The Lelda Of Zegend: Breath Of The Weath

I finally got a Nintendo Switch. It is adorbable and teeny-tiny and I can't handle that.

I have now played Breath of the Wild, seven million years after everyone else already moved on from it. I'm only about an hour through the game, but I'm going to see how long I can get through it without putting any pants on Link.

I was hoping to have paid for it from art commissions, but that requires a paypal account and a paying audience and not being in a ruined state in terms of artistic growth. So my dad bought it for me.

The shame at being such a pathetic baby that needs his parents to buy him his toys is palpable. But I seriously don't have anything else going on in my life, I've lost a lot of heroes in the last couple of months and I doubt I'm going to have a chance to be an adult anytime soon. If I'm going to waste the days until I'm dead, I might as well do some wacky shit in Hyrule.


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~A.H.

Dark Souls Remastered: Plat

I got every trophy in Dark Souls Remastered in about ten days. It felt like months. Apparently the Remaster introduced MORE bugs. Which is kind of like if Sonic '06 finally got patched, and all the patch did was add Big the Cat fishing levels.

With this, I now have the platinum trophy in all 4 Soulsborne games. To commemorate this, here is a doodle of my player character:

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~A.H.

Loot Boxes

Someone who's as interested in video games as I am should probably have big, important opinions about loot boxes. A random in-game item or appearance modifier, usually obtained through payment of real earth dollars. Like those "Gashopon" vending machines in Japan.


Over the last year I've read about them a lot, and about whether they count as gambling, if they're immoral, if they're harmful to video games as a whole and so on and so forth.


I don't disagree. But I also don't know if I agree either.


I really don't know where I stand on the issue. Maybe because I'm sympathetic to game devs trying to recuperate ballooning costs in making games these days. Maybe because I haven't seen too many outrageous examples(and when I do, it's usually EA being EA).


Also, I don't really have any better suggestions for what game companies could be doing instead. Paid loot boxes in online games seems to me like a crude band-aid solution. Something to buy some time before a better idea can come along. I don't have that Better Idea, though.

The argument could be made that they're manipulative, or that they take advantage of people with gambling addictions. Those are valid concerns, and I feel particularly useless that I don't have a better alternative in mind. I'll just have to wait and see how this pans out.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

In The Valley Of Gods: Hair Helmet

In The Valley Of Gods looks rad. I'm into ancient-egyptian stuff, it's got a gorgeous art-style and I dig the character designs.

Apparently it takes a LOT of hard work to get hair to look that good.


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~A.H.

Final Fantasy XV: First Impressions

Final Fantasy XV is a game I've been playing lately, which is something I thought I would be saying 9 or 10 years ago, or never. Back when it was announced as "Final Fantasy Versus XIII". For reference, George W. Bush was still the president of the united states when this game was announced. Then we went  through the ENTIRE Obama administration, in the time it took for this game to be developed and then released.

That's a long fucking time to be working on and funding a video game. Like "The Last Guardian", it was one of those "vaporware" projects that became a running joke about how it would never be released. Both games came out in 2016. Both of those games now exist in a finished state and are in my house, and I still don't quite have the words to describe what that feels like. It's as surreal as if Half-Life 3 got a trailer and was announced for release in october this year. Even if I saw it on store shelves, my brain would still resist it. It can't be real. It's been the Not Real thing for so long. Surely this must be some mistake.


But it's there. It's real. I'm about 40 hours into it. I don't remember a whole lot, most of the characters are pretty unmemorable, and the game is too in love with open-world game concepts, without working to mitigate the more annoying aspects of those games(such as vast, empty spaces of no engaging content, and too-long trips back and forth between areas to cash in on finished quests.)

But I don't hate it. I want to play more. If nothing else, it FEELS like Final Fantasy, even if through a very warped modern lense. If nothing else, I'm glad Final Fantasy games really try to experiment with the brand.


That said, fuck whoever thought there should be a fishing mini-game. Fuck everything about that. Those are the Water Levels of mini-games.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Dark Souls 3" Review

by Alex Hill

2.5/5

Dark Souls 3 is like "The Force Awakens"; It's the bare minimum of what it needed to be, a video game for the sake of a video game. It thinks fan-service, nods and references will carry it, because it offers little that's new or interesting enough to stand on its' own. It has more to offer than Bloodborne, but it's still a regression of the Souls formula. Someone shaved this wild, untamed thing, and whittled its' fangs down too far.

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Dark Souls 3: Challenge Runs

Today I learned that I can beat every single boss encounter in Dark Souls 3 without dying.

It's everything in-between those that can go fuck off.





I've run into a problem: Once it sunk in that you can't really die(at least it's never permanent, there's no real GAME OVER situation), all of the tension of playing Dark Souls kind of... left.  Just vanished.  It can still be frustrating to lose, but I don't feel like there's anything at stake.

So I've tried doing No-Death runs.  To very limited success.  Maybe I should give myself a bit of leeway?

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Dark Souls 3: "Darkmoon Blade"

I just got the platinum trophy in Dark Souls 3.

I've been playing this game since the day it was released. It took over 400 hours to get one achievement. Which is 397 hours longer than I consider reasonable.

The last achievement/trophy I needed was to get all of the games "Miracles", a type of magic spell. The most time-consuming spell to obtain is called "Darkmoon Blade". The only way to get this Miracle is to offer 30 of a specific item to a dragon lady in a tower.

The items in question are white ears, human ears called "Proof of a Concord Kept". The only way to get these are:


a.) Killing "Silver Knight" enemies

or

b.) Defeating an invading player in someone else's game after you're summoned to help them.

The greatest foe in Dark Souls 3.

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Transformers Devastation

I'm surprised by how much I was impressed with Transformers Devastation. I got it for free during a Playstation Plus "free games" thing and it kind of languished on my PS4 hard-drive for a while. I only got around to trying it out a few days ago, thinking I'd just get a few Trophies and then delete it to make room for other games.


It's by Platinum Games, and it shows. It's not a million miles removed from stuff like Bayonetta, fast-paced melee combat against multiple opponents, end-of-level grading, etc. I'm not sure why that made me hesitant to try it out. In any case, I became a bit obsessed with getting better and better at it. It's not a long game, and that might be why I wanted to play it again. If it were some obnoxiously long, open-world game like Skyrim or The Witcher I'd likely have gotten bored early on and never come back to it. I certainly wouldn't have leveled up my character as high as possible and beat the game on the highest difficulty setting. And I certainly wouldn't have wanted to keep playing it after that.


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Dark Souls 2: No Deaths Playthrough Ending

A couple of days ago, I beat Dark Souls 2 without dying. It took 9 months of constant fuck-ups and swearing and resentment, blaming myself, my controller, the game(and to be fair, I'd say they were all valid targets of blame at different points). But it finally happened.

I set a goal for myself last year, and now I've achieved that goal.




Granted, I overleveled the fuck out of my character, and I wasn't going for some kind of insane world record or anything. The point wasn't to try and be the best person to ever play the game, just to see if I could beat every boss in the game without dying in a single playthrough.

Was it worth it? I mean, I didn't feel any different. I always knew I COULD do it, theoretically. I'm just surprised at how many bullshit deaths these games threw at me before I got this far. If nothing else, it provided a welcome distraction from the upcoming US election.

So umm... yeah. That's what I've been up to this year.


END OF LINE

~A.H.

One: 2

Could someone explain what the hell happened to video game titles? What the fuck is a “Horizon: Zero Dawn” or a “Bravely Default”? Or “Kingdom Hearts: 218/2 Days > Destiny Divide = Fart” or whatever. Do they leave this up to a random number generator? What is the reason for this? How does this get past all of the people in corporate and all of the people who are paid to make sure you don't have a stupid-sounding brand?

Another one: Games in a long-running franchise that have the exact same title as the first game in the series, so talking about it is prefaced with confusion.

“Hey, have you played Doom?” 

“Yeah, I remember that game when I was a kid.” 

“No, not DOOM Doom. The new Doom. The one that’s also called Doom but came out more recently than the other game that’s called Doom.” 

Sonic the Hedgehog. Tomb Raider. Thief. Mortal Kombat. That’s like if the next big JRPG were called “Final Fantasy 2″. People get paid millions of dollars to come up with names for these products, and everyone apparently forgot that subtitles are a thing?


You know what the new Spider-Man reboot is called? “Spider-Man: Homecoming”. See, they put another word in there to distinguish it from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, as a small courtesy to anyone who tries to talk about this shit. Especially in an age where word-of-mouth social media regurgitation-as-free advertising is so important.


This reminds me: there’s an old PSX-era EA game I played a demo of called “One”. And I always thought, man, what are they gonna call the sequel?

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~A.H.

Dark Souls 3: "True Colors"

So, remember that post I made complaining that Dark Souls III looked too monochromatic? Where at the end I suggested that maybe we only saw a very bland-looking area, and that maybe the rest of the game was more visually interesting?





Damn it.

Also, whose idea was it to use the song “True Colours” for a game that doesn’t have more than two?


It’s like they looked at Skyrim and Gears of War and said: “Ugh, these games are just too vibrant! What is this, My Little Pony?!”. I was really hoping Bloodborne was just a game with monotonous art-direction, but it looks like that blandness and de-saturation is built right into the engine.


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~A.H.

Colours And Contrast

I know this is just as annoying as that guy who was mad that Diablo III had TOO MUCH colour. As far as problems with video games go, it’s not the end of the world or anything, but it still bugs me when modern games do this. Especially when they rely on BS excuses like “it’s supposed to be dark and edgy and dark and gritty and dark and dark”. When in practice, it just makes everything look flat and uninteresting.


And yes, Dark Souls III in particular does have screenshots you can find with some colour and contrast. But I’d argue that in order to be a part of the franchise, it should really look closer to something like this:

But hey, what do I know? Maybe they’re only showing us the really bland, gray, flat-looking areas before we get to see the REAL art design… or something. But there's a reason why Fallout 4 was so colourful and had such high contrast and saturation: because Skyrim and Fallout 3 looks like a black and white picture of a turd. If people have to mod your game to make it look good, then your game's art design sucks. I don't care how many polygons you have to work with.

I was really hoping that video games had finally gotten out of its' "Gears of War, gray and gray and more gray" phase.


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~A.H.

Bloodborne: "Chalice Dungeons"

Bloodborne is two games:

The first is a generic 3D brawler. You mash the attack button at every enemy, and then you do the same thing. And then you do it again. You do this for nine million years, and it never becomes exciting or interesting. The world is drab and lifeless, all of the levels are forgettable, there are no meaningful interactions and there's too much damned level grinding. There are obstacles that have solutions so obtuse, so nonsensically beyond what any sane person would ever think to do, I'd swear it was made by Tim Schaefer.

Basically, it's Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest.

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Smash Bros. For 3DS

Smash Bros. for the 3DS has the worst control scheme I’ve ever experienced in a video game. I say this because within the first 2 minute match, my hands were hurting from the clumsy button placement. Nothing else has ever accomplished this.


It's so awful, I almost wonder if this was done on purpose so more people would buy the Wii U version, thus boosting sales for the struggling console. I can't believe a video game in this century plays this terribly. And worse, from a franchise that was heralded for its' near-perfect precision gameplay.

Portal 2: First Thoughts

So I bought Portal 2. Still making my through. Some early impressions:

-Solid writing, although most of it has been spoiled for me by the internet parroting it all.

-I was seriously stuck dead in my tracks during one puzzle for about half an hour. And I figured it out right before I was going to surrender and look up the solution online. Figuring that out made me feel a lot smarter than I really am. Very few games have accomplished this. Most veer wildly too far into frustratingly vague territory, where you're punished simply for not having a psychic link to Tim Schaefer's schizophrenia.

-I miss when Chell was a person of colour, instead of a plastic-surgery-riddled Strong Female Character. Considering you're not even supposed to see her, and she's not even on the box, that's pretty disappointing that they would whitewash her just to appeal to a "wider audience".

-When I "rescued" the turret and brought it through the field that destroys anything you carry through it, I felt so bad I restarted from the last checkpoint and just left it before that part, intact. Just so it would "survive" my playthrough. It takes a very special game to make me care that much about the soulless robots shooting at me.

-The fat jokes get old, fast. 

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~A.H. 

 

That Wizard Came From The Moon

Peter Dinklage can barely contain his excitement for being in the video game "Destiny". This is what $500 million can get you, ladies and gentlemen.

Between this, The Elder Scrolls Online and The Old Republic, maybe this will finally be the year where the large-scale multiplayer game dinosaurs finally collapse under their own weight.

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~A.H.

Bungie: Destined For Failure?

Activision recently announced that it's going to cost them half a billion dollars to create Bungie's new game "Destiny". $500 million. That's even more than the rumoured cost of BioWare's Star Wars online game "The Old Republic".

There are about 7 million Playstation 4s in the hands of consumers, and about 5 million Xbox Ones that have been sold. As has already been pointed out, the only way Destiny will be make a profit is if every single human being who owns a Playstation 4 and an Xbox One buys a copy of Destiny.

Destiny.

The game that's just Borderlands without the flavour, personality, art direction or comedic appeal.

The game where Peter Dinklage boredly tells you to go over here and shoot bad guys, then go over here and shoot more bad guys.

The game that marks the point where Bungie fired one of the great video game composers, for apparently no reason(my guess is to cut costs somewhere).

A game with no readily apparent characterization, no indicator of a compelling story, and no one talking about it. Other than how expensive it is, because why else would anyone talk about it?

The Walking Dead: "You Killed Kenny!"

Did it ever feel like that scene in "No Time Left" where Kenny "dies" offscreen felt like a cheap placeholder, intentionally vague so they could bring him back later?

Wasn't it a complete non-event when, oh look, he's magically still alive in Season 2, even though that's literally impossible given his circumstances? And even though the end-of-game tally screen says he was overwhelmed by the horde?


Well, Gavin Hammon admitted that Kenny was canonically dead in Episode 5, until the director intentionally deleted audio files. They literally cheated at their own story just for idiotic fan-service in the next season. That is some BioWare level nonsense.

Boy, what a great feeling! To know that all of the tension is robbed from an entire franchise, now that Telltale Games can just pull a "Death & Return of Superman", and bring back any character the director has a chubby for. That just fills me with confidence.


Remember when Jurassic Park was the worst thing this developer had done?

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~A.H.

PAX East: "A Quick Reminder"

The Penny Arcade Expo and the owners of the Penny Arcade brand:

• Slut-shames paid cosplayers 
• Tried to sell rape-culture merchandise, 
• Denied the existence of trans people, 
• Openly regretted having to pull their rape culture merchandise & 
• Covered up sexual assault among their Enforcers 

Women and minorities are already treated like an invasive species in conventions and nerd culture. If you know all of this, and still go to PAX, you are supporting everything wrong with what's supposed to be an open and inviting space. You are not just "part of the problem"... You ARE the problem. 

YOU ARE WHY THE VIDEO GAME CULTURE SUCKS.

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~A.H.