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Kirby and Mario in the Palm of My Hand, in Glorious 3D!

2015-07-14T19:01:00.000+03:00

I remained sceptical about portable consoles for a long time, but earlier this year I finally caved in and bought myself a New Nintendo 3DS XL. There were multiple reasons for this. My phone's pretty old and not great for games, and I've disliked the touch screen controls in most phone games I've tried. My laptop is equally not great for games. I wanted something I could play with away from home, as well as something to be a light-weight time-killer I could easily pick up (at home or away) and start playing, with a little less effort than booting up a console game.

The 3DS is a pretty nifty little device, I have to concede. Obviously it's somewhat lacking in power compared to the PlayStation Vita (let alone regular consoles), and particularly suffers from a rather low resolution, but the games still look fine. The 3D screen feels surprisingly natural and adds a nice touch to the visuals. It can be glitchy and blurry if you don't look at it just right, but these are fairly minor complaints. Of course it feels clunkier in my hands than a proper controller, but the controls work fine for most games I've tried.

The first game I actually beat with it was the '3D Classics' version of Kirby's Adventure. This is a port of the NES original that makes use of the 3DS's 3D screen, which doesn't actually affect gameplay in any way, but manages to revitalize the look of the game somewhat. I never actually played this game back in the NES days. It's one of the later NES titles, and looks and feels fairly advanced, by NES standards. The ability to save, as well as unlimited continues, makes it a little easier than many other NES platformers, although some of the bosses in particular still required some effort. All in all, a fun little game. It's a shame that there aren't too many interesting games in the 3D Classics line. You'd think enhanced ports of, say, Mario or Zelda games would sell...

Seeing as how this was the first Nintendo device I've owned in a long time, and having played and enjoyed the Super Mario Galaxy games on my parents' Wii a couple years back, I naturally wanted a new Mario game for the 3DS. So I bought Super Mario 3D Land, and... I think the word 'Mario' sums up everything I could possibly say about it. I don't think it's quite as fun as the Galaxy games were, but a competent, polished platformer nonetheless. It felt a little more lacking in character and story (even by Mario standards), drawing heavily from classic Mario games, but with 3D controls.

The 8 worlds of the 'main' game often felt a little on the easy side (dying a number of times in a level grants you a power-up that makes you invulnerable—which made many bosses, in particular, a joke), and fairly fast to play through. However, once you beat the game, you unlock 'special worlds', another 8 worlds of remixed levels with new challenges, so I can't really complain about lack of content or challenges... The Galaxy games I never could 100% complete, we'll see how far I get in this one...

I'm writing this just a couple days after the world learned of the passing of Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata. He worked as a producer on Kirby's Adventure before joining Nintendo—and modern Nintendo consoles, including the DS line, were of course developed under his rule—so the news hit a little closer to home for me than it might have at some other point in time. While for many years Nintendo was somewhat at the periphery of the gaming world for me, I must say their products have a unique feel—not to mention many iconic characters, like Mario and Kirby. That feel may be partly rooted in nostalgia, of course, but I'm nevertheless happy to be the owner of a Nintendo console once again, and hope they continue making interesting, and most of all fun, games in the future.

One Solstice Night, Pt 6

2015-06-23T03:57:00.000+03:00

It has been my tradition for several years to stay up till dawn on the night of the summer solstice—the shortest night of the year—while having a few drinks and blogging my activities. Well, as it happens, the solstice was actually yesterday, but I had a much too tiring weekend to stay up last night. So I figure a day here or there won't make much difference... (There's no real practical difference in the length of the night yet, anyway.)

Last year at this time I was watching Mario Marathon 7. Alas, there is no Mario Marathon this summer, mostly due to (I assume) the crew being too busy with their personal lives. I hope we haven't seen the last of them, but for now, I'll have to make do with other entertainment...

For company I have some sweets, a Pringles tube, and a chilled bottle of Minttu, a peppermint flavoured drink described on the label as 'the legendary mint shot from the Finnish Himalayas'... (I haven't had this stuff in a long while, I'm rather looking forward to it.)

22:51 - Sunset!

23:00 - Each Monday around this time I usually watch LoadingReadyRun's CheckPoint Plus stream on Twitch. This stream normally consists of a humorous news show about video game news (which is also recorded and posted on YouTube), followed by a more freeform discussion about video game news. The show wraps up with LRR's Kathleen DeVere welcoming some of the channel's new subscribers with bits of zany improv based on their usernames—all in all a fun, relaxed way to end my Monday.

23:05 - The show's running a little late, as is usual, so I'll take this opportunity to have my first drink of the nigh. Aaaah, that hits the spot. The trouble with a bottle that's spent several hours in the freezer, though, is that it's a) cold to handle, and b) after a while wet with condensation...

23:20 - As they say on the show, the week after E3, kind of a slow news day... Not much there of personal relevance. But the LRR crew is still always fun to watch.

00:30 - Show's over, now I have to think of something else to do... There's a few clouds around, so the night's actually fairly dark right now. If it was clear, the sky would probably be a pale blue, fading into orange near the horizon...

1:10 (Really? What happened to the last half hour?) - I finally decided to watch Return of the Jedi! Whee! I recently re-watched the first two movies, and I've been meaning to get around to this, might as well do it now.

2:30 - Already so much lighter outside! But boy do my eyes feel heavy, I hope I can survive till dawn... Movie's great, snacks are great, drink is great, but I guess I'm just not used to staying up quite so late, lately...

3:30 - Movie's over, still one of the greatest classics of all time (even if I was almost nodding off for a fair amount of it). It is almost full daylight outside already. Birds are singing, fairly loud.

3:40 - OMFG, there's a spider crawling on my shot glass. Like, wtf? Where the hell did it come from? Was it attracted maybe by the sweetness of the drink, or the alcohol? Sorry, buddy, but you're going outside...

3:53 - Teeth brushed, all ready for bed, just waiting for...

3:56 - Sunrise! See you again next year, maybe...

Mortal Kombat!

2015-06-08T17:54:00.000+03:00

I came late to fighting games, long after their golden age in the mid-90s. Once I finally discovered them, I thought they were fascinating and cool. But I also soon discovered that I did not have a talent for them, and, not feeling like I was getting any better, my interest gradually waned. Skullgirls was cool enough to bring me back for a bit, but it didn't last.

Even at the height of my interest in the genre, I never really paid much attention to the Mortal Kombat series. Perhaps partly because at the time I was still heavily into Japanese video games, and rather sceptical of a western fighting game... But recently some of the good folks at LoadingReadyRun decided to stream the newest title in the series, Mortal Kombat X. And, only about 23 years late, I caught the bug...

I spent some time digging into the Mortal Kombat universe. I watched both the mid-90s movies. (The first was fun, in a cheesy way. The second... not quite so much.) I re-watched the web series Mortal Kombat: Legacy. And I finally decided I needed to buy this game.

Let's be honest, Mortal Kombat X is pretty ridiculous. But it's ridiculous in a way I really like. The violence is so over-the-top you can't help but laugh sometimes. The story is like a cheesy action movie. The graphics look good. But, importantly, it is also fun to play.

The game has a roster of over 20 cool characters. And each character has three variants you can choose from, with slightly different moves. So there's a ton of variety in potential play styles. The special moves are fairly easy if you know any 2D fighting game basics. But of course, as always, there's a lot of depth with combos and stuff. Which I absolutely suck at... Like I said, I'm not good at fighting games. But the game's not very tough at easier settings, so even a scrub like me can have fun with it.

A cool thing about this game that I've never really seen other fighting games do quite like this (though other NetherRealm games have this too, I believe), is its 'story mode'. It's like watching through an action movie, several hours long, with interspersed fights. In each chapter you control a different character (going through about half of the roster), so you get a feel for different play styles. The story's hardly very deep or original, but I don't think it really needs to be... It carries on from the previous game—which itself was something of a reboot—so it could be a mite hard to follow for someone who knows nothing about the series. (I checked out the cutscenes from the previous game on YouTube before playing, which probably helped some...)

Once you're through with the story, there's naturally a bunch of different arcade and versus modes to play with, and a lot of stuff to unlock (including new finishing moves, concept art etc)... So I do feel I'm getting my money's worth here, as much or more as with any fighting game I've played in the past.

Any complaints I have about Mortal Kombat X are largely about the slight feel of monetization, in certain aspects of the game. There's a few DLC only characters. No big surprise there, obviously. But the thing that feels most bizarre is the way you can buy easy fatalities. Now, as anyone familiar with the Mortal Kombat series will know, a 'fatality' is a bloody kill move you can perform after winning a battle, by inputting a specific button sequence that varies with each character/move. The easy fatalities allow you to pull them off with a much simpler button press... but they are single use items you can buy for real money. It's not like they really affect the game or make it in any way 'pay-to-win', but still... it feels weird and unnecessary.

Overall, though, Mortal Kombat X managed to get me excited about fighting games again, at least for a little while. That is not nothing. I imagine it's not a game to everyone's taste, with its gory violence and cheesy action movie style, but that's certainly up my alley... For a newcomer to the series like me it seems like a good, solid point to jump in.

Bloodborne! Bloodborne! Bloodborne!

2015-04-10T17:59:00.001+03:00

My, it's been a while since I blogged. Guess just nothing much going on in my life, as usual. But, as people who follow video game news at all may know, there's a new game out that everybody's talking about.

First let's talk about the past for a second, though. It was about a year ago when I finally played Dark Souls, inspired by streams (by LoadingReadyRun) I was watching. I blogged about the experience extensively back then. Suffice to say, it was a very rewarding experience, and I really enjoyed the game's atmosphere and level design, the way it built a fascinating dark fantasy world that felt cohesive and connected. Now, I never got around to playing Dark Souls II. However, based on parts of it I saw streamed, and comments from people who's opinions I respect, it just... didn't look as good, particularly in the aesthetics and level design department. It was also developed by a different team at From Software, I believe, with less direct involvement by Demon's Souls and Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki.

Now, when the new game Miyazaki was working on was announced last year, I was... cautiously curious. But seeing as it was a new franchise with a new setting and new gameplay elements, I had no idea what to expect. I pretty much had no expectations up to the release a couple weeks ago, and initially planned to wait a while before possibly buying it. But, the same factors that deterred me from Dark Souls II—seeing bits of the game and opinions from people I respect—made me actually want to try it.

And when I say 'try', it quickly turned into 'devour'. Bloodborne, in a nutshell, turned out to be the perfect Dark Souls successor I never knew I wanted.

Where Dark Souls was primarily medieval fantasy, about a land infested by the undead, Bloodborne draws influence from Victorian Gothic horror aesthetics, mixing in themes of lycanthropy and hints of Lovecraftian horrors. As in Dark Souls, the narrative is subtle and unfolds through hints in snippets of dialogue, item descriptions etc. The atmosphere and feel of the world is much more important than the plot, as such. The game begins as you arrive in the city of Yharnam, ravaged by a disease turning people into beasts. It is the night of the Hunt, when the good people stay behind locked doors, and strange creatures roam the streets. To escape this nightmarish realm, you have to get to the bottom of what's happening to the city...

The game looks gorgeous. Like I said, the atmosphere and level design was one of the major pulls of Dark Souls for me, and Bloodborne managed to capture me once again in much the same way. Everything connects together nicely, yet there's a nice amount of variety as well, from the alleyways of Yharnam to its wild outskirts. From fairly early on you also have a fair bit of choice in the order you explore areas in.

The heritage of the game, from Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, is obvious. The action and interface are immediately familiar to any who've played those games. There are some significant differences, though. Where the previous games featured mostly medieval weaponry, the weapons in Bloodborne are much more exotic. Most can transform between two distinct shapes with different attacks. Also, instead of a shield in your left hand, you carry a firearm. There is no blocking as such, the gameplay is intended to be faster and more mobile. While many of the firearms aren't particularly effective on their own, a well timed shot can stagger an enemy, allowing a powerful follow-up attack, not unlike parrying in the earlier games. It seemed a little easier than parrying was, and while I didn't exactly master it, I could at least occasionally pull it off—something I never really learned to do in Dark Souls.

While the stat and levelling system are basically the same, many aspects of the game have been somewhat streamlined. For instance, there's no encumbrance to worry about. You move and dodge the same regardless of your equipment. Upgrading weapons is also more straightforward. Instead of branching into different varieties with different upgrade materials, you can now attach gems to weapons to boost or change their properties (not unlike, say, Diablo III). The total number of weapons and outfits also seems to be smaller. There's no magic as such, although you can find items that appear to function like spells and require a high 'arcane' stat to use (which I didn't have, so I can't really comment on that).

Like its predecessors, Bloodborne is a challenging game. Some of the bosses in particular gave me a hard time. The game relies on precise timing and fast reactions—things I am not particularly good at. But I usually had other areas to explore, so I could level up a little more, and eventually managed to beat every boss. Like Dark Souls, Bloodborne gives you relatively little information about many things. However, unlike my Dark Souls playthrough, in which I relied heavily on guides, I found myself playing the vast majority of Bloodborne blind. I guess my experience with Dark Souls was helpful there. There were one or two optional areas I would have missed entirely, though, had I not read up on things before I wrapped up the game, as well as some NPC encounters and quest lines I totally missed out on.

One of the more annoying features in Dark Souls were the occasional 'invasions' by other players. PvP still exists in Bloodborne, but it seems to be more limited and less random. As far as I can tell, you can only be invaded in certain areas, and even in those killing a certain enemy will disable invasions—which seems like a welcome change. Also the game actually gives you the option to play offline (though then of course you'd miss out on the notes left by other players).

A masterpiece can still have a few flaws, of course. Many people have commented on the long loading times, which can be a little annoying in a game where death can be relatively frequent, and where you fast travel to earlier locations by teleporting into a hub and then out again, resulting in multiple loading times... Graphical (and other) glitches, slowdown etc. are by no means common, but you might still run into a few. As far as gameplay is concerned, there were one or two areas I didn't like a whole lot, because they were full of very hard enemies and the best strategy seemed to be to run through them, whereas I'd prefer to take things slow, explore and enjoy the atmosphere.

It took me a little over 40 hours to beat the game. I recall it took me over 60 to beat Dark Souls. It's hard to say whether Bloodborne has less content, or whether I was just better at it after my experience with Dark Souls. The slightly streamlined mechanics might also be a factor—I feel like I spent a little less time grinding for upgrade materials etc., which is probably not a bad thing. (My Dark Souls playthrough of course included DLC content as well, which I imagine Bloodborne might get at some point...) There are also optional semi-randomized 'chalice dungeons' you can explore, that add a significant amount of content. I never really got into these, though, as they seemed a little more bland than the 'proper' levels.

I will probably play this game again, seeing as how there's still some stuff I missed out on, playing without guides, and multiple endings as well. The game obviously has plenty of replay value, although I'm not sure if there is quite as much variety for character builds as Dark Souls had, considering the more limited amount of equipment and streamlined mechanics.

So yes, it should be obvious by now that I really liked Bloodborne. I liked the atmosphere and aesthetics. The gameplay was rewarding and exhilarating. Like Dark Souls, it is obviously not a game for everybody's taste. For me, though, I think it might be the best new game I've played since, well, since I played Dark Souls... It's a shame it's only available on PS4. While it doesn't affect me personally (I obviously have a PS4), I know many PC gamers are a little upset about that. But now... I have to decide whether I want to try new game plus, or an entirely new character build, or take a breather with something else entirely... Such hard decisions!

Transistor (Game Review)

2015-02-19T00:28:00.002+02:00

I just finished Transistor. And I usually write a little blog post when I finish a game, so here I am. However, I'm finding this game surprisingly difficult to describe. The game was created by indie studio Supergiant Games, whose first title, Bastion, got a lot of praise. I've had it for a while—courtesy of a Humble Indie Bundle—but haven't gotten around to playing it, as I don't play much on PC. Transistor, however, was recently offered as a PlayStation Plus monthly game for the PS4, so I immediately downloaded it.

The story of Transistor begins 'in medias res', explaining little about what is happening. You play Red, a singer in a city called Cloudbank, who has lost her voice. You acquire a strange sword called Transistor, which speaks to you. And you're under attack from strange creatures called the 'Process'. You set on a quest to find those responsible for the Process attack which is laying waste to the city. The setting is strange and mysterious, with a slightly Art Deco feel, but obviously highly advanced—a lot of the game's themes are quite... 'computer-y'. The game has a very nice aesthetic, presented in 2D isometric style. The music is also quite good.

I might describe Transistor as a tactical action game with RPG elements. At any point you can pause the game and input a series of action, which are then rapidly played out. There is a short cooldown after you use this feature. As you level up you gain more abilities, or 'functions', that you can equip. All your abilities can be equipped either as primary actions, modifiers to other actions, or as passive abilities, which is pretty cool and allows for a variety of different strategies. Instead of a difficulty setting, as you level up you unlock new 'limiters' that you can enable or disable individually, which make aspects of the game more difficult, but also grant a small bonus to experience. Which is also a neat idea.

Transistor is not a long game. It didn't have a clock anywhere that I could see (and anyone who reads my posts would know how much I hate that), but I played through it over the course of just a few days. There is a 'new game plus' mode once you complete the game, but I've never had a whole lot of interest in those things. Yes, the gameplay in Transistor is interesting and fun, but I feel it's the type of game I experience once and then move on to other things.

So, overall, Transistor features nice aesthetics, an interestingly presented narrative and original setting, and interesting mechanics. A nice little experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. And that's about all I can think of to say about it. I don't know if it's very helpful, I seem to be pretty bad at writing 'reviews', really—but, you know, whatever...

An Infamous Post, feat. Delsin and Fetch

2015-02-03T18:45:00.002+02:00

I played the original Infamous—or inFAMOUS, however you want to spell it—several years ago, when Sony offered it free after the big PSN outage. I had fun playing it, but never got around to playing the sequels. Recently, though, Infamous First Light for PS4 was a PlayStation Plus monthly game, so I decided to give it a shot. And I had enough fun playing it that I soon bought the previous PS4 title, Infamous Second Son. (My brain would want to insert a colon in those titles, but that's how I always see them written...)

Even though I played First Light first, I should probably start with Second Son. It's been a while since I played the original Infamous—and I never played Infamous 2—so I didn't remember the story too well, but basically all you need to know is that several years ago something happened that 'caused people with super powers, called 'conduits', to appear. Second Son features a new protagonist, Delsin Rowe, a young man of Native American heritage with a penchant for street art. A draconian government agency called the Department of Unified Protection (really, writers, you couldn't think of a more generic name?) is now in charge of containing conduits, branded 'bio-terrorists'.

When Delsin encounters a group of escaping conduits, he discovers he's a conduit himself, with the power to copy the powers of other conduits he comes in contact with. After the D.U.P. and its leader, Brooke Augustine—a conduit herself—wreak havoc in Delsin's reservation trying to recapture the escapees, Delsin and his sheriff brother set out to nearby Seattle, now under D.U.P. lockdown, to find Augustine so Delsin can obtain her power and use it to heal people in the reservation injured by her...

The story and characters are fine, but the meat of the game is the open world action. You mostly have free reign over the game's Seattle (which I don't believe is a very accurate representation, but does of course feature some notable landmarks, like the Space Needle—which you'll naturally have to climb at one point in the game). Freedom of mobility was an important element in the original Infamous, and this hasn't changed. You'll spend much of the game climbing buildings and running around rooftops. Over the course of the game you'll meet several other conduits and acquire their powers. In gameplay terms this means that you have access to several discrete sets of super powers that you can switch between. Which adds a nice bit of variety to the game.

Infamous does a good job at inspiring a certain completionist mindset. In addition to the story missions, there are numerous little side missions and collectibles you need to complete to 'clear' each region of the city. The game didn't have a clock anywhere I could find, which annoys me somewhat, but it felt a decent length when played to 100% completion...

There's also an additional bonus mission called Paper Trail, which I believe was originally released as free DLC content. The mission requires you to sync your PSN account with a website—you follow leads in the game, but have to use a web browser to examine clues you find and solve puzzles, before you can continue the mission on the console. It's kind of a neat idea, and some of the browser content is interesting enough, but some of the puzzles are kinda obtuse (I had to resort to using a walkthrough on a couple occasions), and having to keep switching between browser and console is somewhat annoying. Still, it's a nice little addition to the game.

Infamous First Light is a 'standalone expansion' for Second Son, sold at a lower price, based around the same city map. It's a prequel to Second Son, telling the backstory of Abigail 'Fetch' Walker, one of the conduits Delsin meets during his adventure. Fetch's powers are similar to what Delsin acquires after meeting her, though there are some differences, and perhaps a little more variety and depth, seeing as she only has the one set of powers. The game's considerably shorter—I played through it over the course of just a few days (though not quite 100%)—but of course is is cheaper, as I said, and it was still a lot of fun.

I quite like Fetch as a character, not least because she's a cool, bad-ass female character who looks like a real person rather than a model. Delsin isn't bad either, though honestly I didn't find him quite as interesting. I do appreciate the way they handled the Native American bit—not making a huge deal out of it and avoiding clichés.

So yeah, the Infamous series overall features fun, fast-paced open world action, and I have enjoyed all the games of the series I've played. Simple fun with relatively few issues I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many more aspects of the games I could go into more detail about, but I think that pretty much sums up all I wanted to say about them. So, till next time then!

The Last of Us

2015-01-21T17:28:00.000+02:00

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us was one of the more talked about and generally respected video game releases of recent years. I never really paid it that much attention back when it was originally released, but now that I have a PS4 and the 'Remastered' version had been out for a while and I could get it for a fair price, I figured I'd finally give it a shot.

The Last of Us is a third person action-adventure game set 20 years from now in what's basically a fairly typical 'zombie apocalypse' setting. The monsters aren't called zombies, but 'infected', and have strange fungal growths and stuff, but basically it's still your average zombie apocalypse. Humanity's remnants are held up in quarantine zones under martial law, or loot the ruined cities in lawless gangs. Joel is cynical, middle-aged smuggler, who gets tasked with escorting a teenaged girl, Ellie, who's apparently immune to the infection and could thus be the key to humanity's survival...

Honestly, it all sounds terribly clichéd. It took me a while to really get into it. But it turns out the story is more about the characters than anything else, and the characters are pretty good, as is the dialogue and voice acting. The game succumbs to some video game tropes occasionally, but I mostly enjoyed its style of storytelling. Joel and Ellie's mission turns into an epic journey across America, with many twists and turns. You'll visit a nice variety of different environments, too, and fight your way through many tough scrapes... The game is also obviously targeted to a mature audience. It is very gritty and violent, and the story is not without tragic moments.

The Last of Us plays much like many modern third person action-adventure titles. There's an emphasis on stealth, facilitated by some neat features, like the ability to focus on listening, which allows you to practically 'see' through walls. There's a decent variety of different weapons at your disposal, too, of course. You'll face both infected monsters and regular human enemies, which'll require different strategies.

I played on normal difficulty and found some of the action sequences surprisingly challenging (though I should note that I'm generally pretty bad at action games). Sneaking past multiple enemies isn't always easy, and you can die pretty fast if you get swarmed by enemies. Also, while the game is fairly linear, it doesn't always do the best job of telling you what you're supposed to be doing. Especially in the earlier parts of the game I felt almost frustrated at times, but the action got more fun later with more weapons and tools to choose from. For those much better at this type of gameplay there are multiple harder difficulty settings as well. (I have no interest in trying those, though...)

Originally released for PS3, the 'Remastered' PS4 version presumably has at least a better resolution, though I cannot say how much it differs. The game looked fine to my eyes, anyway. Some of the outdoor locations especially were quite pretty, and the art direction and level design in general wasn't bad, nor was the audio.

The PS4 version also includes the DLC Left Behind, which delves deeper into Ellie's backstory. It was pretty decent for DLC content, though not hugely long. All in all I spent some 20 hours on The Last of Us Remastered, which is a pretty decent length for an action-adventure title.

So yeah, both in terms of story and gameplay, it took me a little while to really warm up to The Last of Us, but in the end I quite enjoyed it. It doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel in any way and it has its problems, but it's a fairly well put together action-adventure title, with nice atmosphere and storytelling. Will I ever replay it? It's one those games I think I could well replay some day, but in practise I know I rarely get around to... I'm glad I played it, in any case.

The 2014 Post

2014-12-31T14:39:00.000+02:00

So, it's New Year's Eve, and I guess it's traditional to take a look back at the past year. I'm not going to pretend 2014 was the greatest of years for me. My creative and social energies have been pretty low and I haven't accomplished much. (And, looking at my blog, I see I've only posted about half the number of posts I've written in an average year.) But let's talk about some of the highlights of the year, rather than mope around!

As anyone following my blog would know, video games have always been one of my greatest passions. I think I managed to play a reasonable number of games this year, by my standards. Finally getting a PlayStation Plus membership allowed me to try out several interesting games I might not have played otherwise. But I think two games really stand out when I look back.

The first was Dark Souls. I spent many an hour playing it last spring (and wrote several blog posts). This dark, challenging action RPG that I'd been somewhat sceptical about for many years turned out to be very much to my taste. And then there's the last game I played this year, another that surprised me with its addictive quality—Destiny. I've never been a huge fan of FPSs, but, as I wrote before, I think I've had more fun with Destiny than with any FPS I've tried since Doom.

I realise that both of these games have an appeal that is not necessarily easy to explain to others, and also not the types of games I've traditionally played most (being less narrative and more grindy experiences). They aren't perfect creations, but I've still greatly enjoyed them.

Tangentially related to gaming, discovering LoadingReadyRun was an important part of my year. This Canadian group produces a large variety of online comedy videos and also streams games live on Twitch. Their works have provided me with a lot of entertainment over the last year. They're also known for their charity gaming marathon Desert Bus for Hope, which I watched for the first time this year, and it was a blast. Speaking of charity marathons, Mario Marathon was another highlight of the year, as it has been for several years running.

The music year was a little slow for me, to be honest. I've been a little lazier than before in my listening, and I haven't really made many interesting new discoveries. I got to see Within Temptation live, which was fun. (And their new album was decent as well.) The highlight of the year for me, though, was probably the new Toehider album, What Kind of Creature Am I, which I backed in a crowdfunding campaign, on a whim, based on the recommendation of Arjen Lucassen. And I'm very glad I did—Toehider was a much needed breath of fresh air in my otherwise slightly stagnant year.

And I guess that pretty much wraps up 2014 for me. Hopefully 2015 will continue to bring interesting games and entertainment my way. And maybe, just maybe, I'll even manage to accomplish something sometime...

The Destiny Post Part 2, featuring The Dark Below

2014-12-23T20:43:00.000+02:00

I'm honestly a little surprised that almost a month after my previous post about Destiny, I'm still actually playing it. Having played through the story missions just before that post, I was momentarily unsure about what I wanted to do next. Usually I get bored with games around that point and move on to something new. But I fought through my hesitation and popped the game into the console again, and, lo and behold, I've been enjoying it ever since, even with all its repetitiveness and lack of obvious goals beyond improving my character.

So what I've been doing is pretty much just grinding. There are 'bounties' in the game that refresh daily, so I wander the planets, killing things and doing little missions, occasionally replaying story missions on harder settings etc. And I've managed to grind to level 30 doing pretty much just that. (The progression is much slower after level 20, which is where I was at when I finished the story missions almost a month ago.)

There are still aspects of the game I haven't really delved into, specifically the multiplayer content. I've only tried doing strikes (the slightly more demanding three player missions) a handful of times. It's been fun and I probably should be doing more of it, but I'm always very nervous about playing with strangers. (It's not like I even have to communicate with the other players, the missions are fairly straightforward, but still...) As for the Crucible, which is what the game's PvP portion is called, I tried it once recently, and soon discovered that fighting human players is very different than fighting AI. I failed about as miserably as it is possible to fail, and I don't really have any desire to try that again. Yeah, what can I say, I'm a scrub. (Which is a shame, since some of the better weapons in the game can only be obtained by playing Crucible...)

Also, a couple weeks back Destiny's first expansion was released, titled The Dark Below. Being heavily into the game at the time, I bought it, of course. Well, actually I bought the expansion pass that includes both The Dark Below and the next expansion when it's released. Something I've never done before—I've never really been in a huge fan of DLC in general, and rarely in a great hurry to obtain them...

The Dark Below adds a couple new story missions and a bunch of smaller objectives called 'quests', as well as two new strikes and a new raid, new bounties, plus new equipment (which I believe is available even if you don't buy the expansion). It also increases the level cap to 32. While playing through the missions as such won't take a huge amount of time, when you consider that the 'meat' of Destiny is largely in the repetition and grinding, any bit of added variety is obviously important. If it was a one time playthrough, the price of the expansion would seem a little bit steep, I think, but Destiny's nature probably makes it more worth it...

Anyway, the new material was pretty fun to play through, overall. The new missions are obviously higher level than the original story missions, with lots of enemies to plough through and keep that adrenaline pumping. The story's no deeper than the rest of Destiny—an old alien threat is about to rise again and you must stop it, etc. etc. But it builds on lore established in the original content, which is important. I'm already looking forward to seeing what the next expansion brings to the setting.

Now it's hard, as always, to say how long my interest in the game will last. I do have other games waiting to be played. But so far I've been enjoying Destiny... Even if I do take a break before too long, I'll obviously return to it eventually, since I've already bought the next expansion...

The Destiny Post

2014-11-26T22:02:00.000+02:00

Not being a huge fan of either FPS games or online multiplayer games, I wasn't initially particularly interested in Bungie's new game, Destiny. But after recently getting a PS4 and watching the game streamed by members of LoadingReadyRun (who have previously inspired me to try several other games, like Dark Souls, that I've quite enjoyed), I figured I might as well give it a shot and bought a second hand copy. I ended up playing a not insignificant amount of hours of it over the last week or so.

Destiny was initially released to somewhat mixed reviews, but I think this was largely due to the fact that it had generated a lot of hype before its release. So it might not have been quite as ground-breaking as some might have hoped, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad game. I've heard more than one person I respect comment that the criticisms the game received can't really be argued with, but it's still a fun game to play. As I write this, I've finished playing through the game's main story missions, but there are still aspects, namely the game's multiplayer elements, that I haven't tried. I may return to those in a future post, if I ever get around to playing them...

So what exactly is Destiny? It's actually a little hard to sum up in just a few words. Destiny is a sci-fi first person shooter with RPG elements. It's set in a distant, apocalyptic future. A long time ago, a vast alien entity known as the Traveler came to earth, bringing about an era of prosperity across the solar system. But eventually the Traveler's old enemy, a mysterious force known only as the Darkness, came and caused society to collapse. Humanity's last survivors now live in a single city on Earth, while the rest of the solar system is overrun by hostile aliens. You play as a Guardian, a warrior brought back from the dead by the Traveler's power, who must venture out into the world to fight these alien invaders...

While the game was obviously designed with multiplayer in mind, there is plenty to do on your own as well. A series of story missions introduces you to the game's locations and enemy factions. The story's not exactly very deep or complex, but that's fine. Destiny is clearly more about gameplay than it is about narrative, and I think its storytelling went well with the game's style and pace. Graham Stark of LoadingReadyRun once commented while streaming the game that it's not so much a game with story as it is a game with lore. And the setting is, indeed, pretty cool.

Which brings me to one of the game's features that caused some controversy. As you play, you unlock 'Grimoire Cards', little snippets of lore concerning many aspects of the game and its setting. However, you can't read these in the game, only by logging into Bungie's website or using the game's official mobile phone app. The possibility to read this background information online or on my phone, in and of itself, is a pretty neat idea, I think. But not being able to access it through the game doesn't really make any sense. It's not like we're talking about a huge amount of data...

But let's get on to the game itself! Destiny controls much like any FPS. The action is fairly fast and fluid, and pretty fun. There's a significant RPG element to the game as well, though. You pick one of three classes and three races. The latter choice is only cosmetic, but each class has slightly different abilities. As you play you level up and gain more abilities, and find or buy better gear. Loot is important, and items come in a range of different rarities. Once you hit level 20 you can only increase your level by acquiring better gear, up to an overall maximum of 30.

The game has four major areas (Earth, Moon, Venus and Mars), each of which features a fairly large, open public area and locations for several missions. Multiplayer is woven through the entire game. Each mission will usually see you travelling through a public area populated by other players as well, to the actual mission area, where you'll be alone—or with your 'fire team', if you're playing co-op—not unlike an instance dungeon in a MMORPG. Or you can patrol the public areas doing little side-quests and bounties and participating in random 'public events' that will have you engage a particular enemy or defend a location with any players that are around... Destiny's not really a MMO game, however, since you'll only ever be in a level with a handful of randomly selected other players.

Like I said, there's plenty to do on your own as well. Playing through the story missions, maybe doing a few patrols and bounties on the side, should get you close to level 20. According to the stats in the phone app I've spent some 16 hours doing just this (although I'm not entirely sure if this includes everything or just time spent in missions). Which is already a decent amount of content for an action game.

If you're interested in multiplayer, there are additional missions, called 'strikes', intended primarily for three player teams (and of course you can play any of the regular story missions and patrols with a team as well), as well as a lengthier 'raid' for a six player team. (More strikes and raids are to be added in DLCs, I believe.) And of course there are PvP modes as well—a fairly decent variety of content, all in all, catering to different tastes. (It should be noted that multiplayer content is not cross-platform, as far as I know.)

Destiny looks and sounds pretty good, in my opinion. The soundtrack has a lot of variety, ranging from epic orchestrals to fast electronic segments, all of which fit the game pretty well. (And I recently learned Paul McCartney himself worked on some of the tracks, which is pretty interesting.) I'm not the best at evaluating the graphics of modern games—I don't feel like Destiny is especially ground-breaking in that department, but I certainly had no complaints. Performance (on PS4) was always pretty smooth. The only technical complaint I had was that, because of the online elements, Internet connection hiccups might cause the game to kick you out, making you restart at the last checkpoint. This happened to me a few times, but overall it's a relatively minor annoyance.

Admittedly I haven't played a ton of FPS games, but, honestly, I think I had more fun playing through Destiny's story missions than I've had with any FPS since, well, Doom (though of course the RPG elements and level structure make it pretty different from most typical FPS games). It may not be the deepest gaming experience I've ever had, but it's a fun game with a cool setting. What more would I want?

With its multiplayer elements it's a game one could theoretically keep playing indefinitely, although the number of missions is somewhat limited and I imagine they could get pretty repetitive after a while... Like I said, I haven't really tried the multiplayer at all yet. I honestly don't know at this point if I will. This tends to be the point in many games when I lose interest and move on to new things... We'll just have to see whether Destiny repeats this pattern—though even if it does, I feel I've gotten my money's worth from the game already.

Child of Light (Game Review)

2014-11-14T18:01:00.000+02:00

So I finally got myself a PS4! I say 'finally', although honestly a year after release isn't that long for me, quite possibly the earliest I've ever gotten a new console. But I knew I would have to get one eventually, so here we are...

So, brand new console out of the box and hooked up, but no actual games in my shelf yet, I turned to the PSN store to look for a cheap game to try. Child of Light caught my eye. I've been meaning to try it out for a while. It's available for PS3 as well, but obviously I was going to play it on PS4 now that I had one (buying it on PSN actually gives you access to both versions). Of course I can't say if there's any difference in appearance between the two, since I've only played it on PS4.

Child of Light was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, but it's not a typical large western studio production. It's a cute (some could even say twee) fairy tale game that combines features typical of indie sidescrollers and Japanese RPGs.

Aurora is a girl from 19th century Austria, who due to an illness succumbs to a deathlike sleep. However, she awakes in a magical land called Lemuria, where a dark queen has stolen the stars, moon and sun. Naturally it's Aurora's destiny to fight the queen and save the land from eternal night... The story's hardly very deep or original, but it goes very well with the style of the game. The characters are all fun as well. Most of the dialogue in the game is written in rhyming verse. Honestly, it's often a little awkward and could have been improved with just a little effort, but I still think it's quite charming.

Aesthetically the game is quite pretty. It has a 2D hand-drawn look that goes very well with the game's themes. The music, composed by Canadian musician Béatrice Martin (aka Cœur de pirate), is quite good as well.

The 'overworld' part of the game plays much like a 2D platformer (although quite early on you gain the ability to fly, so it's not really about 'platforming'). There are some puzzle elements, many involving your 'firefly' companion that can be controlled with the right stick (or the PS4 controller's touchpad), who can interact with various objects.

Coming into contact with an enemy triggers a turn based battle sequence, much like typical JRPG battles, although there are original twists as well. Timing plays a crucial role in combat. Time advances between actions, and you can follow characters' progress on a graph at the bottom of the screen. Different actions take a different amount of time to complete, and if you hit an enemy (or you yourself get hit) in this 'casting' phase, the action is interrupted. The firefly companion is used in combat as well. It can slow down enemies, heal allies etc.

Over the course of the game you'll acquire several allies. Only two characters can be in combat simultaneously, but you can switch characters at any time. The characters all have unique abilities, of course, that develop as you gain experience. There's no equipment management per se, but you'll find gems that you can equip for additional bonuses.

The game has two difficulty modes, 'casual' and 'expert'. I went with 'casual' for my first playthrough, looking for a primarily relaxing experience, and the game was mostly pretty easy. (I only died once, and that was due to environmental hazards rather than combat, and I very rarely had to use any of the many healing items I picked up.) However, even on this easy setting, I felt the battle system encouraged me to think about what I was doing, which is naturally good.

The game wasn't very long (at least by RPG standards). I played through it over the course of a few days. (Alas, no in-game timer, as far as I could see. Seriously, game devs, it can't be that hard to include one!) Then again, it's not very expensive either. And I may want to replay it in 'expert' mode some day, too...

Ubisoft isn't one of my favourite game publishers due to their attitudes toward DRM and recent debacles concerning diversity, buggy game launches etc. The game bugs you to register with their entirely unnecessary Uplay platform. Thankfully it's optional, though. The reminder when starting the game is only a minor annoyance. Still, it was one of the few things that really bothered me about this game.

So yeah, in summation, Child of Light is a very pretty, unique RPG with a fairy tale feel, and an interesting, well balanced battle system. The cute look and themes obviously may not be for everybody, but fans of fantasy RPGs might get a kick out of this game. I know I enjoyed it myself.

Hatoful Boyfriend (Game Review)

2014-10-21T17:45:00.002+03:00

So I'd never really played a 'visual novel' style game. Then I watched members of LoadingReadyRun stream some of Hatoful Boyfriend on Twitch. I watch a fair amount of LoadingReadyRun's streams and other online videos. They're a cool bunch, and they stream a wide variety of interesting games. In the past they've inspired me to play at least Dark Souls (which I love) and XCOM: Enemy Unknown (which I never actually got around to beating, but it was still an interesting experience). Hatoful Boyfriend looked like an... interesting and funny game, and it wasn't terribly expensive either, so I decided to give it a shot.

Like I said, Hatoful Boyfriend is a 'visual novel' game, meaning it's primarily presented through dialogue sequences, occasionally requiring you to make choices about your actions or replies, which in turn determine the storyline and ending you get. A little like the 'choose your own adventure' books of old, I guess... The game was originally release in Japan in 2011, but a new 'HD' remake was released this autumn, and is available on Steam and other online services.

The game puts you in the shoes of a Japanese high school girl, following her life through a school year. You'll have to choose what extracurricular activities you take, which boys you hang out with etc, as you'd expect in this kind of game, except... all the other characters in the game are birds. Mostly pigeons or doves of various kinds. Yes, you are the only human pupil at a school for intelligent birds! And there's other weird stuff going on, as well. Like, early on in the game, it's revealed you live in a cave, and you're apparently a 'hunter-gatherer'...

Some of the storylines the game takes you through are relatively mundane, romantic stories. That is, except for the fact that they're between a human and pigeons! Other stories go into... weird and sometimes dark places (don't worry, it's not a 'hentai' game, but it does have some horror elements). There's a lot of humour through the game (obviously, there'd have to be in), and a lot of references to Japanese culture, games etc.

Each playthrough only takes an hour or two (probably less once you've played through it a few times and can speed through repeated dialogue). There's more than a dozen different endings, though, so you'll be playing through it a bunch of times to see all of them. Which is also what, in my mind, makes this a 'game' and not merely a story. You'll want to unlock all those endings, and you need to find the right choices to get you to each of them. (Most of them were fairly easy to get, though I did look up hints for a few endings—most of which were simply alternate versions of endings I'd already gotten that hinged on relatively minor details.)

It sounds crazy and random, and I guess it is, but there is actually a surprisingly detailed backstory to it. However, through much of the game you'll only be given hints about what's going on and why the world is like it is. After you've unlocked the game's other endings, you unlock a special ending—a long (like, literally several hours) story sequence that explains a lot of what's actually going on and ties together loose ends. All in all it took me some 15 hours to complete Hatoful Boyfriend, which I think is a respectable amount of entertainment for the game's price.

Technologically speaking the game's hardly impressive. There's virtually no animation, just static character images superimposed on simple backgrounds. The character images are actual photographs of birds (though when you first meet major characters, you have the option to see a manga style representation of what they might look like if they were human)... There's no voice acting, and the music is, for the most part, quite generic (largely making use, I believe, of public domain tracks). There was also a fair amount of typos in the text, and occasionally the game would crash when trying to load a saved game. But none of this really matters, the game's real value is in its crazy story and concept.

So yeah. Hatoful Boyfriend is a weird, insane, sometimes silly, sometimes dark and even gruesome, often hilarious... thing. It's actually quite hard to explain its appeal, and I'm sure it isn't for everyone. It wouldn't necessarily be my first recommendation to people who aren't already into Japanese games and culture, at least. On the other hand, I don't think you need to be a fan of other visual novel or dating sim style games to get a kick out of it.

Also, pudding.

Batman: Arkham Asylum (Game Review)

2014-10-15T19:58:00.000+03:00

The Arkham series of Batman video games has been fairly popular, but I never really got around to looking into it, even though I do think of myself as a Batman fan (but then again, who doesn't)... However, when the first game in the series, Batman: Arkham Asylum (from 2009), was recently offered as a PlayStation Plus member download, I figured I might as well give it a shot.

The story begins with Batman delivering a recently captured Joker to Arkham Asylum. Lo and behold, Joker breaks free and begins taking over the facility. Naturally several classic Batman villains are released in the process, who Batman will have to deal with on his way to defeat Joker... Honestly, I found the story mediocre at best, a collection of Batman tropes to ferry you from level to level. And I wasn't hugely impressed by the dialogue and voice acting either, even though the game was written by Paul Dini—who worked on Batman: The Animated Series—and several original Batman: The Animated Series voice actors (most notably Mark Hamill as the Joker).

The actual gameplay, however, is somewhat more interesting. At its core it's nothing really original, deeply rooted in the 3rd person action-adventure genre. But there are many little features that make it fun to play. Naturally Batman has a variety of gadgets to help him, from batarangs and explosives to grappling guns. Which adds variety to the game, even though the controls for some of the gadgets felt unnecessarily clunky. Mobility plays a large role in the game, as Batman can grapple to high platforms to escape enemies and the like. An important element is also a special 'Detective Vision' mode that gives you additional information about your surroundings.

Combat is fairly straightforward and fluid. You gain experience that unlocks more powerful combo moves etc. Nothing really new there, but nothing wrong with it either. The regular combat sequences could feel a little repetitive, though (as did many of the boss fights), and some of the more interesting scenes were stealth oriented sequences where you have to pick off enemies one by one, using a variety of tactics, including sneaking behind them or dropping down from above.

I had no complaints about the look and feel of the game, aesthetically. It did feel... Batman-y enough. Interior level design, of course, can feel a little 'game-y' sometimes and not always exactly realistic. Not that that's much of a surprise. A particular pet peeve for me was the frequent use of gargoyles... on interior walls. Sure, they were quite practical as a gameplay element, but the point of real gargoyles was to funnel water from a roof so it doesn't run down walls. Not something you'd want inside a room...

The game didn't have a timer, as far as I could see, but the length felt fairly typical for this kind of game. For the obsessive completionist gamers there's a ton of secrets and collectible items scattered through the game, but, as usual, I couldn't really be bothered with that stuff...

In summary, Batman: Arkham Asylum was a reasonably fun little action-adventure game, but, despite some interesting features, didn't really stand out from other games in the genre, and felt like it had potential for more, in terms of narrative and gameplay variety. I don't really see myself replaying this game much, with so many other interesting games out there. But I could consider picking up the sequels, should I run into them at an affordable price...

A Weekend With WoW

2014-09-23T22:44:00.002+03:00

So, almost a decade after the game's release, I finally did it. I actually tried World of Warcraft.

I've been mildly curious about MMORPGs as a phenomenon for a long time. A few years ago I even tried playing a handful of free games, but all of those turned out to be either uninteresting to me or suffered from poor performance on my system at the time. But that was a long time ago, and, on a whim, just for kicks, one boring Friday night I decided to try if WoW would run on my current Debian laptop, using Wine. I figured what the hell, it's free up to level 20, I have nothing to lose. Perhaps a little to my surprise, it actually ran. Not at huge frame rates or on full graphical settings, of course, but smooth enough to be perfectly playable.

A few days later I reached the Starter Edition's level cap. Those 20 levels... actually succeed at giving new players a fairly decent glimpse of the variety and scope of WoW. There's a vast world to explore, a variety of different enemies and quests, and loot to pick up. You can do solo quests, or even try out instanced dungeons with a group.

So those would be some of the pros of the game. The cons, however... Yes, the world is vast with a multitude of different environments, and there are tons of quests. However, a lot of that world is, to be honest, a little on the bland side, not exactly teeming with detail. (Well, the game is ten years old, after all...) And while there is some variety, a lot of those quests are hopelessly repetitive. Go here, kill X creatures, report back... The controls also seem a little awkward and I don't think I've still quite gotten used to them. (Perhaps this is partly due to my mostly console background—playing third person games with a mouse feels weird. And speaking of which, boy has my hand been hurting, I'm so not used to using a mouse these days...)

So my feelings about WoW are somewhat mixed. It feels like a world with a lot of potential, but on the other hand it could obviously be much more interesting. Still, just exploring the world and doing quests has been pretty entertaining for these past few days.

Then there's of course the social aspect of the game, which is a whole other story. And one I can't really comment on much. I only did one instanced dungeon before hitting the level cap, and it was fun, but kind of a hectic blur, and I didn't really interact with the other players at all. (I know some of my friends have played WoW in the past, but I'm not sure any are currently active, and I doubt they'd be on the same server anyway—I just picked the first one the game recommended for me, out of quite a few).

So the big question is: is it worth paying a monthly fee for? Right now, sure, I could see myself paying for one month and trying out the game a little longer. When you think about it, a month's subscription isn't a whole lot of money, if you actually play the game on a fairly regular basis. Compare it to, for instance, buying a new single player game. It'll likely cost more, and mostly I don't play a game like that after I beat it, which rarely takes much more than a month, often considerably less. But would I be interested in WoW in the long term? That... I'm a little sceptical of. I've never really played a single game for extended periods in the past. I'm always moving on to new experiences. Ideally I think it would be something to occasionally kill a little time with. But paying a not insignificant monthly fee for something like that just doesn't seem like a viable option.

One more observation, relating to a theme in recent blog posts: this game could really use a manual. If one is provided anywhere with the download or in-game, I haven't found it. And the guide at Battle.net isn't nearly as helpful as the one for Diablo III was. It doesn't really go into the basic controls and mechanics at all...

EDIT: Well, I actually found a downloadable PDF manual, in the account section of Battle.net under my WoW details. Wish someone had pointed that out earlier... Mind you, the file is very unoptimised for computer screens and quite hard to read...

I guess that wraps up my admittedly brief experience (so far) with one of the world's most famous games, so I'll just leave you with this: for the Horde!

A Moment of Nostalgia with Heroes of Might and Magic III

2014-09-16T12:47:00.000+03:00

I recently bought a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999) when it was on sale at Good Old Games. I was a little surprised to find it works almost flawlessly on my GNU/Linux machine using Wine. (I also installed an unofficial HD mod to make it run in bigger resolutions.)

Back in the 90s, I had a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic II. I recall it was probably one of the first games I bought after my family got a new Pentium computer. It was a cool fantasy strategy game, with pretty graphics and great music. Right up my proverbial alley at the time. Before that I'd been playing Master of Magic a little, but Heroes' more polished, modern aesthetics, and perhaps also the slightly more streamlined mechanics, quickly won me over.

But I was never very good at it, or should I rather say not patient enough. I never got very far in the campaign, mostly playing single scenarios on easy difficulty settings and sometimes hot-seat multiplayer with friends. (I never was very patient with games back then—I hardly ever 'beat' games until a little later when I got into more story-driven stuff, like JRPGs...) Even so, I might go as far as saying that Heroes II is the game I remember most fondly from the 90s (together with TIE Fighter).

So, I started up Heroes III, and I felt right at home. Even though I didn't play it back in the day, the game's similar enough to it's predecessor to feel instantly familiar and intuitive. I still love the aesthetics and feel of the game, so many years later. I started up a scenario, played it for several hours... and then I drifted off to other things and haven't been back since. Yup, that sounds very familiar as well.

It's a problem I've had with many classic games, and perhaps particularly strategy games. There would be a ton of content to play through in Heroes III (the GOG version includes the two expansions as well). But alas, it seems more like an itch that needs occasionally scratching than something I'd be really motivated to stick with. (I'd still heartily recommend it to fans of classic strategy games, though. Even when not on sale, the game's only ten bucks at GOG.com, which seems like a bargain.)

Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition (Game Review)

2014-09-11T11:49:00.000+03:00

Blizzard's Diablo and Diablo II are among those classic computer games I never played. Thus I was only vaguely aware of the hype surrounding Diablo III when it was finally released a couple years ago, and the maybe somewhat lukewarm reception it had. But when the expansion, Reaper of Souls, was released earlier this year, and people were saying how it improved the game, coinciding with when I was getting into watching more gaming streams and thus exposed to a wider range of games, my curiosity grew.

When the expansion was released for consoles recently, bundled together with the main game as the Ultimate Evil Edition, I decided it was time to finally check out the series and bought the PS3 version. (It's also out for PS4, but I don't have one yet...)

I'm sure many people reading this will already be aware of the Diablo series, but for anyone who's not, the games are isometric hack-and-slash style action RPGs, with a focus on randomly generated content and loot. The story is set in a dark fantasy world called Sanctuary, and deals primarily with the war between angels and demons, with the player taking the part of a human hero going up against the demon lords, particularly their leader, the titular Diablo. Diablo III takes place 20 years after the previous game. Diablo has supposedly been vanquished, but the remaining demon lords are again spreading evil in Sanctuary. You set out to investigate a mysterious falling star and the dead rising from the graves...

The gameplay itself is quite simple, on the surface. Basically you hit buttons until the monsters die. The console version, out of necessity, has vastly different controls than the PC version. Where the PC games have always been heavily mouse oriented, the console version plays more like a standard third person action game (you use the left stick to move, buttons to attack etc). The menus and inventory management were also completely overhauled to work better with controllers.

Despite the simple premise, Diablo III has a surprising amount of depth, for a hack-and-slash game. You can pick one of six different classes, each with unique abilities, which are unlocked as you level up. Most of the locations you explore are random generated. Each time you start up the game they change, so you'll never have the exact same experience twice, even if you go back to locations you've visited before. Difficulty seemed something of a mixed bag. I played much of the main game on the maximum allowed difficulty, and didn't die once, which was a little surprising. After beating the main game (i.e. up to Act IV) you unlock higher difficulties. Playing the expansion content on the next higher setting seemed more suitable for me, except now some of the bosses felt a little too hard, and I ended up lowering difficulty for them... But at least you can change the difficulty at any time, which is good.

The game's reasonably long, too. (As far as I can tell, there's no timer in the game that would tell me how long it took to beat it, which is a shame. I find that kind of information interesting.) It doesn't end with beating the campaign, either. After that you unlock 'Adventure Mode', which lets you freely travel the word hunting down randomly generated 'bounties', and exploring randomly generated dungeons. Character level is capped at 70, but after that you can continue to improve your character by gaining 'paragon levels'. I'm not quite that far yet, so I can't really comment on what that entails.

And then there's the loot. Dropped by enemies and discovered in chests, or bought from merchants, or crafted by a blacksmith... So much loot, most of which is also random generated, so you'll find an endless number of equipment with different combinations of magical properties. There are several levels of rarity in items. Though, honestly, this seems a little unnecessary. Not long into the game it became obvious that 'rare' (and above) items were much better than more common items, and plentiful enough to simply not bother with picking anything else up (except occasionally to salvage for crafting materials).

The game looks very nice, even on the PS3, which probably has lower resolution than the PS4 or higher end PCs (I noticed some occasional slight slowdown too, but nothing that really detracted from the experience). There are lots of different environments, and tons of cool monsters. The music, on the other hand, was... well, background music. It's well enough done and suits the atmosphere of the game, but not exactly what I'd call memorable.

Another aspect the Diablo series is famous for is the multiplayer. You can team up with up to three other players for co-operative play. In the console version you can even play local multiplayer. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'm sure it, together with the randomly generated content, greatly increases the game's replay value. (As far as I know cross-platform online play isn't available, and for local multiplayer I assume each player needs a local username and save file, which slightly limits the potential. But it's still a cool thing.)

Now, I've listed a lot of positive things about Diablo III Ultimate Evil Edition. I certainly had fun playing it on my first playthrough, and I'm still having fun checking out Adventure Mode. But when it comes down to it, the core gameplay is quite repetitive, and the story is hardly very deep or original. While in theory it's one of those games you could keep playing indefinitely, how long it can keep me interested after 'beating' it once is a question I can't answer yet. (My past experience with games with a lot of 'post-game' content doesn't exactly speak for me sticking with it. Always moving on to new experiences...)

One last complaint I have (which I touched upon in an earlier blog post) is that the game came with virtually no manual, beyond a simple controller diagram. It turns out there's a game guide on Blizzard's Battle.net website, which answered some of the questions I had. But this guide was not mentioned anywhere in the packaging, as far as I could see...

The Forgotten Art of the Video Game Manual

2014-09-02T10:53:00.000+03:00

Blizzard's Diablo is one of those classic game franchises I never played. So, now that the expansion for Diablo III is out for consoles as well, and conveniently bundled with the main game as the 'Ultimate Evil Edition', I finally decided to pick up the PS3 version and give it a try. But I've barely started the game, so I'm not actually here to talk about it yet, but rather a related observation.

So I bought Diablo III, and opened up the box to check out the manual: a single folded sheet, featuring only a controller diagram and the usual warnings and customer service numbers.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the manual for Diablo II (2000) online. It's almost 100 pages long.

Another example. Some years ago I picked up a cheap second hand copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for PS3 ('Game of the Year Edition', 2007). Its manual is over 50 pages, which is actually fairly impressive for a PS3 game. A little later I bought the then brand new Skyrim (2011): a 'quick start' guide a couple pages long. (In multiple languages—this was the Nordic version, I don't know if UK/US versions differ.)

The trend is obvious. The video game manual is a dying breed. There are many reasons for this, of course. Designing and printing manuals is an additional expense. Online distribution of games is growing. Many games these days have extensive tutorial sections and in-game reference guides.

But there's a certain feeling when you open your brand new game and flip through the manual for the first time that an in-game tutorial can't replace. At best, manuals of the past have been much more than just about teaching you the controls. They could immerse you in the world of the game, expand the experience, get you hooked even before you start the game...

And all that aside, there are still games even in this streamlined, hold-you-by-the-hand age complex enough to benefit from a detailed reference guide. (Dark Souls springs to mind...)

I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, game publishers still making decent manuals. But for the most part the manual seems to be a thing of the past, and I'm not very hopeful of seeing a resurrection. Which is a shame.

Brief Procastinatory Ramblings on Learning Dota and Stuff

2014-08-28T16:53:00.001+03:00

Hello blog. What have you been up to? Not much, I see. Well, maybe I'll just scribble down a little something, just in way of procrastination...

So in my last post I mentioned trying out a little Dota 2. I've been playing a little more over the past week. I'm not sure how worthwhile it is actually writing about it with still so little experience under my belt, but whatever...

I have now completed the tutorials and practice battles in the game's training section, except for the last one, which is matches with other real players. And I really don't want to do that. Even if some people playing in those matches may well be as inexperienced as me, I am well aware of how bad I am at this game and I have zero confidence in my ability to compete against other humans.

I'm not sure I'd be willing to try that even if the MOBA community didn't have a reputation of being very harsh towards noobs. But of course it does. When you read about MOBAs, the one thing you always run into—in addition to how they're challenging but rewarding games, of course—is how unwelcoming and aggressive the community can be. Which is a shame.

It's funny, really. For a long, long time I simply wasn't interested in online games, favouring engaging single player experiences. And that's obviously just fine. But various factors lately have, just slightly, piqued my interest; like getting into following gamers on Twitch and social networks, esports becoming more mainstream etc.—overall exposing me to a wider range of gaming. And just when I'm maybe opening up slightly to these different parts of the hobby and to gaming as a more communal thing, I begin to discover that some parts of the gaming community can actually be rather shitty... Not that I have experienced anything very negative first hand—since, as said, I have hardly ever played online games and also the communities I have had touch with are pretty much composed of actually decent people—but it seems like these days you're constantly hearing stories about harassment and abuse... Actually, come to think of it, no, that's not actually funny at all.

But let's get back to Dota. Because, possible community issues aside, it is actually an interesting and entertaining game. Or at least has been so far. And I can see it will require a lot of practise. I honestly don't know at this time whether I'll have the motivation and patience to stick with it. It's quite similar to my relationship with fighting games, really. I find them cool and fascinating, but I'm terrible at them and lack the patience to really practice.

I'm slightly surprised I didn't lose any of the training section battles. But I think the game was rigged in my favour. It was obvious that the bots on my side were vastly more efficient than the enemy bots. I expect when I get into the 'proper' bot battles, which is probably the next step for me, my side will lose, even on easier settings. Because, all other things being equal, I still suck.

[EDIT: OK, so I actually played one bot match soon after writing this with the bots set to 'easy', and... the result was very much the same as the matches in the training section—i.e. I sucked but my team still dominated. So I guess I'd need to play on a higher difficulty for the teams to actually be equal...]

On Things Steamy, Esportsy, and Never Wanting to Be a Lumberjack-y

2014-08-20T21:01:00.000+03:00

I haven't been blogging much this summer. Sorry about that. Just not a whole lot going on in my life to blog about. I spent a few weeks in the countryside recently, much of which I spent cutting up firewood with a chainsaw. Turns out using a chainsaw isn't as cool as it might sound, but actual hard work. Especially when you're doing it several hours each day in the middle of Finland's longest heat wave in 40 years... Let me tell you, I was not built for manual labour...

So let us talk about geekier topics instead. I've written in the past about how I'm a dedicated GNU/Linux user and how this isn't exactly ideal for gaming on the PC, and about the (relatively few) games I've actually played on my computer. Of course the situation has slowly been improving. A major contributor to this is Valve's decision to bring Steam to GNU/Linux. I stayed away from Steam for a long while (partly because, in addition to running GNU/Linux, my laptop isn't exactly great and I've had a lot of issues with graphics drivers), but I finally took the plunge and installed it.

Steam's GNU/Linux support is still far from perfect, I'm afraid. The release is tailored for Ubuntu, for one thing, which has caused some compatibility problems with the Debian testing release I currently use. Getting it to run required a little trickery, like removing outdated libraries bundled with it in favour of actually working versions in my OS. But lo and behold, I did eventually manage to get it to run.

The main reason I decided to try Steam was that I have a whole bunch of games I've gotten from the Humble Indie Bundles, most of which are redeemable on Steam. I figured Steam might make installing and managing these games simpler. I installed a few of these games before I went on my trip... but of course I never had the time or energy to play anything after all the woodcutting. But I've finally been playing around a little over the past few days. I've played a little Legend of Grimrock, which seems pretty fun in an oldschool, nostalgic way—harking back to classic dungeon crawlers like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder (the latter of which, if I recall correctly, might have been the first PC game I ever bought, back when I got my first PC in the 90s).

Perhaps more surprisingly (to myself at least) I've also been playing a little Dota 2. Just tutorial matches against bots, of course. I doubt I'll ever have the skills or confidence to actually play with other humans... I suck so bad at it. I'm still completely lost with all the powers and items and whatnot. But I find the basic premise of these kind of games interesting and I figured I might as well try to learn some of the very basics. And I spent a fair amount of time watching The International (not least because it happened to coincide with my woodcutting 'holiday' and I had little energy to do anything more productive), which I guess instilled a little interest in me.

Plus Dota 2 is free. Which is cool. I'm actually quite surprised it even runs on my laptop. Though of course I have graphics settings almost at minimum...

I'm not going to go any deeper into these games at this point, since I haven't actually played that much of them yet. There's a bunch of other games I now own on Steam I'd like to try some day as well. But can't play everything at once, alas...

What Kind of Creature Am I? (Album Review)

2014-07-03T00:07:00.001+03:00

It's not very often these days that I encounter a new band or artist that I get really excited about. But Australian prog band Toehider is proving to be one of those.

I first heard of the band when frontman Michael Mills was featured on Ayreon's latest album, The Theory of Everything. I didn't look into it too deeply then, but sometime later the man behind Ayreon, Arjen Lucassen, posted a link to a crowdfunding campaign for the new Toehider album, What Kind of Creature Am I? I thought it looked interesting, and the cost for the CD wasn't too high, so I decided to take a chance, even though I wasn't at all familiar with their music.

The album isn't officially slated for release until next week, I believe, but backers got a link to download the album last week, and today I discovered the CD in my postbox. I have listened to the album several times now, and... yes, I'm quite enjoying it.

I often talk about how much I appreciate albums as physical, aesthetic objects, and this one is no exception. The artwork by Andrew Saltmarsh is delightful. The liner notes are quite hilarious (another thing that adds value to owning the physical version). My one complaint is that the font in the booklet is quite small and hard to read. (Alas, this is a far too common problem in CD booklets.)

While Toehider has additional members for live performance, almost everything on the album is done by the quite talented multi-instrumentalist Michael Mills (which makes the music all the more impressive). Best I can describe Toehider's music is as prog rock. The songs display a wide range of styles and influences, with intricate, skilful arrangements, often complex (as prog tends to be), but still frequently quite catchy as well...

There are obvious Queen influences in several songs. There are heavier guitar parts, at times venturing close to metal (though much of the music is fairly cheery), as well as softer, more folky sequences (parts of the epic 12 minute track 'Meet the Sloth', for instance, remind me greatly of Jethro Tull).

Mills is a quite competent singer, as well, with a remarkable vocal range. The lyrics are frequently surreal, fantastic, even whimsical, though occasionally veering into darker, more personal territory.

I will probably have to try to get my hands on Toehider's earlier works eventually, although that may take a while. Meanwhile, I'll just go on listening to What Kind of Creature Am I?

One Solstice Night, Pt 5

2014-06-22T04:02:00.001+03:00

So, as my followers could conceivably know, for the past few years I have stayed up till dawn on the night of the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year, and blog my activities during that night. The actual moment of the solstice (astronomically speaking) was at 1:46 p.m. my time, so I guess tonight is the closest to it.

This year is a little different from my previous solstice nights, though, because, as it happens, the solstice this year happens to coincide with the awesome Mario Marathon for Child's Play Charity, which (as my followers again may be aware of) I follow every year with an almost religious fervour. So my night isn't going to be a whole lot different from the rest of my weekend. But I'll try to write up some of the highlights, anyway. (I also don't have any booze, like I usually do, largely because the stores have been closed for the last couple days due to the Midsummer holiday...)

22:51 - Sunset. The MM crew has now been playing for almost 29 hours and they've raised over $26,000 for charity. Pretty cool. They're currently playing Super Mario Bros. 2. That's one of my favourite games from the good old NES days, and (iirc) the only Mario game I actually beat (without Game Genie codes) back in those days. (Before this they played Super Mario Galaxy, which is probably my favourite modern Mario game...)

23:00 - A couple words about my marathon watching set up. I went all out this year, hooking up my laptop to my 40" TV so I can watch the stream way bigger than I ever have before, and I can have my laptop next to me for chatting in the marathon's IRC channel (and, you know, writing this blog and stuff). It's pretty cool. Don't know why I haven't done this before. Just laziness, I guess (and of course I didn't have a TV this size in previous years).

23:25 - And they just beat SMB2! I think this was the fastest playthrough yet this marathon, faster than SMB1 even. Next up is Super Mario Sunshine for the GameCube, which should be a much longer game... Not one I've played, not likely in the foreseeable future, but Mario is Mario...

00:00 - Midnight calls for a midnight snack. Gonna make me some nachos! Well, I call them nachos, but it's pretty much the simplest version I can imagine. Basically I just put slices of cheese on top of tortilla chips and toss them in the microwave. Well, I've got some salsa for dipping, too. Fancy.

1:00 - Should be about as dark as it gets around now. Been a pretty rainy week, but apparently the skies have cleared up just in time for tonight. And the skies are a nice shade of blue, fading to almost gold on the horizon... Yup, that's midnight at midsummer here in Finland...

1:20 - Ah, good old blindfold mode, always good fun to watch.

1:40 - Hah, wouldn't be Mario Marathon without the eventual technical difficulties. Apparently the website is down. Stream still works fine, luckily, 'cause it's through Twitch.tv. Of course the stream is a lot more quiet when people are fixated on fixing issues...

3:10 - I probably shouldn't be having more nachos at this time, but maybe just a little... Hope I won't regret it soon when I'm actually trying to sleep...

3:55 - Sunrise. Which means I should be heading to bed. Fun enough night, just a bummer about Mario Marathon's server issues. Tomorrow will be... pretty much the same as tonight! Hopefully the issues get sorted out soon and the rest of the marathon will be a huge success!

BioShock Infinite

2014-05-22T14:26:00.000+03:00

BioShock's one of those game series that's been sort of on my radar for a long time, but, perhaps mostly because I've never been a particularly passionate FPS fan, I never got around to buying them. However, I recently joined PlayStation Plus and one of the free member games at the time was BioShock Infinite, so of course I decided to download it and give it a try.

Infinite is the third game in the series, but it's a more or less independent story set in a new location, so I didn't have too many qualms about not having played the first two. Booker DeWitt is a private investigator living in 1912, who, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, ends up in a floating city called Columbia, looking for a girl called Elizabeth. Of course things soon get crazy. Or crazier, I should say. Columbia turns out to be a religious white supremacist community on the verge of rebellion. Mix in supernatural powers, strange quantum technology that keeps the city in the sky, alternate realities, mechanical creatures and whatnot, and you've got a pretty cool, original environment and interesting story.

Quirky vintage environments have of course been a defining feature of the BioShock franchise from the start. I really enjoyed the look and atmosphere of this game. Radios and gramophones play music in the style of the period and the aesthetic in general is not quite like any other game I've played. For much of the game you travel with Elizabeth, which, from a story point of view, added opportunities for dialogue, something that normally isn't perhaps the strongest point in FPSs. The storytelling in general was pretty good, although it did feel like there was the occasional unnecessary MacGuffin used to add more action sequences that didn't quite fit in the otherwise original and high quality design of the game...

Gameplay-wise, BioShock Infinite plays much like any FPS. It does have some slight RPG elements mixed in too, though. You gain a variety of different supernatural powers you can use. There's a lot of loot lying around for you to gather and you can buy upgrades for your weapons and powers. There are also sequences with little fighting, some exploration to do and a few sidequests as well (though honestly I didn't find the sidequests particularly interesting or rewarding). All in all, it plays pretty smooth and fun.

The amount of choice in weapons and powers is good, I guess, but honestly the game didn't really give much incentive to experiment with them. You're limited to carrying two weapons, and although there's plenty lying around that you can pick up, I rarely felt comfortable switching away from the familiar weapons I'd been using from early on and had spent resources upgrading...

I've always considered myself pretty bad at action games and often pick easier difficulty settings when available. But I decided to go with the default setting this time, and... honestly, I don't know if I've actually improved over the years or whether this game was on the easy side, but I found most of the game not very hard at all. Dying wasn't really a problem, as enemies you've killed stay dead. Really only the final battle caused me any trouble, largely because it had a different type of objective from most battles (protecting a target, rather than just killing things). But I still had fun playing, though, and that's what counts, of course.

I also had some complaints about the save system. Namely, the lack of one. The game only saved at particular checkpoints, and should you have to quit at any other point, you'd have to start again from the last checkpoint...

So yeah, overall, while not perhaps exactly perfect, I quite enjoyed the game. Once experienced, though, I don't really see myself replaying this in the foreseeable future. I guess I should eventually check out the other two games. But it's not a terribly high priority, got plenty of games to play as it is...

One More from the Normandy: the ME3 DLC Post

2014-05-12T13:54:00.001+03:00

So I just finished my second playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy. It was a great, epic journey once again. And a long one. (Some 140 hours, at least, spread over the last six months or so—I tried to be as thorough as possible this time, probably doing a bunch of optional stuff I might have missed first time round.)

When I first played Mass Effect 3, a year ago, all the DLCs were already out, but I was somewhat low on funds and they were, all put together, pretty expensive. So I decided to postpone purchasing them, hoping they'd be on sale before too long. Well, they finally came on sale in the PSN store earlier this year, just a little before I was moving on to ME3 in my replay of the trilogy. So obviously I bought them all (the single player expansions, that is), meaning I had a ton of exciting brand new content for my playthrough. So, let me just go over those expansions briefly.

From Ashes features a new mission, revisiting Eden Prime. Some nice scenery, but the mission itself was hardly anything special. The 'meat' of this expansion, however, is a new squad member. And not just any squad member, but an actual living prothean. Who turn out not to be necessarily the nicest of peoples. But I don't want to spoil too much. Though not hugely important, it's a fun enough addition to the game, and obviously expands on some elements of the game's lore, which is always cool.

Leviathan has the team chasing after a mysterious being in several locations around the galaxy. The story builds on some concepts from the game's ending, particularly the origin of the Reapers. This was a fairly entertaining mission, overall, in my opinion, with a decent balance of action and story.

Omega sees Shepard helping Aria recover the Omega station from Cerberus forces. The loss of Omega was of course mentioned in the main game, but more importantly, this DLC ties in heavily with one of the Mass Effect comics, Invasion (which, of course, I re-read before embarking on my replay of ME3). As a mission, though, it's mostly pretty straightforward and linear combat, little more. While it was still a lot of fun and offered several hours of gameplay, in some ways it seemed perhaps the most overpriced of all these DLCs. You don't even get to revisit Omega again after finishing the mission or anything...

Citadel, on the other hand, features a pretty fun mission with plenty of variety and new areas to visit on the Citadel, along with a ton of little dialogue scenes with various characters, mini-games etc. You get to see the Normandy's crew just hang out and have fun, for a change. Compared to most content in ME3, which can be quite grim, this expansion has a very tongue-in-cheek tone throughout. Some parts are just downright hilarious, which is a nice change. Anyway, I think Citadel actually had the most 'bang for buck' of the expansions, although it's still not exactly cheap.

Overall, the DLCs add a fair amount of fun content and variety to ME3, easily adding 10+ hours of gameplay. I do, however, feel that, at full price, they're somewhat overpriced. The four major single player expansions together (in the PSN store for my region, as of the writing of this post) cost almost as much as a new game, and probably a fair amount more than you'd actually pay for ME3 these days. Which is just ridiculous. Well, I guess it's hard to be a fan of anything without someone, somewhere squeezing money out of you...

A Noob's Guide to Dark Souls

2014-05-05T16:32:00.000+03:00

I recently beat Dark Souls and thought it was a very entertaining, cool experience. It is, however, not one of the most easily approachable games around, so I thought I might write down some of my thoughts for potentially interested gamers.

I am by no means an expert on Dark Souls. In fact, I'm barely more than a noob myself. I've only played through the game once, and there is much I don't know, and much I probably could have done better.

What Is Dark Souls?

Dark Souls is an atmospheric, challenging action RPG title by Japanese developer From Software, originally released in 2011. Set in a gloomy, desolate fantasy world, you take on the role of an undead warrior, banished from the lands of the living, on a quest to learn ancient secrets of the world.

The game has a reputation for being rather hard. And I guess it is. You will likely die many, many times while playing it. But it can also be very entertaining and rewarding. And for all its hardness, the game is still, mostly, fair. You learn to deal with the challenges. You improve your character and equipment to help you overcome them. I'd say anyone with some experience with action games, and a little patience, should be able to beat it.

That being said, Dark Souls definitely isn't for everybody. If it's not your thing, that's perfectly fine. It's just a game, not some sort of holy grail, although some may portray it as such. From what I hear, the community for this game can be a little elitist sometimes. But you can just ignore such people. Remember there's no one correct way to play the game. As long as you're having fun, you're doing it right.

Do Your Research!

Here's the thing about Dark Souls: it tells you very little about anything. The manual that came with the version I bought is not very informative at all, and doesn't even list all the controls (for instance, I don't think it makes any mention of jumping—not something you need often, but occasionally useful). The game itself is not much better. While there is a tutorial section of sorts, it doesn't really hammer a lot of stuff in, or explain every aspect of the game. The menus may well be confusing. Like, what do all these stats mean?

However, there is a wealth of information about the game online. Several wikis are dedicated to it. (Here's the one I ended up using most.) You'll find more detailed info about locations, enemies, items, NPCs etc. For a game like this, I don't think there's any shame in doing your homework. There are so many things you simply cannot know. Once you get some way into the game, you'll likely want to explore more on your own, but getting to that point is much easier with at least a little more information than the game gives you. The story of the game isn't hugely complex, and the style of storytelling quite minimalist, so you're not likely getting a whole lot of big spoilers if you read up on some stuff (heck, it might even clarify some plot points that aren't necessarily all that obvious from the game's dialogue).

Early on, watching other people's experiences can be valuable. I watched Alex Steacy and Graham Stark of LoadingReadyRun play the first few hours of the game on the LRR stream, which I'm sure was helpful. (Here's the first broadcast of Graham playing the game, archived on YouTube—it's fun and also informative.) (There's also a post by Alex giving advice to new players here, which I recommend, though I'm covering some of the same ground in this post.)

Character Creation

The class you pick determines your beginning stat levels and starting equipment. But over the course of the game, you can increase whatever stats you want and use whatever gear you want; the class is only your starting point. So the class you choose isn't hugely important, although it does give you a small head start in certain areas and you may wish to focus on those areas. Some sources have recommended warrior or knight for beginners, as they're fairly straightforward melee oriented characters, and I have no argument with this. You might not want to trouble yourself too much with magic on the first playthrough. (I played a warrior and used almost no magic, and it worked fine for me.)

The gift is probably even less important than your class in the long run. Many of these are of very little consequence at all. Some are single use items that would be soon expended, so they don't seem especially valuable. The binoculars you can actually obtain fairly easily quite near the beginning of the game. Be wary of the description of the Tiny Being's Ring—it does not, in fact, regenerate your health, only gives you a slight increase in total hit points. The Old Witch's Ring allows you to speak with a particular NPC. It doesn't really affect the game, but is a fun little scene. (You can obtain it late in the game, but it requires a little work.)

The one gift that actually has a significant game impact is the master key. This allows you to open several doors in the game before you get the keys for them. I have seen some sources recommend it, but it's a double-edged sword. It might allow you to skip some potentially difficult areas early on. But it might also give you early access to areas that are too tough for you, and confuse you about where you're supposed to be heading. And if you're playing for the first time, do you really want to be skipping content anyway? I, at least, wanted to experience the whole game, from beginning to end. So I would only recommend the master key if you really know what you're doing. (Note that the thief class gets the master key as part of its starting gear, so beginners might want to be equally wary of picking that class.)

General Gameplay Considerations

I played on PS3 and have no experience with the PC version, but I have heard many people heavily recommend using a gamepad rather than mouse and keyboard. The game was obviously designed with consoles in mind.

The easiest tactic against many early enemies is to wait for them to attack, block with your shield, and then hit. Repeat until it's dead. Being too hasty will likely get you killed. Beware of getting crowded by multiple enemies.

Kicking is useful against enemies that constantly hold their shield up. It's a little tricky to perform, so you might want to practise it. Parrying is supposedly a really effective technique, but if you have trouble getting the timing right, don't stress over it too much. I beat the game just fine without learning to parry. Backstabbing is a little easier to do and quite effective against many slower enemies, so you might want to practise it.

Remember that you cannot pause! While you're in menus, you can still be attacked, so make sure you're in a safe place before you adjust your gear of whatever. Also, make sure you're fully out of the menu when you continue, as you can still move but you might, to your surprise, not be able to block or attack because there's still a menu tab selector active in the corner...

Once you do something, it's done. You can't go back. There's only one save file per character, and the game is frequently autosaving. When you quit, you carry on from where you left off. However, there's not a whole lot of things you can screw up permanently. If you use or dispose of an item, it's gone. Some you may be able to replace, others not, so take care. If you kill an NPC, they're gone for good, so be sure about what you're doing in such situations.

If you're ever stuck at a certain point, there may be other areas you can explore, and you can usually also grind and level up or upgrade your equipment.

Getting Invaded

While Dark Souls is primarily a single player game, it has some online features woven in. The most noticeable (apart from the many messages popping up all over the world) is the ability to 'invade' other players. You will get invaded, sooner or later. It is quite possible you'll die, since the invaders are likely more experienced players and likely to have better gear. Some may be actively trying to troll other players.

But, overall, it's not really that bad. At least it wasn't for me. You can only be invaded while in human form, and you can play much of the game just fine without restoring your humanity. (You will want to do it every now and then to kindle bonfires, though, and in order to summon NPCs to assist you in boss fights. But those are the only important times.) There's a cooldown before you can be invaded again, too. At worst, invading seemed like a minor annoyance. At best, it can even be exciting, especially when you actually manage to beat the other guy. Just be mentally prepared for the possibility.

A Few Useful Early Game Hints

There are several useful items you can get around Firelink Shrine when you first get there (in the nearby graveyard, and down the lift into New Londo Ruins). Getting some may practically involve suicide runs, but that's fine, because you keep all items when you die.

Try talking to NPCs more than once. Sometimes they have more useful information, gifts etc. if you talk to them two or more times.

Find the merchant in Undead Burg. He's got some useful stuff to sell, and there's a bonfire fairly near, so grinding for souls isn't too hard, if you don't have enough. The repairbox is really useful, especially if you use gear with low durability. You should probably also buy the residence key. When killed, he drops the uchigatana, which is a very good sword for anyone going for a dexterity-heavy character build (I pretty much used it as my primary weapon throughout the game). But if you do decide to kill him, make sure you buy everything you want from him first.

When you get to the bridge with the dragon, you can fairly easily get the Drake Sword by shooting its tail from a location under the bridge. You'll need a bow and plenty of arrows, which you can buy from the merchant. It might take a few tries to get the aiming right, and dozens of arrows before it drops the sword. Once you get a little further in the game and start upgrading your gear, the Drake Sword is easily outclassed, but at this point in the game it can be really good.

If you kill Lautrec when he shows up in Firelink Shrine, you'll get a rather good ring. You'll miss out on a storyline involving him if you do this before ringing the second bell, but it might still be worth it, and easier at this point... (Just make sure you never remove the ring, though, as you'll lose it!)

Before you head into Blighttown, go to the Darkroot Garden from Undead Parish and kill some of the tree creatures. They drop varieties of moss, which cure status ailments and can be quite helpful.

Afterword

There's probably important stuff I've forgotten, and obviously I haven't gone into a lot of detail about the game's mechanics and controls. But you should be able to find a lot of this on your own, if you're interested.

I don't know if anyone who might find this useful will ever stumble upon my blog. But if even one person out there actually finds this helpful and ends up enjoying Dark Souls as much as I did, I'd be happy!

Linking the Fire: The Day I Beat Dark Souls

2014-05-04T12:43:00.001+03:00

So I did it. I beat Dark Souls. After years of being somewhat sceptical about this game, once I actually got into it I simply devoured it, spending a lot of my free time playing it over the last couple weeks.

The final boss... was actually easier than I was expecting. Beat it on my second try (and came very close to beating it on the first). But that doesn't mean I'm a skilled player, just that I've taken my time and levelled up my character and equipment. I feel like I've explored Lordran fairly thoroughly now, although I'm sure there's still a ton of hidden content that I've missed. The ending was... arguably kinda anticlimactic, but that's just so Dark Souls all over, with its minimalistic storytelling.

Since I already discussed many aspects of the game in my last couple blog posts (my first impressions, and second impressions), I'm not going to write a proper 'review' blog. Suffice to say, I had a lot of fun playing Dark Souls. I loved the atmosphere, the action, even the silly NPCs. That being said, I'm sure this is not a game for everyone.

Dark Souls has a reputation for being a hard game. And I guess it is. But if I can beat it without too much trouble, I think most people with a little experience in action games, and a little patience, should do just fine. It is not the most easily approachable of games, however, and, as I've said before, you're much better off if you do some research beforehand. (Actually, maybe I ought to write some kind of noob's guide to the game. Although I'm not sure if any of my friends might actually be contemplating playing this game or that anyone else would actually discover my writings...)

I don't feel a great hurry to play the sequel. I guess I'll have to some day, but I'll wait at least until the price drops a little. The little I've seen of it... is fairly interesting, I guess, but I'm not sure about some of the changes... I'm also not sure I want to try a 'new game plus' with my current Dark Souls character. I think it might be more rewarding to try an entirely different character build. In any case, I probably should be playing other games as well, for a change.

And... I guess that's about all I have to say at this time.