Hell difficulty, despite spending hundreds of thousands of virtual gold in the auction house, and that started to get old very quickly.  1.0.4 seems to have made rather sweeping changes to almost every aspect of the game – Hell difficulty has been tweaked considerably, each player class has received numerous updates, and there’s a new XP system for people who’ve already maxed out at level 60.

I would’ve liked to have tried out Hell difficulty, but the thing is, I’d put the game down in a rather sorry state – almost all of my equipment was heavily damaged, and I only had 66 gold to work with.  So I decided to go back to Act 3 of Inferno and farm gold for a bit so that I could at least approach Hell with enough gold for the inevitable repairs I’d have to do, and maybe also see if I could notice any difference.

Can’t say I noticed much of a difference, actually, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of the patch, or because my character is just that powerful.  Back when I was still heavily addicted (and having trouble with Hell), I’d periodically go back to Inferno and farm for a while, and I never had too much trouble.  But last night I mowed through the Battlefield section of Act 3 like a goddamned tornado – I’m not sure my health ever dipped below 50%, actually.  Some of my critical hits were 5 digits long.  I may very well end up farming Inferno Act 4 once more before giving Hell another go – it’s pretty quick, after all, and I should be able to scrounge up enough gold for a few high-quality Auction House items and be able to cover repairs if Hell starts to go bad, again.

Then again, I’m still in deep with Darksiders 2, so maybe I don’t need to do this right away.

Plus, I don’t want to forget about Sleeping Dogs – that’s a game I’d like to finish.

And Borderlands 2 is going to suck up a lot of time, I’m almost positive of that.

Anyway.  If you’ve been away from Diablo 3 for a while, the 1.0.4 patch is substantial enough that you might want to give it another look, if (for some reason) you’re not playing anything else.