I finally got 100% completion on Dragon’s Dogma. More importantly, I managed to get a shot of my character where she looks like Che Guevara.
This needs to be on t-shirts and posters everywhere.
Karma chameleon
I logged on to the Dragon’s Dogma website for the first time since August. Apparently one of my characters essentially won a beauty contest and was featured on the game newsletter by Capcom. On the one hand, yay me. On the other hand, that particular look is being copied by other players, judging from the screenshots being submitted.
What the hell, people? Get your own look. It took me hours to coordinate that outfit, not to mention the time I spent picking the hairstyle and fine tuning the bone structure and body type for that character. And I don’t want to think of how many goblins and bandits I had to kill for that cape.
Anyway, I’m thinking of playing this game for a third time and getting all the trophies. There are only three left and they don’t look that hard. One quick run should do it.
Would you like to play a game?
Well, I finally finished Mass Effect 3. After all this time, I’m done.
I liked the Citadel DLC. It’s really big and it’s nice that the stakes are much lower. I also liked the combat simulator, it’s a lot more fun than the Pinnacle station from the first game. Plus I got to play with Zaeed again, who I sorely missed in the regular game. It was nice to see him, Javik, Wrex, and Grunt all hanging out shooting up empty beer bottles. I thought at first they were playing “cuckoo”, which was said to be a game played by bored Russian officers from the tsarist era – basically you turn off off the lights, hide behind furniture, then shoot at anyone who shouts “cuckoo”.
And let me just say that Kai Leng’s stupid ponytail and black trench coat annoyed the hell out of me. All he needs are sunglasses to complete the Matrix douchebag look. He’s like a prepubescent child’s vision of “awesome badass”. I enjoyed shooting him in the face with my sniper rifle.
As for the infamous ending, it wasn’t as bad as the online hyperbole made it out to be, but I still found it disappointing. First, this is a video game – where is my final boss? Yeah, I killed like a dozen Banshees and Brutes while defending the missile battery but that didn’t feel like a climactic battle. There was Saren in the first game and the Human Reaper in the second, but all we got was Space Boy in this one.
Speaking of which, none of the choices he gave seemed representative of what my Shepard tried to accomplish. The Destroy ending would have been the best choice for my character, except that it kills all synthetics and there’s no way my Shep would kill EDI and her geth allies.
Anyway, I discovered there’s a fourth ending. Just like Global Thermonuclear War, you can also choose not to play, or rather, you can circle “none of the above” and shoot Space Boy in the head. He’s unaffected but he says that the cycle will play out like normal and galactic civilization ends up destroyed. In the epilogue we see the warning Liara recorded for the next cycle, then we see some future alien telling her kid tales of “The Shepard” and how they owe their lives to this person. The end. I wanted a good-ish ending, so I reloaded and went with Synthesis because what the hell, let’s just end this.
Whatever ending you choose, the setting will be irrevocably changed, which is really too bad because I like this space opera galaxy of theirs. Why did we need to be fighting genocidal robot space squids, anyway? We could have had a spy game in the style of Alpha Protocol about the secret war between the STG and the Shadow Broker or a Seven Samurai one about recruiting mercenaries to defend an outpost against Batarian slavers or one of any number of scenarios. I know there’s a Mass Effect 4 coming but I don’t know how that’s even supposed to work.
There and back again
Ever watch the movie Primer, about a couple of engineers inventing and exploiting a time machine in their garage? Ever wonder what it would be like to see that seemingly-realistic depiction of science at work in an anime setting?
Because Steins;Gate has you covered. I like this series, which is actually an adaptation of a visual novel game – in essence, a Choose Your Own Adventure story with added pictures. And guess what? The translated version is available for digital purchase straight from the comfort of your couch.
The game is $30, though, so it seems that the Japanese haven’t gotten the hang of this digital pricing thing yet. Were it $5 I would seriously be tempted to get it. But hey, maybe there’ll be a deal there someday.
My thanks go out to Hanako Games for alerting me to this opportunity. I’m afraid I’m not going to buy Long Live the Queen as many reviews say that it’s too short, but I’ll keep an eye out for other games from this studio.
The return of the king
A new version of King’s Quest is coming in 2015 . . . for the PS3 and PS4? What the hell?
My thoughts, in the order they came to me: First, the game studio Sierra has been resurrected and is making games again? Second, this adventure game franchise has been dead for like 15 years now. There are avid gamers of voting age who have never heard of these games. Third, all previous game are indelibly linked to the PC and it would be odd to play them with a controller. Fourth, I’m getting the awful impression from the trailer that this new game will be full of Quick Time Events – i.e., flashing prompts will show up on screen telling you to press up, press down, press R2, and do the hokey pokey, and god help you if you screw up because you’ll have to start all over again.
Boy, I’m just full of positive energy, aren’t I? I’ll allow that this might turn out to be a fun game, but unless it gets near-universally good word of mouth then I’ll probably never play it.
What particularly sucks for me is that apparently Telltale Entertainment, makers of The Walking Dead game, were in the midst of developing their own take on King’s Quest when they had to drop it and make way for this one. Ah, what might have been.
Morituri te salutant
I bought Dark Souls 2 over the weekend, and I’ve been playing it every day since. It’s quite fun.
Among many in the video game community, the Souls games are held up as the pinnacle of difficulty, with a typical playthrough resulting in at least hundreds of deaths for the player. I don’t really see it, though. My failures are the result of my miscalculations and are essentially just part of the learning process for a new player.
I do want to share my favourite story so far, which is about the first time my game got invaded. Other players may enter your game to help or hinder you, as they wish, and one such person did so to me. I was just minding my own business when someone glowing red showed up in my game. I bowed to him, since it seemed the polite thing to do, then he bowed back, then I stepped forward to get a closer look at him and he shot me in the chest with a crossbow. I didn’t know we were supposed to be fighting. He was classy about it and messaged me saying "Valar morghulis", so of course I replied back "Valar dohaeris" since no one is outdorking me.
Anyway, I also discovered this list of player names banned from Dark Souls 2. Players may choose the names of their characters, and if you’re familiar with certain parts of the Internet then you’ve already guessed that most of the banned names involve sex acts or are various synonyms for genitals. It’s kind of awe-inspiring that so much human creativity is expended on slipping obscenities into a video game.
Hail to the king
Some peeps were sharing stories of video game dickery at a certain place online, and while most were so-so, this one managed to class up the joint:
In an online 8 player free-for-all in Age of Empires 2 I secretly made separate alliances with every player, then got them all to give me some resources to build a wonder so that we could win a team victory.
Wonder built, I waited until the victory timer was at about 15 seconds, and then broadcast to all "The Lannisters send their regards." and de-allied them. I alone won and they were defeated.
Da Durarara
Damn you, Mass Effect trilogy, why were you on sale on the PSN store? I’m doing nothing but playing Mass Effect 2 as soon as I get home and up to when I fall asleep with the controller in my hands. I finished the first game years ago and I quite liked it, but not enough to deal again with some of the wonky aspects that set my teeth on edge the first time around (i.e., driving the MAKO, dealing with the inventory system, the endless elevator rides, and so forth).
So to refresh my memory on the plot, I read the fanfic Of Sheep and Battle Chicken. I would have been pleased if it were the official novelization of the game, instead of the rather bad spin-off novels that were actually published. It explores and expands upon stuff from the game, and where necessary it invents things wholesale. The story also isn’t shy about changing things drastically from the game’s plot to make the narrative flow better, which I quite liked. It’s by no means perfect, since small but persistent annoyances such as mixing up “its” and “it’s” and slipping between past and present tense happen quite a bit, but they weren’t enough to stop me. The fic’s writer really poured a lot of creative juice into this endeavour, as evidenced by the reams of text about this fictional world’s setting, akin to Tolkien’s volumes full of hobbit apocrypha.
Anyway, that’s what’s been up with me lately.
Also, guess what? Hello Kitty is promoting Durarara. Ain’t that adorable?
Star Trek + Facebook = Redshirt, the computer game
Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that shifted focus from the high-ranking officers on the bridge to the entry-level schlubs doing the grunt work? Remember how those saps never knew what was going on half the time? Now imagine if those ensigns had Facebook.
This is the premise of Redshirt, the computer game. You create and roleplay one of the nameless crew members that die all the time on Star Trek (the so-called redshirts).
However, the game is not about meeting aliens and exploring space. It’s not even about cleaning toilets and fixing light bulbs, which are the only duties your fearless crew member is qualified for. It’s about playing the Facebook game.
There’s a disaster coming for your space station, you see, and your goal is to get promoted high enough to be evacuated along with the top brass (though the highest rank you can aspire to is the Commander’s Assistant). In the meantime, you have to schmooze with supervisors and keep your spirits up by hanging out with people on your friend list. Essentially the game is an RPG played through a Facebook simulator.
Thus are combined two obsessive activities: checking status updates on Facebook and grinding for incremental level gains on RPGs. I was up until 3 am playing this game and had to call in sick the next day due to sleep deprivation. It’s fun if you’re into Trek jokes and roleplaying, which yes, I am.
In conclusion, if you’re trying this game out for the first time, I recommend doing it on a weekend.
The Summer of Adventure
I just completed the adventure game Memoria, which I’d bought during GOG’s summer sale. It’s rather old school in its point-and-click control scheme. Were it not for the graphics and for the far lower number of game-crashing bugs (damn you, Quest for Glory IV) I might have thought I was playing something Sierra Entertainment made in the 90s.
But one glimpse of the visuals will let you know this game is from the 21st century. I mean, just look at this game:
That’s too detailed to be anything but hand-painted. And this is a screenshot from the game itself. Something from the classic era of adventure gaming would be full of visible pixels. Even a lot of modern adventure games like Gemini Rue still use that older style of giant pixels. I suppose it’s both out of nostalgia and out of consideration for the development budget.
Memoria is about a princess trying to stop a demonic invasion and about a birdcatcher five hundred years later learning about her story in his own quest to solve a magic curse on his beloved. The latter protagonist is somewhat run-of-the-mill, but the princess is more savage and ruthless than the typical bland do-gooder you might get in this sort of game. It’s rather refreshing.
Daedelic Entertainment definitely went all in on this game. Even the voice actors are uniformly good. And as an adventure game it’s satisfying enough. The puzzles tend not to delve too much into that odd adventure game inventory puzzle logic, such as that infamously convoluted Gabriel Knight solution (number four on that list) which involves using cat hair to make a mustache to match the picture on a passport stolen from a man with no facial hair. No, I think experienced adventure gamers should be able to finish this without having to resort to a walkthrough.
However, while the game is fun, it isn’t very long. I only got it last week and have already finished it, after all. I remember taking a lot longer to finish an old Sierra game. This game is actually fairly linear, so you’re not wandering around a lot of different locations wondering which doohickey should be used at which place and in which combination. It’s pleasant to look at some pretty pictures with no real sense of urgency, but it’s hard to justify paying full price for something this ephemeral. It’s not like this game has a lot of replayability in it.
Overall? I say buy it if you’re into adventure games, but wait until there’s a sale on.