Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s best moments come from other, better games
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The single-player campaigns in the Black Ops sub-series of Call Of Duty games are almost always defined by their narrative gimmicks. The first game in the series took place in the ’60s and was about an American soldier named Mason who had been captured by the Soviet Union and brainwashed, with some late-game twists establishing that Mason hadn’t been an entirely reliable narrator during your time in his head. It wasn’t the most clever plot in the history of plots, but as far as video games go—especially the traditionally straightforward Call Of Duty series—it made a nice impact.
Black Ops Cold War, the latest game in the Call Of Duty series, and a semi-sequel/reboot of the Black Ops series set in the ’80s, essentially pulls the same trick. Near the end of the game you find out that your player character isn’t who they think they are, but the developers—led by the Black Ops creators at Treyarch, but consisting of a half-dozen other Activision-backed studios—don’t just repeat a cool trick that worked the first time around. They repeat cool tricks that were done better in other games, too.
Chronologically, the first time you’ll feel the twinge of familiarity is in a mission where you play as a Soviet double-agent trying to sneak the main protagonists into the KGB headquarters. To do this, you must procure a one-of-a-kind key in the possession of a Soviet general, but to do that, you have some options: You can, for instance, plant evidence to frame him as a mole. That requires getting and faking the evidence, though, which means going through areas you’re not allowed to be in. Luckily, you can sneak around and knock out patrolling guards, stuffing their bodies in conveniently placed lockers so other guards don’t find them. Once you’ve done that and procured the key, you deliver a couple of uniforms to your American buddies so they can then sneak through the base after you.
If stuffing people into lockers and swapping outfits to avoid detection wasn’t a clear-enough clue, the whole thing is extremely Hitman. It’s not the playground of wacky murder that IO Interactive’s excellent series has become, but it’s close enough that you’d almost expect to see a tall bald guy skulking around, dropping suspiciously ominous double entendres about killing people while everyone conveniently ignores him. For big Call Of Duty fans, the level also features a surprise cameo from Modern Warfare villain Imran Zakhaev, making this one of the few times ever that one Call Of Duty sub-series has explicitly acknowledged another Call Of Duty sub-series. It’s a more overt version of the apparent Hitman nod, with Cold War essentially saying, “Look! It’s like the thing you like! Now you should also like us!”
Cold War more or less resists the temptation to pull something like this again until the end of the game, when your character—code-named Bell, though you can pick some other details about them—undergoes a surprise psychological torture thing from Adler, your distractingly Robert Redford-esque boss. After he injects you with something, the game jumps to a Vietnam flashback set shortly after when you first met Adler on his quest to capture a notorious KGB spy called Perseus (as established in an earlier flashback).
The sequence starts with you waking up after a helicopter crash, surrounded by enemy soldiers, and Adler’s narration of your memory (an early red flag) says something to the effect of “The first thing you did was pick up an M16.” You don’t have to pick up an M16, though, and that’s when the cracks appear. You can follow Adler’s voice, ignoring the fact that it’s more of a command than a commentary, and move straight through the story. Or, when presented with a fork in the road and the voice in your head saying, “You went right,” you can go left. When the voice says, “Go into the cave,” you can do everything in your power to avoid the cave. Reality begins to shift to draw you to the cave. Adler becomes more and more frustrated. You eventually end up in a secret bunker with a hallway that loops back in on itself until you give in and open a door that Adler wants you to open.
To cut to the chase, it’s a whole lot like The Stanley Parable, Davey Wreden and William Pugh’s brilliant indie game about an office worker going about a relatively normal day—at least until you ignore the narrator’s insistence that it’s a normal day and go the wrong way at a fork in the road, like Cold War. The Stanley Parable doesn’t own that gimmick, but it was one of the first video games to do it very, very well. The looping hallway in Cold War is also a trick that’s been done before, most famously in horror game/demo P.T., though there’s no ghost chasing you here. There’s nothing wrong with Cold War paying homage to other games, intentionally or otherwise, but it’s bizarre for this game to build its entire series-mandated twist on multiple things that have famously been done before rather than coming up with an angle of its own.
To make things worse, that’s not even where the familiarity ends. The looping hallway concludes with a reveal that your character is actually a KGB spy who was kidnapped and brainwashed by the CIA, with Adler planting a trigger phrase (“We’ve got a job to do”) in your memories to cover up the changes he’s made to your personality. Then, to hammer it home, the game quickly flashes through moments in the game where Adler said the phrase just before a mission, making it clear that everything you did was because he made you do it. The trigger phrase is different, but the plot point and the way it’s underlined is straight out of BioShock—with its “would you kindly?” reveal possibly being one of the most famous video game twists ever that doesn’t involve cake being a lie.
Really, it’s almost a shock that there isn’t a nod to that Portal scene in Cold War, if only because it would’ve been so absurd that it might have been an indication that the developers knew what they were doing with all of these obvious nods to other games. Instead, it just feels like a cheap attempt to make a new thing by mashing together some old things, like a highlight reel of fond memories rather than something wholly new and exciting—which could be said for a whole lot of Cold War, unfortunately.
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You mean to tell me that one of the most creepily jingoistic and transparently commercial video game series ever is also creatively bankrupt? My jaw’s on the floor.
Watching the game awards I was surprised how little I was really hyped for. The aesthetic of modern AAA gaming bores me, and while I’ve been in sort of an open world mood lately, I’d like to find an open world game that has a really weird environment, not just post-apocalyptic national park. Like, devs, you can make anything. Crystal mountains. Purple jungles. Islands floating in the air! Have fun with this!But anyway I’ve joined up with Mahjong Soul, an online and mobile mahjong game which is themed around anime girls of some kind, there’s like a gatcha mechanic for getting them gifts and there’s some sort of dating sim element, but under all that silliness there’s just a really solid mahjong client which automates some of the more mystifying elements. Mahjong, for those who don’t know, is a tile game enjoyed mostly by the elderly, you draw and discard tiles to try and make a good hand, and there are a bunch of different potential winning hands (yakuman as they’re called) and point values differ based on the tiles involved and seating order and the prevailing wind and I am nowhere near understanding this but I’ve managed to win some games. I’ve gotten back into Witcher 3 after a long absence- what CDProjektRed have been up to in the meantime is dispiriting, but this is a good solid RPG, though once again I am forced to set the combat difficulty to “easy” because there is a boss in here whose health regenerates twice and fuck that noiiiiise. Anyway the writing’s good and Geralt’s a strong character. The environment is a little samey after a while but there’s at least some cool stuff to do. Continuing in Jedi: Fallen Order, the game’s showing off some of its better aspects. I’ve learned a bunch of major force abilities, I got to ride a giant bird, I’m still shit at the Sister fights but well that’s what Story Mode is for. I’ve finally gotten to a planet with a cool environment! Dathomir is all weird ruined temples inhabited by witches and spiders! This is what I expect from a space opera game! (Also it’s weird how janky this runs on PS4, right? Lots of slowdown, some pop-in issues, it’s like I’m playing it on an underpowered PC.)
Hype is overrated. I find I enjoy stuff more when I wasn’t excited for it beforehand.
Watching the game awards I was surprised how little I was really hyped for. The aesthetic of modern AAA gaming bores me, and while I’ve been in sort of an open world mood lately, I’d like to find an open world game that has a really weird environment, not just post-apocalyptic national park. Like, devs, you can make anything. Crystal mountains. Purple jungles. Islands floating in the air! Have fun with this!
Have you met Just Cause? Granted it’s not “out of this world” fantastical but each game has a variety of environments and the grappling hook/parachute/wingsuit combo let’s you fully explore them. Unlike, say, GTA where you can’t even really climb w/o a ladder.Plus, there’s blimps and helicarriers – close enough to floating islands!
I’m playing Fallen Order right now, and by the sound of it, in about the same place you are. After initially being excited by the general positive tone of the game, to then being beffudled by the creative decision to use slides as a major game play mechanic, I’ve settled into feeling this is almost an archetypal average video game. It does some stuff well, some stuff bad, nothing exceptional, but no great failures either. The art direction is the one squarely excellent aspect of the game; Successfully capturing the diffuse pastels of Ralph Mcquarrie’s concept art. I may enjoy it more if I ever developed the rhythm for combat, which eludes me, but for the most part, I qualify it as an enjoyably, almost soothingly, mediocre experience.
It’s worth pushing through on Fallen Order. That level gets pretty fun, and the story gets good at that point too. There are fewer slides as it goes on (that ice world really taxes things, doesn’t it?). The biggest problem for me is how short the game is. But it does give you some sense of finality.
By all accounts, Immortals Fenyx Rising, despite having one of the worst titles in gaming history, is quite good and has a fun and interesting open world. I haven’t played it myself yet, but the folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, whose opinions I respect greatly and tend to align with my own, have written of it adoringly.
I enjoyed Jedi: Fallen Order. The protagonist was a bit boring (no offense to the actor) but it sure was fun light-sabering my way around the SW Universe for a while. The game way overestimated how interested I am in ponchos though.
Yeah it’s weird they went with that given none of them really look good (esp. on a character who’s doing parkour all the time.)
You forgot one more nod. The idea of being a member of an opposing force before getting betrayed by our allies and being brainwashed to help the other side is the Knights of the Old Republic twist. Yes this is all unoriginal. Do I care? Honestly no, the Cold War campaign is still far and away better then Modern Warfares campaign. At least this one wasn’t pulling the whole this game isn’t political but watch me torture this family. Helps that the game allows you to side with the bad guys, which is both warranted and really satisfying. Bonus points if it makes some kid play Bioshock, Stanley Parable or a Hitman game, preferably 2 but I’m not picky.
Kind of impressive how The Game Awards was a steaming pile of crap this year. Moreso than the usual pile of ads, just straight up crap. There apparently wasn’t much to acknowledge this year that wasn’t a game where Neil Druckmann called everyone’s managers. It was nice to see Hades get some recognition, but I think it’s sad watching a show that was clearly geared toward getting people to look at games as art, but decided to pick the closest thing to a cinematic experience it could rather than something that could stand on its own two legs. Yes, TLOU2 had a lot of money behind its development, but there was so much more to gaming this year alone. There was next to nothing for me to look forward to next year, so instead I’ll be focusing on the next few months. Specifically Gamepass handing me Dragon Quest XI and the possibility of FFXII in the near future. This should keep me occupied for awhile, though I’m only an hour in on DQ. That’s because Hitman 3 comes out next month so I’ve been clearing out some masteries on Hitman 2016 through Hitman 2. The little things in that game still impress me, even in the story beats. There was a whole “fixer” rant I missed in Bangkok that made one of the characters seem like a competent Giuliani. I’m up to lv 20 mastery on Also dipped back into Rocket League lately. Season 2 just got started and they’ve added musical cues with every goal that really aren’t mixed well with the actual audio in the game. Thankfully they have a handy slider that mutes it. The game itself is still good. The weekly challenges still aren’t cumulative, but the 4 “stages” that unlock over the next 110 days are at least.
And me? What have I been playing? Thank you for asking.Yes, along with nearly half the damn planet it seems, I’ve been player Cyberpunk 2077.Aaaand, it’s good. Not great, but good.
More than anything, I’m glad that this game exists, and I’m glad I pre-ordered it, the second game I’ve pre-ordered in my life. Patronage has sort lost its meaning this days, but I’m happy to kick some money to some guys who are still making good, honest, single-player games that aren’t cash-hogs or mere demos for multiplayer. Plus, we really don’t get much cyberpunk-themed games these days.Unfortunately, there are problems. It runs only slightly better than John Wick’s dog, and you really cannot believe it was ready, as CDPR said, to go back in April and they’ve just been “polishing” it. They were polishing something when they said that, I’ll bet, but ‘tweren’t the game. I’ve not had as many problems as others, but across varying strains of hardware, the chorus coming back about performance is that…your mileage may vary. Some guys are running it better on lower end hardware than the guys on the high-end hardware, there’s pop-in glitches, and the much-vaunted ray-tracing is pretty much out of everyone’s reach. The gameplay’s…OK. Unfortunately, since it’s based on a tabletop RPG, the mechanics are that enemies are bulletsponges, but it’s OK, because you are too, I guess. This is CDPR’s first shooter, I guess. Headshot’s don’t do much anything special, for example, so there’s no chance of feeling like a badarse operator.What’s baffling is that while there’s a wide variety of character design tweaks when you start, some are frustratingly limited. For a game that relies on body mods, you have less than ten visible sets of augmentations you can. You can choose your character’s dick size (and whether you’re uncut or Jewish) for both genders, but, bizarrely, once you spec that character, you’d better like it. There’s no chance to re-sculpt your character in the game – you don’t even get a barber or a hairdresser, some even Geralt had access to. What’s most frustrating is the lack of deeper exploration of the themes. It’s very shallow, and I suppose that’s in line with game’s whole “style over substance” ethos, it’s disappointing. It’s much the “HOLY SHIT, THAT CHICK HAS KNIVES IN HER WRISTS” cyberpunk, but failing to touch on the deeper issues that Gibson wrote about: alienation, what it means to be human, post-colonialism, the nature of AI, and social-cultural themes and phenomena. Still, though. It’s fun. It’s a great world to explore, and definitely worth spending time in.
Yeah the shallowness is what turned me off on the game. That and them intentionally adding an unskippable sequence that’s based on a diagnostic tool used to induce seizures. It’s fucked up that they would put that in the game and than bury the seizure warning in the user agreement.
I’m petty. In my case, it’s gog’s forumic support of neonazis, gamergaters and foaming trumputiners that turned me away from cdpr and, more sadly, de facto, DRM-free gaming.It’s wonky, flimsy guilt-by-association (I was quite forgiving of gog and cdpr marketing clumsiness), but it has reached a point where I just couldn’t sustain my cautious interpretations. Now, fair or unfair, it’s pavlovian. I see gog or cdpr, it’s like I see a maga hat or a PiS flag.To the extent where, reading this seizure thing here, my reflex is “hah, doesn’t surprise me”. Which, again, may be unfair. But I’d say the stakes are too low for me to try and overcome that feeling.
“trumputiners”… and you think you’re not a neo-Nazi yourself
There’s only one personality in the game: my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours braggadocio. (Really should’ve made the whole penis thing into a game mechanic.)Here, let me write everyone an example of the dialogue:“Do this thing, or I’ll kick yo’ ass.”“Fuck you. I’d like to see you try.”“Put you through a fuckin’ wall.”“Bullshit. You couldn’t put shit through a wall if the shit was frozen and the wall was made from neo-synth cyber-rice paper because Japanese references, dickhead.”“You know what? You all right.”“Likewise. Now, you want me, this legend of Night City, to work for you?”“You ain’t a legend yet, but workin’ for me you might be, because I’m awesome. Are you a bad enough dude to work with me?”“Are you a bad enough dude hire me?”There’s no subtlety, nuance, manipulation, or wider sort of intrigue like there was with, well, like there was with Witcher III. There’s no really verbal intricacy like you had with, say, Dykstra in WIII. Everyone is out for themselves, with no real larger goals, so basically everyone’s against you. Cyberpunk’s a much-maligned genre. I’ve always said William Gibson was a literary writer who happened to write within the spec fic genre; as a result, he gets maligned by both the lit side, who see him as a mere genre writer, and the science fiction side, who see him as a soft sci-fi writer. There’s a reason Gibson stopped writing that sort of cyberpunk. There’s his oft-quoted…quote “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” relating to why he’s focusing fiction set more in present times.And I can’t blame him. For a lot of things, the Bridge and Sprawl trilogies really did accurately reflect a lot of things we’re seeing come to light now, but the science fiction crowd focused not on the themes, on the social and cultural changes we’d face, but merely on the technical stuff (“Why doesn’t anyone in Neuromancer have a mobile phone, eh? Eh? If he’s so smart why didn’t he predict that? Also, dead channels on TVs now are blue – like a blue sky over the Sprawl is proper hardcore cyberpunk future” – of course, we now know why a hacker wouldn’t have a phone: Google and Facebook would track the shit out of you and pass that on to the authorities.)Instead, they focus on the eyeball kick. The sexy hookers with cyber-vaginas and goombas with cyber-muscles, the most shallow, skin-deep takeaway from Gibson’s work. And we know that Pondsmith has red Gibson’s work, and had that exact reaction to it, missing the points Gibson made. We know this, because Pondsmith took one single sentence from Neuromancer and based his entire RPG off it:“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”That’s it. That’s Cyberpunk 2077 in, well, not even a synth-nutshell. That’s all of it. He even stole the city’s name.(PS: want to know how to make something fit into the CP2077 universe? Just take a thing around you that exists today, and add a prefix of either “synth” if it’s a natural object, or “neo” if it‘s already a man-made object. For example, I’m sitting on a neo-couch after drinking a cup of synth-coffee. Cyberpunk 2077, baby!)I can’t help but think, when I play it, there’s absolutely no place in this game for Henry Dorset Case, Dixie Flatline, or even the Finn. Or even Molly Millions – the only takeaway from her seems to be “Right, she’s a smokin’ hot whore who can kick yo’ ass, right?”There’s no sense of the downsides of such a lifestyle, like there was with Case, who pointedly drank at a bar called The Gentleman Loser, and is most definitely one of those people the game relentlessly mocks and talks about: a loser who failed, fell between the cracks of the society, and was working the lowliest subsistence possible. He’s not a badass netrunner – he’s literally suicidal.
Molly reflects back as her time as a meat puppet, her time of desperation to raise herself up, and falling in love and losing Johnny – yes, that Johnny – and why she cannot let herself fall for Case. Armitage was a PTSD-suffering soldier who was nursed and manipulated and brainwashed into service by Wintermute at his mental hospital. And that’s not even touching on the gameplay or technical problems – it’s telling that CDPR has dropped all references in its marketing to CP2077 being an RPG: it’s now merely an “action adventure”. Along the way, things trains and subways were deleted despite featuring heavily in marketing:Yet its interface is obtuse and opaque; instructions for doing things tend to run along the lines of “You can spend status points to increase stats” without telling you how to do that.
The much-vaunted “life paths” are little more than a slight extension to the character creation screen. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that we were led to believe that these were to be long, stage-setting prologues to main gameplay. As a Nomad, for example (which I think the lifepath most pre-release press seemed to cover), we were to believe that you’d spend an hour or two getting to know you gang, your character’s place within it, fix your car, before finally fire up and drive into Night City.That never happens. There’s a brief five minute intro, then a cutscene where your character drives into the city.Spoilers Ahead:I played the Corpo intro (ugh, the one where Elon fucking Musk shows up), and here’s what happens (irrelevant spoilers happen):You start throwing up in the bathroom, where Elon Musk pervs on you. Something bad has happened to cause you to chunder. Your boss calls you up to his office. He pisses off an unseen woman called Abernathy by killing a bunch of members of the European Space Agency. She threatens him, so he calls you over to take her out, giving you a bunch of hard currency to put together a freelance hit squad to take her out. Three minutes later you’re in the bar talking to Jackie Welles, the huge guy you’ve seen in the promo videos, and start discussing about Putting A Crew Together. Oh fucking sweet. We’re gonna be getting the team together, learning all the systems and mechanics in this intro mission where you get to take out the Abernathy woman, in a guided, relatively safe first quest-WRONG. Then two corporate security guys turn up. They say they’ve found out about the plot formed three minutes earlier (they never elaborate how), turn off your augs, and fire you. That’s it. That’s all, folks. Instead, you get:That’s it. A few short scenes of you character working with Jackie, dancing, and that’s it. You never get the big The World Opens Up moment.There’s a fundamental problem here, and I think CDPR bit off more synth-sirloin than they can neo-chew with their cyber-teeth: either make an incredibly deep, nuanced, and interactive RPG, or create the next Crysis in terms of graphics wankery. CP2077 tries to do both, at its great expense. There’s a reason the technological graphics games tend to be simple first-person shooters, because they focus much of their development on the tech, with relatively simple gameplay: Unreal, the various Quakes, and, of course, Crysis. As such, right now, CP2077 feels decided unfinished. It feels like you ordered a meal at restaurant, and when the waiter brings it out to you, you notice the salad consists of nothing but lettuce and a single slice of tomato, with the explanation “Oh, yeah, we’re out of cucumber, feta, and capsicum. Enjoy.” I’m not averse to technical bugs. Ya wanna know how cool I’m with ‘em? I played STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, at launch – version 1.0.0.1. I played New Vegas from Day Zero. I’m cool. I’m willing to forgive almost any amount of technical glitches (and narrative woes) if the gameplay’s excellent, but Cyberpunk is pushing it. Especially considering these are the same guys who made The Witcher III. People are getting flashbacks to No Man’s Sky, where a lot of the systems that were promised (the techie skill tree, wallrunning, trains) are flat-out just not in the game, with the hope that they’ll be integrated later. It does, indeed, feel like a Kickstarter game that scraped through to their (much-delayed) release date.
Still I’ve stopped reading at “spoiler” (which means I keep open the possibility of playing it at a discount price one day maybe, I suppose) without knowing if the spoiler ends somewhere or runs to the end of your post.At this point my two questions are :- How is it different from the latest Deus Ex games, then,and – By the way, should I play Deus Ex Mankind Divided some day if I kinda enjoyed Human Revolution for what it was ? I seem to remember disappointed reviews.
Hey now, we here in America have a long ecumenical circumcision tradition that includes Jews and non-Jews alike. For us non-Jews it’s not about piety but rather because we as a culture are terrified of human sexuality and believed in the late 1800s that non-consensual infant dick surgery was a good way to stop kids from playing with themselves.
This weekend will certainly see the end of My Time at Portia. After completing the main quests and most of the romance missions for the most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, wading a little bit into the postgame, and being met with a series of more arduous quests that ask me to collect more and more of rarer and rarer materials, I really do feel like I’ve see it all. And seeing it all has brought me really close to maxing out the achievement list, so I’ll be doing that. I’ve still got a few more hours, but not enough to fill the weekend.All that’s left is a rather long-term romance mission and a missable challenge near the beginning that should be pretty quick with the understanding of the mechanics that comes with the 100+ hours I’ve put in at this point. I’ve appreciated how much of a time sink the game is. It is, in fact, exactly the game I was looking for, and I’ve turned around and hooked a couple others on it with my strong recommendations.I think the thing I enjoyed most was chaining the romance missions together in the most socially awkward way possible, divorcing a man and marrying his sister, then divorcing her to date the doctor treating her chronic illness, all while caring for the son I adopted during my first marriage, who remains happy and healthy without food because I give him his favorite toy once a week. By now everyone in town should know better, but I’m a magical Harvest Moon protagonist, so nobody can resist me when I stalk them, learn their daily routines, and ambush them at the crack of dawn to give them roses and talismans and massage chairs, then immediately retreat to bed so I can wake up early and do it again. I have been a positive influence on this community, but I am neither a good person nor a particularly romantic lover.I think the move here is to get into something more action-oriented, and with a streamer I follow working his way through all there is to do in Hollow Knight and crowing about how much fun he’s having on Twitter, I’m getting some significant fomo. I mean, I have it installed. It’s just among far too many other games. The other strong contender is Valdis Story, which I found more immediately accessible when I was dipping my toes into every unplayed game in my library over the summer. Either way, this weekend I play a combat-heavy metroidvania.
It’s really fun, when you brainwash KGB agents, to implant the sort of trigger phrases they hear four or five times a day in their everyday lives. My bosses love when I do that.That said, having had an undeserved overflow of great games lately (Battletech, Kerbal) I decided to dial it back with Arkham Origins. Which, okay, isn’t bad bad, but really feels like a cheap, cardboard version of the Arkham games. It’s really the details. The punches sound like slaps when they sound at all (especially after Arkham Knight’s thunderous soundsplosions), the fight animations don’t flow extremely well (they snap into position more artificially), the layouts are dull (none of the awe that I experience when exploring in other free-roaming games and gothams) and special sequences feel overly gamey and forced (like it was a tedious, unwanted work to design it), the timeline is clunky (which characters are supposed to be well established, which ones are completely unknown? depends on the moment)… and, well, the feel is a bit less polished. It doesn’t give the labor-of-love impression of the other Arkham games. At least not in the gameplay. Its cutscenes are very good so far, maybe better than the other games’.Anyway, it’s the odd one, the one made by the other company, and it feels like a supplement. It’s serviceable. But unless I see the old Asylum and City through rose-tinted glasses, I’d really recommend the classic trilogy first (Asylum, City, Knight). And Origins even if you want to reheat some more of it the next day. It lost a bit of its taste, but why not.Of course, I maintain that if you’re into pointy ears costumes, the Telltale series is still the best, most interesting adaptation. Better than the comics and the movies as far as I’m concerned. AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED
i repeat, yuri
AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED
I’m on the final stretch of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Heaven’s above that game is massive. Still, absolutely loving the story and characters so far, with Eivar probably already my favorite AC protagonist up to this point. There are just so many layers to both his/her story, but also the motivations and interactions. The way they explore glory, the price of it and what it means to be a leader through that character is masterful. Sigurd, in turn, is just as good of a counterbalance as while there is that one part of his arc that was abrupt, you could still see the seeds of it from the start. It is clear that from the start that to him being king was more important as a concept, as something owed to him, than what being a ruler actually meant.Having written all that, something that really took me by surprise is how heavily it references the original AC games as both Origins and Odyssey really felt like they distancing themselves from them, but here there is so much stuff that probably feels utterly confusing if one isn’t familiar with the larger storyline. At the same time, and I am not yet at the end, I do think they set up the elements for the next big arc.Also, and those who played the game understand, those cairns can go to hell. I don’t understand how a game that invested that much into game mechanics would then include that horror show.
As a sidenote, something I’ve been pondering is what is the next AC setting as I’m hoping that they finally go outside the Western/Middle-eastern world. Indian subcontinent would be a fascinating one as the mythology there is so rich and the history allows for so much.I’d also be really interested in a South American one, but as I keep thinking about logistics, I keep coming to the conclusion that it almost would need to happen during the arrival of the Conquistadors. And Jesus Christ that would be one of the darkest AAA games ever made.
I agree about going outside Europe. I was surprised they went to Vikings, actually, given how focused the game has been on geography and landmarks, but maybe they were building on the popularity of Vikings the TV show and The Last Kingdom. As someone who is basically a tourist in those games, I would love one set in feudal Japan, the Mughal empire, or the Incan Empire. Was it me, or was there less history/landmark info in this game than the others?
Cold War has one of the weakest CoD campaigns in a long time. Modern Warfare was a tone deaf mess, but at least it was cohesive. Cold War just feels like a collection of levels with no connections and a very stupid left field twist that makes absolutely no sense. The mission inside the KGB headquarters was cool but mostly played like a cheap knockoff of a hitman level. The first two Black Ops games have the best CoD campaigns in the series so it was always going to be hard to top them. At least the multiplayer is getting better with every update…Anyway, I’m going to attempt to get through a big chunk of Persona 5 Royal this weekend and hopefully set myself up to finish it before Christmas… It’s very long
I’ve been very low key for gaming, even by my standards. For one thing, I have completed my Jedi Knight class story for Star Wars: The Old Republic and temporarily uninstalled the game, so I don’t have my usual comfort food MMORPG in a galaxy far, far away this week.One of the reasons I uninstalled it was to reserve hard drive space for Star Wars Squadrons so I could play the single player bit on my potato laptop, since I don’t think multi-player is happening until I get my newer PC built. (Which means my biggest game I’ve been playing is “attempt to find a GPU for MSRP, and I’ve been failing. I’ve added myself to an EVGA email alert list among other things…). Unfortunately, that potato laptop was slightly too potato and Squadrons doesn’t seem to run (though that might be an issue with the anti-cheat software). I may attempt another clean install this weekend and see if that works.I went with much lower powered games, starting out with Magic – The Gathering: Arena. I had got a bunch of codes to give me the 5 Bob Ross basic land cards and free packs from a number of the recent expansions. I’ve done a few of the quick play games, but need to draft a few things. If anyone’s interested in doing a direct challenge and getting an easy win, I’m lost_limey in MTGA and more than happy to accept any AVClubber who wants that win.Another low key game, and one that I’m still slowly working my way through is Baba is You. After more hours than I’d like to admit, I was able to clear three Forest of Fall levels: 6. Crate Square, 7. Ghost Friend, and 8. Ghost Guard. I haven’t yet figured out what I need to do on 9. Leaf Chamber, so I’m still in the pleasantly frustrated stage of this puzzle.I watched a little bit of streaming from Richmond, VA locals – the tabletop gaming group that used to hold events in local breweries in the Before Times and now does video game streams and podcasts, Goblins & Growlers – – playing Minecraft on their Patreon-exclusive server (Full disclosure, I’m a Patreon contributor so also play on said server sometimes). They played the Java edition, which was basically a newly generated world compared to the Bedrock server which we’ve been on for a couple of years and doing all sorts of things with. Our tabletop DM did stream a little bit of Cyberpunk 2077, and it does look good, but I’m not buying it any time soon (see “potato laptop” above) so I might look into installing/playing other Cyberpunk-ish games, since I think I have a bunch of Shadowrun games between Steam and the Epic Games Store. I also finally broke down and rented my first Neal Stephenson from our local library in eBook form – Snow Crash.On the tabletop, we had an extremely combat heavy session of our Dungeons & Dragons Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign. We were facing an Frost Giant Skeleton initially with a custom magic item. It got very, very close to being a TPK if not for y Barbarian character having a ridiculous amount of hit points (42) at 3rd level and rage resistance. Also, the temporary hit points his Storm Aura – Tundra granted our Paladin, our Ranger’s animal companion, and our wizard was just enough to pull them away from the realms of death saves. Despite taking a couple of enormous battle axe blows to the chest, my Barbarian was able to get the kill by warhammer to the skeleton’s jaw.After no rest and some quick gulping of healing potions, we were confronted by a hag crawling on the cave system ceiling. Luckily, she wasn’t able to do much offensive damage. Our Paladin was able to pull the hag from the ceiling, causing a significant amount of falling damage. That did did end up with the Paladin and Ranger being frightened by the hag’s visage as she landed. The ranger’s animal companion was able to slash at the now-prone hag with it’s mighty beak, and finally, my barbarian’s hammer was able to crush her head Gallagher style against the cave floor.After that we were able to bury the hag’s human victims under the ice and return a Cauldron of Heroes Feast to the town of Easthaven. We have a couple more things that we’ll need to take to our Loxodon contact with the Harpers…
I really want to get back to Baba Is You, but I don’t feel like I’m in the right headspace for it this year. I just want to feel patient enough to get lost on a puzzle for an hour or more without immediately raging over needing a victory in 2020 and looking up the solution. And you can never undo looking up a solution.
I recently finished The Witcher 3: Please, Geralt, could you stop exploring every unmapped corner and just save the world already? and its DLC…or at least as much of it as I cared to. It was a fine experience, a well-told tale, but I’m probably not going to dive back in for a New Game+ any time soon. Instead, I fired up my Retropie and went for something far more scaled back:Sweet Home (1989), based on Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film of the same name (haven’t seen it myself) is a Famicon horror RPG that is often credited as being the inspiration for Resident Evil and the survival-horror genre. It also has seemingly one of most earliest (if not the first) examples of what would later be called “quick-time events”. I am playing a version with a English translation patch.The Plot: The game doesn’t waste too much time on plot, maybe presuming the player has seen the film. There is a short cutscene that lays it all out: a group of five filmmakers are exploring an old mansion to document important frescos that are purported to be inside the property. A ghost pops up and traps them inside. They must now find their way out of the haunted property, battling paranormal/weird/evil presences and solving puzzling as they do.Gameplay: The five documentarians* each have a specialized key item that allow them to solve specific puzzles: Kazuo the team leader, who has a lighter he can use to burn ropes that block hallways**; Ryo the cameraman, who has a camera that can reveal clues embedded in the frescos; Akiko the nurse, who has a First Aid kit that can cure status ailments; Asuka the art restorer, who has a vacuum that removes any obstructing piles of broken glass and any dust that might obscure a fresco; and Emi, who has a key that can unlock select locked doors throughout the mansion. You control the characters from a top-down perspective. They can team up for safety, but the maximum team size of a team is three, which means the player will be often controlling a team of three and a team of two, altering the team compositions as the situation demands. Inventory slots are limited—one slot for the character’s key item, one slot for a weapon, and three slots for anything else—so you’ll have to carefully manage it. There are a few tonics sprinkled throughout the game that provide a full party heal, a range of weapons (knives, swords, and axes), a few items that act as replacement for key items if a character dies (broom for the vacuum, pills for theFirst Aid kit, etc.), and a whole lot of items to solve the myriad puzzle that dot the haunted manse. It actually took me a bit to figure out how to actually pick up an item. There is no “take” option in the inventory menu, only “use” and “move”. “Move”, it turns out, is the all-purpose option for exchanging items. In order to take an item, you must either exchange it with an item with an item in your inventory (which puts the new item in your inventory and puts the old item in the place where the new item was) or exchange it with an empty slot. It’s a little counter-intuitive, but I understand the logic.Combat is a standard menu-based, first-person perspective arrangement reminiscent of old Western RPGs like Wizardry (I’m not sure exactly when the side-view combat perspective was codified in JRPGs), with the standard options of “Attack”, “Run”, and “Defend” as well as a few specialized options, “Pray” and “Call”, the mechanics of which I don’t entirely understand.You can also save anywhere you want, but there is only one save slot, so you have to be careful not to save yourself at a point where you don’t have enough resources to complete the game.Initial Impressions: There’s some pretty interesting ideas here, but the idea to force the player to split the party has the most merit. You’ll usually want to position your teams pretty close to each other when rearranging them so to minimize the risk of one character triggering a random combat encounter as the break formation with one team and move to join up with another. The combat can be a bit deadly at the start, but I found that if you grind levels for a bit before moving into a new area, it’s usually pretty safe. Thus far (I’m not finished with it yet), it’s got some spooky ambiance but it is not especially scary, though it probably was pretty scary at the time it came out. I certainly remember being freaked out the the scream sound effect in the Commodore 64 Friday the 13th when I was a young lad.Annoyances: The absence of all the quality-of-life/UI/gameplay elements that one expects in a modern video game don’t really bother me too much; I’m not new to the retro scene (and I’m old enough to qualify as a retro curio myself!). There is, however, one aspect that really bothers me: the wooden planks. Throughout the game, there are small chasms that cannot be crossed without using one of the limited “wood” items to bridge the gap. At somewhat-random points (I think there is a hidden “weight” stat that influences this), the plank will break as a character crosses the gap, forcing another player to pull her up and wasting the plank. I have no problem with the survival-horror strategy of rationing limited resources, but I don’t like it tied so explicitly tied to luck. If it was a degradation mechanic wherein the game would give you subtle warnings (a text box saying “The plank is starting to splinter” or a creaking sound effect) as it got close to breaking, I would be fine with it.“Hey, I recognize that!” factor: Resident Evil was originally intended to be a remake of this game, so it makes sense that a few homages pop up: the slow door-opening cutscene (that RE presumably used to hide load times) and the “Man” enemy (a human head, first seen from behind, that turns to reveal that it is a zombie), a direct inspiration for the first zombie you encounter in the first RE.All in, an interesting game. I’m not sure if I’ll see it through to the end, but I’ll probably stick with retro games for a time yet***. I’ve got a GBA port of the first two Mother games (the first was never released stateside; the second was released in the US as Earthbound) that I’ve been itching to try out.*I’m not sure if that’s a real word or if I just made it up!
**This obstacle appears in game as a rope stretched taut across a passage, which makes me wonder why the characters just can’t go over or under it.***Why, was there some major game release this week that I should play instead?!?
I’d appreciate if japanese directors could stop calling themselves kurosawa for a while. Still, movie added to my to-watch-list.
During the whole J-horror fad, there was a brief spike of interest in his films, especially Cure, which I remember liking quite a bit back in the day.As someone with one of the most common American surnames, I can definitely relate to your whole “Kurosawa” issue.
I haven’t seen Cure yet. But his Kairo is still haunting me. It really captures something deep about depression in the internet age. It’s a film that keeps growing in you years after having seen it, and I don’t think I had fully realized at that time how important it was.
I’ve played through the first few hallways of Sweet Home, found a key or two, made a small bit of progress, and gotten overwhelmed by combat. It had interesting atmosphere and group combat mechanics, but I think I made a save in a situation where I felt like it was impossible to recover, and I didn’t want to restart.It’s on my mental list of games to give another shot when I’m in the right mood for them. I guess I’ll remember to try grinding out a few levels in the first set of rooms next time.
I think the advice I saw in a GameFAQ for it really worked for me: if you don’t finish the combat in one or two rounds, you’re under-leveled and you should go back and grind a bit. The key items also seem to have some limited use in combat: the lighter is good against the worms and the camera is good against bats. And, of course, trade up for better weapons when you find them. For some reason beyond my ken, you cannot equip any of the axe weapons on the women, but as you get further, there should be plenty of good weapons to go around regardless.
Can’t say I thought I’d ever read an article that explores the similarities between Call of Duty and The Stanley Parable, but it’s not an unwelcome comparison, and kind of makes we want to play my first Call of Duty since the first Modern Warfare. Nah.The new patch for Final Fantasy XIV came out on Tuesday, so I’ll be spending most of my gaming time in Eorzea and/or Norvrandt. A couple months ago, I finished leveling every combat class to 80, so I have my Amaro mount and refuse to use anything else. The new raid was kind of fun, and, since I don’t have anything to level, maybe I’ll give the Savage raids a try for the first time since the end of the last expansion, Stormblood. I’m sure I’ll also continue Nioh 2, a game a really like a lot even though it might be a bit too long, a trait it shares with the first game. I understand why they include the sub-missions, but I can’t help but think the game would be better off making them truly optional, (possibly) endgame content, rather than interspersed between the much more interesting main missions. It ends up padding length in a game that doesn’t really need it.Finally, I’ll continue getting alternately frustrated/elated at Chess. I’m thinking of making a framed poster behind my computer that says “1. Checks, 2. Captures, 3. Threats, 4. Am I undefending something?” I know they’re things I should always think about before I move, but I always forget while I’m playing.
if only because it would’ve been so absurd that it might have been an indication that the developers knew what they were doing with all of these obvious nods to other games. “Wahhh all of these stories are just variations on the Hero’s Journey theme!”
You literally wrote the Freshman Lit 101 paper that everyone gets made fun of for, except for video games.
My own snarky commentary about Call of Duty aside, I am presently waist deep in Yakuza: Like A Dragon.This has been a weird one for me, not because of the sudden shift from beat ‘em up to JRPG, but due entirely to the multiplatform focus. There were small details, like Dengeki PlayStation being one of the magazines you could browse at a convenience store, which are obviously now absent with the series appearing day and date on Xbox and PC as well as PlayStation. (You can’t actually look at the magazines at all in this installment, which is a bummer.)More so, however, is the dropping of the sequel number in favor of a subtitle (in this case, a literal translation of the series’ Japanese title) in an effort to sell the game as some kind of soft reboot. (Spoiler, it isn’t. At most, the slate is only wiped semi-clean narrative and character-wise.)The wait for what was once only known as Shin Yakuza has been a long one. And I was genuinely looking forward to finally seeing that giant, red, calligraphic ‘7′ standing alongside the previous numbered installments. And, I’m not gonna lie, I’m mildly resentful that Sega elected to accommodate those who are late to the party instead of the people who kept the series afloat for fifteen years. Like, take the series multi-platform, whatever. But this kind of reverse Final Fantasy VII situation where the numbering is concerned rubs me the wrong way. (Well, that and the fact that Sega was being cagey as fuck regarding the release date of all but the Xbox Series S/X version. Which, again, fantastic way to treat your core audience.)The game itself is excellent. A little rough around the edges in spots, but I’m confident Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio will totally find their feet as a JRPG studio should they stick with the genre for another installment. It’s certainly one of the most enjoyable RPGs I’ve played in a long while. And ‘forty-something-year-old loser’ is such a refreshing change of pace from ‘fresh-faced teen’ as far as protagonists go.The arcade was a major disappointment this time around, though. A straight copy paste job from Zero and Song of Life – which have collectively formed the core of the Club Sega lineup for several installments running – with none of the embellishments seen in Kiwami 2 or especially Judgment. Furthermore, Ichiban himself is really more of a console guy – so why he doesn’t have access to either a Master System or Genesis and a handful of cartridges is beyond me. Perhaps in Yakuza 8.I have The Last of Us Part II in the chamber once I’m finally done with Like A Dragon (or have at least moved on to mopping up side content). Concrete Genie as well. (Talk about running a tonal gamut.)I may also elect to finally wrap up Sakura Wars after getting unintentionally sidetracked a while back.Ichiban’s obsession with Dragon Quest and the frequent references found in Like A Dragon actually motivated me to grab a copy of XI S: Echoes of an Illusive Age, though I’m probably not gonna dive into another lengthy JRPG right away. But who knows? I’m energized by the genre in a way that I haven’t felt in years, and am actually pretty enthusiastic about tackling Dragon Quest XI, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered, Valkyria Chronicles, and Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition. So maybe that’s my cold weather gaming right there.
Waiting for a dedicated PS5 release of Cyberpunk 2077 before I dive in…so selfishly hoping a lot of the bugs get patched between now and the Day 1 patch for next-gen console owners.Since I try not to buy new games between the holidays (if only to make sure my family has some things they could buy for me), my PS5 is running the same mix of games that my PS4 did before: Genshin Impact (as f2p…who wishes to repudiate the God of Contracts, having drawn the surprisingly-underpowered Zhongli), Overwatch (20 levels to go until I have a gold banner around my player portrait…bronze & silver are for suckers!), and Avengers…which I have not actually played since they added the Kate Bishop content earlier this week. I’ve heard that Hawkeye’s “classic” costume is locked behind 40-some tiers of character daily/weekly quests. Having already leveled Captain America and Black Widow to Lv. 49+, I am worried about how much time I’m going to have to spend dealing with the same rote mission structure, just to get skill points to put into talents that might not reflect the hero so well. Captain America is decent, since there are things you can do with the shield, but Black Widow is this odd combination of guns, invisibility(?), and gets to hit people with a quarterstaff for some reason??? Having seen that Ms. Bishop gets some teleportation skill….I’m worried that they screwed up what should have been my favorite character (as I loved the Fraction/Aja setup, as well as Kelly Thompson’s solo + WCA runs with the character), and leaves me less than enthused about what liberties are yet to come.
Ultimately, as I learned with Genshin this week, I may just have to dive in on the multiplayer content with Avengers, and allow the game to sink or swim on that rather than staying single-player forever. (Grinding for gear / “artifacts” in GI is so much better when you’re playing with 3 other high-level players, rather than trying to switch between your single-player characters. It’s much faster, and since you can attempt the highest difficulty level of content, the gear drops are noticeably improved.)
I’m not averse to technical bugs. Ya wanna know how cool I’m with ‘em? I played STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, at launch – version 1.0.0.1. I played New Vegas from Day Zero. I’m cool.
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