Boundary-breaking in video games is unholy and wrong
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Everyone remembers the moment in Portal when they first noticed that the strings were showing, so to speak, and that the sleek sci-fi test chambers you were being ushered through by the seemingly benevolent voice of GLaDOS were nothing but smoke and mirrors. At some point, everyone notices the cracks in the walls, the scrawled graffiti telling you that “the cake is a lie,” and the discarded trash of someone who went through all of this before you. It’s all stuff that the game says you’re not “supposed” to see, but when you do, it marks the point where Portal stops being a fun puzzle game, and starts being just a little bit unnerving. Reality, as it turns out, is not real. It’s a trick designed to make you complete certain tasks.
It’s also a trick that has been deployed in many other games, from The Stanley Parable to Bioshock, and while it can be cool and unsettling when done right, you’re still only ever seeing the reality that the game developers intended for you to witness. If you ask me, this sort of thing becomes truly terrifying when you find cracks the developers never intended and manage to peek into dark, abandoned worlds that nobody was supposed to see.
If you’ve ever played a 3D video game, especially one with the sort of bugs that are lovingly referring to as “jank” (cough Bethesda cough), you’ve probably seen a glitch where your character falls through an invisible hole in the floor and you can look up to see the thin cardboard structures and endless expanses of “sky” that the world is made of. I’ve always found that sort of thing very creepy, since it breaks the established rules of the reality that a video game presents. If you fall through a floor, for example, there’s no way to know what you’ll see in the bottomless pit that consumes you because the fabric of reality has effectively gone out the window.
YouTube channels like Boundary Break have built successful followings by exploring this sort of thing from an archaeological perspective, using mods or hacks to take over control of a video game’s camera so they can fly it around or point it at whatever they want. The idea is that you can see Easter eggs that developers snuck in just to make themselves laugh, or maybe learn about how a game loads the interior of a building by actually hiding it deep underground and teleporting the player there when they walk through a door. It’s like going backstage at a Chuck E. Cheese, but instead of seeing empty mouse costumes and machinery, you’ll find vast wastelands of darkness, mysterious black cubes that serve some unknown function, and creepy close-up eyeballs.
In 2019, P.T. fans found out that if you hack the camera and pull it out of its usual first-person perspective, you can see that Lisa, the ghost the haunts you throughout the brief game, is actually hovering over your back and just out of sight the whole time. There’s no way to see her there in-game, and she’s probably just there as some kind of trigger for spooky noises (or maybe so the game doesn’t have to load her model in separately and can just move it to where she needs to be), but knowing that she’s there the whole time and you can’t turn around and catch her—no matter how fast you are—makes it all so much creepier.
For me, though, it’s not just scary because P.T. is a horror game. I find all of this stuff immensely frightening, but in a way that I almost don’t want to look away from. I like seeing what’s behind the walls of, say, the school level in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, because I’m curious to see what the developers would put in a room that the average player would never see. But I still get a sense of creeping dread from it. Maybe it’s because this is something that is unique to video games (or at least virtual worlds)? Spin the camera around in a movie or TV show, and you’re going to see crew members watching everything happen. Look behind a wall in real life and you’re not going to see a bottomless pit into a featureless void; you’ll just see whatever’s behind that wall.
Like the Portal test chambers, video games are all smoke and mirrors (Google “frustum culling” some time for some real banal magic). But the thing about smoke and mirrors is that they usually cover up something mundane. That’s how a developer might think of the empty expanses that surround their game world, but for me that stuff is haunting. Covering it up, then, is less of a trick, and more of a mercy.
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There’s no requirement to watch every video of every aspect of game making, it’s always allowed to NOT watch behind-the-scenes stuff if you’re not into seeing what goes on in the sausage factory.Some of it (to me) is pretty fascinating and helps give more of a complete picture as to what goes in to the game and the steps they have to take to get there. Recent Kotaku post was covering… er… Last of Us I think? The gist was they used floating guns endlessly firing into walls in an unreachable room because that was the easiest way to get the sound effects to place in the game correctly. I love that stuff.That out of the way…Playing Tropico 4. AGAIN. I cannot overstate how much I overplay this game. I’d just run through the full set of missions, was playing a round or two at the end of September to clear my mind for a planned October run through Resident Evil VII… and I’m still playing Tropico.DAMN YOU JUANITO!
It’s the music. The music keeps you prisoner of the Tropico series. If you want to go eat something, cut the sound, and it becomes much easier.Cutting the sound is the difficult part though.
I finished my replay of all 11 Mega Man games last week, and I’m so glad there are 4 good games after 7, because 7 really is just the one entry in the series I’m never going to adjust to and actually enjoy from start to finish. Even running out of E-tanks in the last level of Mega Man 9 and spending over half an hour to get good/lucky enough to beat all 3 forms of the final boss on one health bar was just a good challenge, while I don’t think I used more than one continue on any stage of Mega Man 7 and I just felt exhausted by the end. Truly enjoyed all 10 of the other games. Will never love 7.I meandered through a few minutes apiece of several games on my backlog, never settling on anything. But just yesterday I saw that The 13th Doll, the 7th Guest fan game, was on sale for 30% off. I’ve heard it’s not great, but even a poor imitation is probably worth my money, if only so I can write a scathing trip report afterward. I’ve been obsessed with puzzles for decades, and I have a soft spot for even the least campy/fun of B-horror movies. I love all things horror nearly indiscriminately. And, I mean… it’s October.Mere hours after my purchase, I found out that my Shivers speed run got picked up for a Halloween speed run marathon, and the overlapping members of the 7th Guest and 11th Hour communities also got theirs in. And our runs are back-to-back-to-back! We’ve got our own 4-hour puzzle/horror/point-and-click block! That’s such a specific subgenre!I made some pretty big breakthroughs in improving my movement speed last week, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to do the run justice… but even still, that’s just two weeks away, so I’m going to be ramping up my practice until then. I think the run’s already a good show for people unfamiliar with the game, but hell, I think I’m past due for a new personal best. I’ve been 1 second behind 3rd place for far too long now.Otherwise, I’ve just been continuing to work through the solo playthroughs of each class in Vast: The Crystal Caverns, the late birthday present I got last month. The more I play, the more I appreciate how everything must work together in a multiplayer game, and I’m especially fond of the idea that one of the classes doesn’t even have a win condition; the shadow unicorn is just there to fuck people up for fun, maybe even decide the game by playing favorites.But with up to 7 different characters, each with completely different gameplay mechanics and goals, I feel like it’d be a lot of work to teach everybody how to play the game, and 3 of the roles don’t have solo rules, so I’d probably be learning a new role myself. Though the concept of playing as the dungeon and trying to collapse and close off the map before anyone meets their win condition is pretty cool. Heavy learning curve to get a multiplayer game going, but I’m excited about introducing it at game night. Whenever I can have game night again. 2020, man.
Pro-tip: If you’re going to do V:TCC with friends, it probably should be right at the start of your game night (or right after a quick icebreaker), when everyone is still pretty lucid and ready to try something like this with asynchronous (but presumably interlocking) gameplay. It probably will help if the players are not new to complicated tabletop experiences.In my experience with my regular* group of fellow players, if the first play of a new (to us, anyway) game is bad, frustrating, unsatisfying, or just plain confusing, it takes a lot of convincing to get people on board with giving it another try. The first time my group tried V:TCC, it was near the end of the night and we never got more than a few rounds before people started dropping out to go home. We’ve come close a few times of starting another game, but as soon as we open the box and start sifting through the different rule-sets, it all comes back and we close it up again.*I say “regular”, but it’s more like a core group of players that always show up and others that occasionally do. The core group is obviously the more intense tabletop-heads. A couple of players from the core group—myself included—once spent a good chunk of the weekend playing through Betrayal at the House on the Hill Legacy’s full campaign. So we are devoted to the cause.
I think the strategy is going to be to introduce it at a smaller game night or even a one-on-one hangout and gradually expand to larger groups, making sure I’m never teaching more than 2 people a new role in a game, and to avoid the goblins until everyone else is comfortable with the general mechanics or has seen me play goblins. At this point, the only solo-rules game I haven’t played is as the ghost (assuming there are solo rules; I haven’t read up on them yet), so I think I’ll be pretty comfortable tailoring characters to people when I do get to start teaching this to others.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who just doesn’t like MM7. I think a big part of it is how bullshit the last boss is. Every other megaman game feels tough but fair, but in MM7 it’s just awful, and makes the whole game worse because it’s the last thing you experience before you say you’ll never play it again.
It’s funny, because I only died against the final boss once after using 2 E-tanks and then misjudging whether I had enough health to tank one more homing bullet. I only had 2 E tanks + 1 S tank in my successful attempt and still squeaked it out. So my complaint isn’t even about difficulty. I needed more final boss attempts in both Mega Man 8 and Mega Man 9… but I just don’t enjoy 7.The level I died on the most was Wily 2, where I think I lost 3 lives to a section where you’re floating upward through a section with spikes and you’re so close to the top of the screen that you can’t see which paths have enemies trying to snipe you into spikes and which ones just end in an unavoidable cul-de-sac of spikes…
… but the thing I was *most* mad about from that level was when I got to the weird turtle boss, and even knowing the trick is using Burst to trap the baby turtles and fling them into the big turtle when it goes back into its shell, I couldn’t get a single baby turtle to *not* immediately explode on either the wall or the boss’s empty shell, so it was just this sloooooow, easy fight where I was doing one bar of damage at a time and never in danger. Didn’t properly use his weakness against him once because bubbled-up baby turtles are that fiddly, and he spends most of the fight offscreen and thus impossible to damage. Probably only took 5 minutes, but it felt like an hour.That combined with the series’s dullest dialog, slowest text scroll speed, and inability to skip cut scenes – of which there are like 5 in the first level before you get to the stage select – I’m just never excited to start a game, and never end it thinking, “That was a good idea!”…. and because I didn’t find an excuse to say it anywhere in the above, Slash Man sucks.
To be fair, the 7th Guest and the 11th Hour aren’t particularly good games either. They’re influential, and they’ve aged in a delightful way, but they spend minimal effort integrating the brain-teasers into the rest of the game. The 11th Hour also commits the cardinal sin of recycling items in the scavenger hunt (as an additional insult, the second clue leading to the champagne bottle is a pun on liquor, which champagne is absolutely not). And those AI puzzles… Not even the abject sordidness of the FMV sequences (lunkhead manipulated into serial-murder by a sexy monster-woman whose father is a rape-ghost that cut off her mother’s hand? What’s tasteless about that?) is worth that beehive puzzle. Anyway, I got a new TV and video card so I downloaded Red Dead Redemption 2 to test the whole thing out. It’s certainly pretty (I’m still in the mountains, and I’m still admiring the way characters interact with snow). I’m just not sure if it’s any fun – the last time I played a Rockstar game was 10 or 11 years ago with GTA IV, and I’m just as bored by the whole “go to the map marker, watch the cutscene, go to the map marker, shoot something, go to the map marker” gameplay mechanic now as I was then. I’ve read that this open world has a little bit more stuff to do than the ones in GTA, so I’m going to stick with it for a little while.
I remember the beehive puzzle being a giant pain in the ass, but on my most recent playthrough, I actually nailed it on the first try. Either 37-year-old me is much, much smarter than 14-year-old me was, I got very lucky, or they nerfed the AI for the Steam release and it’s just been fixed to not be a giant, frustrating late-game roadblock. I found the painting puzzle to be the bigger pain since there’s only one solution, so it felt less like a game and more like trying every combination of two opening moves until the solution became obvious.I never minded the original two games’ approach to bare-bones storytelling to justify making me solve puzzles. I was there for the puzzles, and I didn’t care that the T7G plot was impossible to put in chronological order because every character seems to die at least twice or that 11th Hour was a particularly bad supernatural-rape-horror soap opera. I didn’t care that the justification for solving puzzles in T7G was that the guests had to solve puzzles, too, for some reason, or that the 11th Hour’s puzzles were the only way you could get Plot Youtube to run on my magical 90s laptop. I was just there to solve.I haven’t really looked into what people’s complaints about 13th Doll are – whether the puzzles suck, the writing is bad by accident, or it just doesn’t capture the feel of the first two games – but I’m ready to accept a significant amount of jank. It’s gotta capture some of the fun of the originals, and I’ve probably spent $14 on worse.
I’ll attribute your success at the beehive puzzle to your wisdom, because it murdered me as a 31 year old. I never played the game as a kid, and I wish I had since my free time and patience were so boundless. Instead I had the novelization/walkthrough, which I read over and over (and passed off as a regular novel for a seventh grade book report). My family actually rented the game the day we got our first PC, but we didn’t know you had to run the configuration file before booting the game. We had it sitting on the desk (six discs in a clamshell box from the video store) for a whole weekend, unplayable. Then my mom got it in her head that rental software would cause a computer virus (which was probably true in the floppy disc era), so I wasn’t allowed to rent it again when I got more savvy. Ah, memories.
Well, if you’re a fan of the genre and want some recommendations,I played exactly this flavor of game all the time in the 90s. Shivers is pretty great (and for the price you might as well pick up Shivers 2, though it’s not quite as good – $5.99 apiece on GOG), and if it even exists in a Win10-compatible format, Obsidian by Rocket Science Games had some phenomenally mind-bending puzzles, but I think it’s fallen into obscurity.
At a commenter’s suggestion I picked up The Last Door, and have played through the first two episodes of the “season”. It’s a solid story and none of the puzzles so far have been complete bullshit, so I’ll see where this goes. I am looking at World of Horror, as well, it’s in dev/early access but looks pretty solid from what I’ve seen on streams.Beyond that, yeah, a lot of Mario Super Picross. I’ve gotten pretty far! I’m to the “Special” level with Mario’s, and World 9 on the Wario levels. (The Wario levels have no timer but also never tell you when you’ve made a mistake so you have to work out for yourself when the numbers don’t add up.) The music does wear on you after a while. Still, the hooks are deep.
I had some trouble getting into The Last Door. The art style didn’t grab me, and the opening sequence where you point-and-click your way through the guy’s suicide seemed trite (it didn’t help that I played the Cat Lady around the same time, which is likewise an independent point-and-click adventure that starts with a character’s suicide).I’ll give it another shot sometime, though – the description like a checklist of things that I enjoy (for better and worse).
I haven’t put the time in for World of Horror to gel just yet. I like the atmosphere and concept, but I don’t think I’ve played it enough to really understand how to make progress, outside of the very much on-rails introductory mission. Part of me wants to pull up a guide or watch a video/stream of someone who knows what they’re doing so I can get into the meat of the game, but a much larger part of me wants to puzzle out the mechanics on my own and doesn’t have the patience to do so right now.Actually, I can say the exact same things about Cultist Simulator. What’s up with me and buying obtuse horror games featuring elder gods?
I’m tediously collecting all the Riddler’s Trophies in Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, a clunky but satisfyingly brutal cowardly assassin’s simulation. Clunky : I does feature the very precise bugs we’re talking about. I’m slipped through the ground twice already. It’s annoying on so many levels. Annoying because it forces you to restart a complicated mission. Annoying because it changes your perception of the world (I only ”see” paper-thin surfaces around me now, at least within the game). And annoying because you play with the suspicion that it can happen at any time, like one more invisible, unmanageable threat. To some extent anyway (it only happened when dropping from a ladder).Satisfyingly brutal : This is not the Sniper Elite series and its retardedly creepy x-ray vision of the bullet’s devastation in a human’s body. Ghost Warrior has violence but not porn violence. Just the occasional cinematic slow-down of a bullet view. It’s nice when you’re in a bad mood, and want the feeling of radically breaking some evil. It doesn’t over-do it by making gore its own quest and reward, as Sniper Elite does.Cowardly : Hey, you’re sniping from 300 meters away, firing at baddies who don’t suspect your presence. So it’s easy to murder some baddies and leave completely unscathed (as long as the paper-thin world’s ground sustains you). But this is balanced by the way that the game doesn’t do “scathed”. Get spotted, get fired at, you’re basically done. As the title suggests (it does), you can either snipe, ghost, or war. Sniping is the default walking simulation to a nice spot, and cleansing the area from a safe place. Ghosting is sneaking in, slitting throats or popping heads with a very silent silencer. Warring is machine-gunning everybody point blank by yelling at the top of your lungs. It’s an option. It doesn’t last. Enemy bullets, in that game, do hurt, to get fired back quickly, and don’t miss much. Lungs are one use only.Also the plot is ridiculously mundane (american soldier hero goes to save foreign country where all collaborators are pretty women in love with him), and ridiculously predictable (super-sniper has super-sniper brother who gets “kidnapped” then super-mysterious super-sniper starts super-mysteriously super-sniping and no one guesses his identity), but less politically offensive than I expected last week.So, yeah. That game will do. That game does.In parallel : Cold Waters. Not getting tired of it. Starting to wonder why. But it’s a clinical ascertainment. Getting tired of it ? Status : not. Doesn’t seem an option featured in that game.
I’ve only dabbled with jumping out of bounds a few times, but one of my favorites was an area in Final Fantasy XIV where you could enter a different zone without entering the loading screen. This is gone forever now due to the implementation of flying in all A Realm Reborn zones, but you used to be able to sneak out of Outer La Noscea into Upper La Noscea and see the roughly drawn landscape of a recognizable area, just presented to be unrecognizable and somehow off.Also, while your revelation about PT makes it even more terrifying (I hadn’t heard of this before), any mention of PT forces me to remember my failure to carry it over from my PS4 to my PS4 Pro, and so it’s lost forever. I made a special note and everything! I remembered to download my victory video over the headless Bloodletting Beast in Bloodborne, but not an actual game I won’t be able to download again. Although, to be fair, I do love the video of my victory over the Bloodletting Beast.This weekend, I’ll play some more Baldur’s Gate III. I’ve beaten the early access once, and am going through again as an evil Dwarven Cleric. I want to see what Lae’zel’s creche is all about.Maybe I’ll play some online Gloomhaven as well. I think it might be my favorite digital version of board game I love. It’s not just a recreation of the board on a table like Catan and Scythe, but an actual video game. Despite that, it’s still a completely faithful iteration of the game mechanics and rules. Still in early access with no campaign mode, but it’s impressive.I’d also love to continue my playthrough of Pathologic 2 before it completely leaves my memory and I have to start over. While I absolutely love the game while I’m in it, it’s lack of direction means I don’t think about it when I’m not playing. I may think of events that happened, but I don’t anticipate what’s to come. This means I’m never dying to jump back in, and instead just think about how I’m going to have to figure everything out before I can immerse myself again. It’s weird, because I think the game’s lack of direction is a strength and adds to the uncomfortable sense of unease that drenches the game’s atmosphere, but it makes going back to it a bit of a chore. I’m only on day three, and the game’s objectives are coming into focus, so maybe it’s just a matter of time before I’m anticipating what comes next. I really admire the game’s willingness to stay obtuse, though.
I think there’s a workaround to re-download it if you had it in the past, but idk if that’ll work on a separate machine. Could be worth looking into.
I think Sony patched that workaround away.
Those instances in which you stumble into an under-rendered environment are so precious and bizarre. I think MMORPGs lend themselves to that because of the vastness and persistence of their space, but I had a similar thing happen in Skyrim once. A door out of a town failed to load, so I was free to walk through where it had been and explore the surrounding tundra. It was some hideously low texture resolution repeated over and over in an effort to suggest the terrain at a distance, as it was only ever meant to be seen over the city walls. Eventually I fell through the earth of course.
I love going into the areas of games not intentional created for exploration. I often find it to be a hypnotic and even meditative experience. That, and I find beauty in corrupted video game art, much like the cover of Kid A.
As ever, my video game habit manifested itself in quick
micro doses of games played as I slowly, slowly work my way through my backlog.
Part of that is that my long-planned/wish-listed/waitlisted/etc. new desktop
build looks like it might actually finally fall within my budget this time next
week, which is exciting, even if a Ryzen 5 3600/GeForce RTX 2060 Super is
nobody’s idea of a cutting edge rig.First, as ever is good old Star Wars: The Old Republic,
where my Jedi Knight finally is doing missions on Hoth. Eventually, the goal is
to scavenge plans for the current Sith Emperor’s fortress-ship from an
ice-preserved wreck. Unfortunately an Imperial invasion force has delayed that
somewhat, so I’m currently sabotaging artillery emplacements:Those have now been disabled, and increased Imperial
activity around the aforementioned ship crash site is about to get some lightsaber
diplomacy.
Moving on from Hoth to what the localization team is certain
is Definitely Not Japan, I decided to play Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice for
All, the second game in the franchise after I had enjoyed the loopiness
and insanity of the original game last year. Despite the game opening with
Phoenix getting assaulted with a fire extinguisher and arguing the opening case
with head trauma induced amnesia, I was disappointed in how relatively sane the
first case was. No parrot cross-examinations here, just this jerk who never
shuts up:Who might qualify as the most annoying opening witness yet. I did successfully defend my client and send
this dude to trial for the murder he basically confessed to. Now off to have “burgers”
in an American noodle stand (and definitely not Ramen in Japan) with Mia Fey
before the second case.
On tabletop, both my Dungeons
& Dragons games got postponed due to scheduling, so to scratch that Rime of the Frostmaiden itch, I busted
out the OG Icewind Dale game again. This was the only Infinity Engine
series I never really played much back in the day, so I’m playing the Y2K-era
interface here in 2020 and getting mildly aggravated by the QoL improvements
that simply don’t yet exist. I created my party with useful descriptive names
in the hope I might remember their classes/roles:And on to the prologue in Easthaven. I did all the initial
sidequests (fighting beetles below the bar, rescuing the boy’s fish from
goblins, clearing a wolf from a workshop and reuniting a river spirit with the
descendant of her true love) and rested a bunch between each, since I’m both not
trying for a speed run, and also recall how lethal 2nd Edition
D&D combat can be.
That done, it’s off to the caves to try and track down what’s
happening with the trade caravans:Which I think becomes the first part of the main quest when
I report back to Hrothgar in town and the expedition begins in earnest. All I remember
is that the next location opens with a surprisingly large Orc force as the
first encounter. So it’s time to get stabby.
I started playing Icewind Dale for the first time ever last month. I played the Baldur’s Gate games last year and really enjoyed them. I knew that Icewind Dale wasn’t as character-driven (out of necessity), but I was really excited to make an entire party. I only reached the Shadow Dale (?), but I’d like to finish someday. I was mostly playing it as a way to tide me over until Baldur’s Gate III released its early access, but now that I’ve completed that, I might need to dive back in.
I’m deliberately playing the old school Infinity Engine games so that I don’t buy Baldur’s Gate 3 before it leaves Easy Access. I don’t want to pay to be a beta tester, since I get paid for non-gaming QA already…
I hope you enjoy the hell out of Justice for All. With everyone talking about Great Ace Attorney right now, I’m getting the urge to go through all the games that have been released since I played the first 5 games 10 years ago. I’m hoping they port more of the series to Steam and/or Switch so I can actually support Capcom when I do play them.
ID is fun but turns into too much of a hack&slash. Unlike BG there really is no strategy other than “be really tough, and save money to raise your dead”
This is one of my favorite AVClub articles right here, as it puts words to a feeling that I’ve struggled to express. Especially the bit about the difference between game worlds and cinematic worlds (or other forms of media). Interestingly, it’s arguably only a portion of game worlds too, since 2D environments don’t tend to really have anything meaningful out of bounds. I think the unseen vestiges of 3D space remind us of abandoned buildings in real life – there’s a sense of loss and decay there, a reminder of the artifice of our everyday experiences (and, to go all-in on something of a cliche, a reminder of our own human limitations).
Also Boundary Break may be my favorite YouTube channel 🙂
I’m not a gamer but this sort of thing fascinates me, as well. I’m drawn to anything with a sense of ominous dread and eeriness hanging over it.
The Talos Principle is great for boundary breaking. After I finished, I used the flying cheat code to zoom around the puzzle areas, it’s a huge amount of fun. There’s also a youtube series devoted to “breaking” the puzzles, often by hopping the walls that are supposed to keep you in the puzzle area.
Please fix these full screen undismissable ads that stop me using the site at all on half the articles.
I’m playing through The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, for realsies this time. The last time I attempted a playthrough, I got as far as Novigrad when some other time commitment came up (or something else shiny came into my view). Right now, I’m well into the Skellige part of the game, after burning several bridges (and at least one temple) in White Orchard, Velen, and Novigrad. I’ve not played the previous entries in the series, nor seen the Netflix series, nor any of the books, but coming into this game, it might be tempting to see Geralt of Rivia as yet another standard-issue fantasy badass (or, in comic terms, a Batman), someone who’s just so good at everything, his few flaws buried in his dump stats. Yet, thanks to the well-crafted story and attention to detail, the game doesn’t quite avoid the problem, but it does go quite a long way to mitigate it. My Geralt is great at dealing with monsters (and maybe sympathizes with them a bit in a few cases), but he is terrible at dealing with people: Caleb Menge found himself the victim of a steel-sword bisection after Geralt couldn’t quite bluff his way into the temple and the Bloody baron hung himself out of grief (another long chain of events that Geralt set off with his meddling).
It takes a lot to say that I haven’t been playing much Rocket League in the past week or two. I’ll get to that game later, but it’s more appropriate to talk about the one peeling me away.I dabbled with Bastion, didn’t touch Transistor or Pyre, but I’ll be damned if Hades isn’t one of the best games I’ve played in a while. I’m somewhere around 50-ish runs in and am starting to get to the point where I consistently am reaching the last boss and finishing maybe once out of every three or four runs. The writing in the game is fantastic, though I can tell for all the many, many lines of dialogue they put in, it’s not all hitting where it should. And let’s be honest, I don’t expect it to be perfect in a Rogueish game like this. But there are definitely moments where it reminds me of its limitations. It feels like I’m getting choice bits of dialogue that were meant for the early game after several successful runs (if you’ve beaten the game this may make more sense). But boy they have nailed down combat well with the boon system. Once I realized the power of hammers as well as how to use Titan’s Blood, things really took off. It’s now my go-to for a quick run that makes an hour disappear. Back to Rocket League. Some of it is the changeover with Epic, some of it is the free-to-play making matchmaking a little odd, and some of it is just the fact we’re getting out of the first two weeks of matchmaking, period. The beginning of a new season is always a little bit of a cluster with people trying to get their 10 placement matches in each mode to set their rank, but this one has just felt really disjointed. Maybe it’s because of people cranking up new accounts and the game just isn’t sure how to handle so many experienced players with new accounts and all the other new accounts of people just starting to play. It feels like there’s a brain drain with the quality of players right now, whether it’s people who know how to rotate, communicate, or just not rage quit when they’re down 0-2.
A long time ago, I was a member of a group that specialized in getting out of game boundaries. We played a variety of games, but some stood out more than others. Halo 1-3 in particular had so many hidden gems behind the normal game map, that I can’t help but think some of it was on purpose for people like us to find. Well, I know some of it was, like the original Grunt Birthday Party skull. One of my personal favs was a jump glitch we found in Halo 3. It allowed you to completely skip the fight with the Scarab, and you got to watch it spawn outside of the map and join the battle.It’s fun, and I don’t see any problem with it so long as it’s not something that can be done in a MP match to give you an advantage (like glitching under the house in CoD:3). I still enjoy revisiting some of my favorite out-of-bounds locations.
My favorite was always clipping out of the universe in the original Quake. Those level designs were very clever when you got a look at them from outside, and from what I remember the engine let you go really far into the Void without crashing (Duke Nukem 3d was similarly fun to clip through, but I’m pretty sure it crashed once you got a certain distance beyond the outer walls).
In the original Game Boy release of Link’s Awakening, you could find some weird rooms by using the screen-warping cheat. All(?) of the indoor/underground areas share a larger map, so there are some connector rooms that weren’t meant for players. Some of these are instant-death rooms where the room is lined in crumbling floor tiles. You can also break that playthrough for yourself if you use the cheat to do something sequential like the item-trading game out of order, so be forewarned.
This reminds me of one of my favourite parts of the original “Driver”(remember that?). The entire map was a closed system, except at one place where the developers had forgot to put in a physical tile for the outer “wall” meaning you could just drive out into the surrounding void (which, as it happens, was physically stable and at least as large as the actual map itself).This led to lots of fun discoveries (such as the fact that the Statue of Liberty you could see out in the distance in the harbour area was in fact only about 20 yards away and was actually the same size as your car… as well as bright pink on the back side, for some reason). But the best (and creepiest) was the existence of an entire other town out in the void, with cars tootling along and pedestrians walking the streets… except you could only actually see the streets and the buildings in your rear view mirror, in front of you there was NOTHING.
The article makes me think you’d enjoy reading ‘House of Leaves’ by Danielewski