Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Thanksgiving kind of got me off track. I bought Fallout 4 at the midnight release. Played a bunch, then my family came for Thanksgiving. I had to tear myself away from Fallout while they were here, but the allure of gaming in some fashion was still too great. So I looked to Steam. I wanted something I could sneakily play in 10 minute increments late at night and no one would be the wiser. The solution to that was "Cook, Serve, Delicious!" And I'm surprised to say, it was very addictive and a lot of fun.

You are a cook at a shithole restaurant. You learn the ropes making corndogs and soft pretzels. Orders come in by number, you press a number to start preparing that order, and the customer's order specifics are listed at the bottom. With the corndog, it starts simple. You press K for Ketchup and M for Mustard and Enter to serve it. Each order has a time limit, and customer's patience wears thin quick, so you gotta be quicker. Speed is a major factor but so is actually getting the order right. An accurate order gets you the possibility of a tip and annoying yummy noises, an inaccurate order will affect your restaurant's buzz for the next day and your cashflow from the bad order.

Each day you have to put together a menu, and the game takes place in day increments. You have to put in a full day (that speeds by like whoa) and there are two rush hours in each day, one for lunch and one for supper. During both of these times, orders come in fast and furious, and you're more likely to screw up, as you'll be juggling 8 orders at a time for most of rush hour. As you succeed in making money, you're able to buy more expensive foods, and they're more difficult to make as you upgrade them. You start with corndogs, but you progress to things like pizza which has three different kinds of sauces and ten different toppings, for example. Some things have to be cooked after you combine the ingredients, some have to be cooked before. Some things can be served immediately, some things take a while, and some have to be prepared for OCD assholes that refuse to eat a kabob that has two of the same vegetable touching. #divas It's all about managing the order of your orders in the optimum way and memorizing the key bindings for each dish. Any time I have to double check the ingredient list, it slows me way down, and if I have multiple items I'm no good at, it ends up getting rather hectic... Try putting fully upgraded soup, kabobs, wine, pizza, nachos, and enchiladas on your menu and wait for the screaming.

You'll start with your 1 Star restaurant, but as you meet the objectives (work 20 days, pass 5 inspections, etc.), you'll work up to a 2 Star, 3 Star, up to a 5 Star restaurant. Another element of upgrading your digs is participating in Iron Cook challenges and some secret society jungle cooking tribunal. Both these require you to make a selection of foods quickly and accurately at a ridiculous pace while epic-ish music plays to further rattle you. Each of these challenges can be retried over and over, and retry them you shall. Some of them are awful.

Everytime I play a game that you can essentially play forever, ie there's no ultimate win condition, I have to set my own parameters so I can move on. Getting to a 5 Star restaurant seemed like the way to go, but once I got there, it said I could upgrade once more. Drat. This required another 20 days of service and beating all "The Hungry Festivities" challenges. Here came the biggest time suck of the game, but it was kind of my fault. Along with getting my 5 Star restaurant, I wanted to upgrade all my food to maximum difficulty/profitability, so that's where all my money went. Problem was, these jungle cooking challenges required 8 golden tickets each to unlock. I had been getting them randomly throughout the game, but once I got to my 5 Star restaurant, I still needed to unlock 3 of them...requiring 24 tickets total. Only then did I realize that they could be bought for $2000 a piece, and here I was wasting money on upgrading nonsense food like a sucker for days.

At least then my goal became clear. Get the money, buy the tickets, beat the things. And I got pretty sick of playing in the amount of time that took. After that, I got a Platinum Star restaurant and unlocked a bunch of stuff that I had no interest in playing anymore. #done

Overall, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed playing this game. Some of the dishes are really difficult, especially when there are 7 other things cooking or needing to be cooked at the same time. I'd recommend picking it up the next time it's on sale on Steam. I felt like a "filthy casual" playing it while I had a perfectly good Fallout 4 waiting in my PS4, but once I started it, I wanted to finish it, so I could mark it off my list for good. It's a fun game, and apparently there's a second one coming out next year, so give it a go.

Now...let's go explore that post-apocalyptic wasteland I've been ignoring.

Hotline Miami

Hotline Miami is...weird. I started out confused and ended up more confused. You start out with 3 dudes in animal masks speaking in fortune cookies at you. It's all very cryptic, and you're immediately wondering what the hell is going on. You then receive a phone messages telling you to go somewhere and do something that's code for go to this address and murderface every single person. This is how each chapter starts.

When you leave your apartment and hop in your car, you go to a place filled with baddies. Some have pipes or baseball bats as weapons, some have assault rifles or shotguns. You can pick all these items up once it and its owner are parted and use them to kill those that would do you harm, but you have to be sneaky about it. There's no health bar in this game. You get touched, you're dead. And not just dead, you're brutally dead with your blood and guts lying strewn about all over the floor. The same goes for your enemies. It was kind of shocking to see once you knocked down an enemy without his weapon, you could slam his head into the ground over and over till it split open like a pinata. This is a pixel art game, but they get all the gore they can out of it.

Timing is fairly difficult, and the game is pretty unforgiving. Make one wrong step, and you'll get your face blown off by the guy just out of frame. This happens a lot. I think Steam said I died 809 times by the time I finished it. It took me a loooong time to realize how those controls worked. lol #aimlockisyourfriend But, thankfully, the game doesn't overly punish you for death. You simply have to start that section of the chapter over again by pressing R for Restart, and you're immediately back at it. If there were any kind of reload time, experiencing that 800+ times would have been awful, so I'm glad failure was as painless as it was.

As you progress through the game, you realize you can't complete a level without killing every single person. Even in the ones where the last guy surrenders...that just makes it easier to go all Mountain on him and jam your thumbs through his eye holes. Like I said, brutal. The further you got in the game, the more you just accepted this, and I'd pause less and less when such an encounter emerged.

I suppose that in itself could be considered as sort of a critique on violence in video games. The more I was exposed to the violence, the less it bothered me, the less I questioned it. Your character experiences a similar transformation as he barfs all over the place after his first kill, but by the end, killing is as normal as breathing.

Things start getting weird about halfway through the game. You're seeing people you killed outside stores and in your apartment, walking around, seemingly unbothered by the holes in their heads or the gashes in their throats. What's real and what's not becomes a question. What the hell is going on is still a question. After I beat the game and the credits rolled, I was no closer to answering those questions. There was, however, an epilogue after the credits and a chapter named "Answers". "All will be revealed!", I thought. Nah. Not really. More questions just got heaped on my brain about what was actually real and what was the point of all that.

When you've completed the game, you unlock the Steam achievement "That's It?", so it would seem my confused and "Wait...what?" response was totally expected. It appears to be a commentary on violent video games in the form of a violent video game. Touche, developers. Overall, I enjoyed it. Confusion still abounds, but it was worth a play.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Complete!

After spending a little more than 128 hours with Dragon Age: Inquisition, I've completed it! Like most games that I spend 100+ hours on, I got to a point where I was getting ready to be done, and I had to define what I wanted to make sure to finish.

I completed nearly all side quests that didn't involve maps or gathering useless shit for requisitions. I really wish I could turn off the requisition requests, quite frankly. My need to talk to anything with an exclamation mark made me do way more of these than necessary. All it did was rob me of crafting materials and annoy me by the end of it. Having 3 total requests per map seems like it would be sufficient, but procedurally generated bluh seems the way to keep people grinding, I guess.

I went through all the achievements and figured out which ones I wanted to get. The one for murderlizing all 10 dragons seemed like a must. When I decided this was my goal, I think I killed like 6 in one sitting. I really enjoyed the dragon battles. They were sufficiently epic for a fight with a dragon, and if you went in under leveled, it would wreck your face. The battles each lasted at least a half an hour and took potion and ability management to keep the battle from turning south. There was one in particular that I had to turn off my party auto-using potions. YOU DON'T DRINK THAT UNLESS I TELL YOU TO DRINK THAT! Without that setting, Dorian literally downed 10 potions by himself during the first couple minutes of that battle. Dude! Selfish!

A couple of those dragons, in fact, were way more difficult than big bad boss man Corypheus at the end. I wasn't too upset by that though. I had leveled up to beastliness, had an awesome sword I called Boomstick, and was a regular at sticking a boot heel up evil's ass by then. I was, however, extremely disappointed in a P0 type really fucking bad bug I encountered during the final boss fight. I think because I was in Tactical Mode when a cutscene was triggered, all the characters were stationary while the audio and camera continued on with the cutscene. You couldn't tell what was happening. You'd just see the background of the shot and a motionless dragon or no character at all. Corypheus was talking mad shit, but all I could see was the orb he was holding flailing around in the air by itself. This, as you can imagine, kind of killed the mood. Instead of enjoying my victory, I was thinking how far I'd have to go back to replay that bit or if the autosave would save me or if I just wanted to watch the cutscene on Youtube and be done with it. I ended up going the Youtube route.

After the 2 or 3 bugged in-battle cutscenes, things went back to working. I got to see the ending without issue. But still...kind of disappointed, Bioware QA. The tutorial needs to be solid to hook a person initially, and the ending needs to be solid to reward the player with some sort of payoff. I'd be way more accepting of buggy shit somewhere in the creamy nougat center of the game rather than in the supposed to be most epic bit.

I did enjoy how the epilogue was handled...the fact that it had an epilogue and had Morrigan tell each bit of the tale. Regarding my particular epilogue, I'm kind of sad I accidentally ruined Leliana and made her a super hard-ass. If I would play this game again, I'd try to steer her away from her throat slittin' ways. She seems a little scary for a now holy lady.

Overall, I'm pleased with the game. The story was confusing as fuck sometimes, but there were several whaaaaaaaat moments that were pretty excellent. I will say that I don't think I was as attached to my NPC party in this game as in Origins. Cassandra was my buddy, Dorian and Varric were usually with me, but there were a lot of characters that I didn't use much at all. Solas was judgey as fuck, Vivienne was stuck up, Blackwall pissed me off when I didn't take him along on one quest line. He got put in timeout for whining once. I'm sure I missed out on some humorous banter out in the field by not switching up my party more, but I liked my A Team. All in all, I enjoyed Inquisition far more than Dragon Age II. Dragon Age: Origins still owns my heart, but the scale and look of the environments of Inquisition are so huge and pretty, it's certainly fighting for its position. Any game that I obsessively play as much as this one made me do is a winner in my book.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - 70 Hours In

Alright, by this time, I've played a hell of a lot more Dragon Age. My overall feeling is I fucking love this game. I love Dragon Age. I will always love Dragon Age. #DragonAge4Lyfe. The additional time has allowed me to see more of what I like and what I don't. Some of the unknowns I called out in the previous post are no longer unknown. I had wondered if my party would have humorous interactions with each other that I've come to expect, and the answer is yes. Cassandra and Varric bicker like children, which is quite entertaining. Interacting with your party members has always been something that I've enjoyed since like Baldur's Gate times, so I appreciate all the effort put into dialogue trees of numerous characters.

One thing that I don't like though, and most people will disagree with me on this, is the dialogue choice wheel. I never minded reading what my character was actually going to say, in fact, I prefer it. Whenever I choose an option, I often think that was not the tone I meant at all. And what is shown as an option is a distilled, usually not accurate version of whatever you're going to say. One particularly annoying option was a Cullen romance dialogue option. At this point, we had played a game of chess and talked all of 30 seconds. Next time I see the dude, the romantical dialogue option was "I want to talk about us." What? The correct response to that from a normal human would be that there is no "us". What you actually say when choosing this option sounds less like future psycho ex-girlfriend speak, but still...if you'd let me read what homegirl was going to say, there wouldn't be that confusion.

Speaking of romancey junk, it seems like Inquisition requires you to be pushy as fuck to start down that road. It feels very awkward, and I think it's because you have to initiate everything. In Origins, I would just be talking to a character like people do, but after a while, there'd be little flirty banter that either led to you saying, dawg, I like you, or the NPC admitting such things to you. This change to Inquisition may have come as a result of some bitching I heard online where people didn't like everybody hitting on them, mainly dudes uncomfortable with being hit on by dudes. However, making the Inquisitor have to be Sgt. Sexual Harassment isn't exactly the way to solve that either. The game world should reflect the real world. Some people are flirts. Some people will wait for you to make the first move. There should be a mixture. As it stands, the only shameless flirt is a gay guy that has no interest in your lady bits.

Some good things are that I'm still enamored by the look of the game. Sun rays were my last ooooh and aaaah. The latest holy shit visual coolness is shadows. At one point, I was standing on a scaffolding while the sun shone behind me. As I looked down to the ground, I could see the shadows of my entire party. They were accurate and you could tell whose was whose and moving and jumping around made the shadows do the same. This may seem like a little thing to be so enthralled with, but after playing games for years in which shadows look like donkey butt, it's a neat thing. Of similar consequence, meaning none, but still neat, when you run on snow or sand, your feet prints are left behind. It's the little things in life, people.

This game, of course, isn't without its annoyances. Prior to realizing that shadows were amazing, I had climbed atop that scaffolding to get the jump on some enemies below. My plan was to get the high ground, and rain death from above from my archer and mage. Nope. Can't do that. In Tactical Mode, it wouldn't let me off the platform to select the enemies that were on a lower plane. The general rule in Tactical Mode is if you can't run to it, you can't select it. I don't need to walk there. I can shoot it in the face from where I stand, but you won't let me. Now I have to go stab it in its squishy parts like some sort of peasant. I thought I was being clever.

I complained about conversations a little in the previous post, regarding dead fish arms and weird camera angles. I have another to add to that pile. Conversations need to be mixed louder. If you're standing in an area that is loud, like where soldiers are sparring nearby, the sound of the conversation is often drowned out by the din of the surroundings. Pump that shit up.

And finally, the biggest OH HELL TO THE NO I've yet encountered involves characters of past games. Whenever you encounter a person you know from Origins or Dragon Age 2, they don't really look like who they're supposed to look like. When you meet Hawke, you have the option to customize her look or use the default Hawke. I didn't change my Hawke from default in Dragon Age 2 because I was pissed at not being able to play as an elf. #fueledbyspite As a result, when given this option in Inquisition, I chose what was supposed to be default Hawke, but I didn't recognize this bitch. I didn't really like the second Dragon Age that much, so it wasn't terrible, but come on, artists... You can do better. However, the absolutely unacceptable cameo character model for me was Alistair. You go on a quest to meet up with him, and he looks NOTHING like Alistair. He looks like Generic Dude #3.

This has always seemed to be a problem for this franchise even within the same game. In Origins, the character models in-game didn't really look like their counterparts in the cinematic that would play when you dallied on the menu too long. Weird but tolerable differences there. This though...

I may be biased because Alistair was my favorite, but sweet Jesus did you mess up his face.

Fallout Shelter

Once again, a mobile game has creeped into my life. It's "Fallout Shelter", and it's a lot like Tiny Tower, which you'll remember consumed me for a hot minute. Only it's way better than Tiny Tower.

You are the Overseer of a Vault. People are coming for shelter and you have to build rooms for power generators, dining, living, and water treatment to keep them happy and not riddled with radiation. You have to staff those rooms with your dwellers, who each have their own personal degrees of aptitude with Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. Those who are very strong work well generating power. Those who are agile work well in the dining room. Placing people where they'll be the most useful with their skillset will make them happy and your production of that resource quicker.

This is the way in which Tiny Tower and Fallout Shelter are the same. There's a waiting game associated with when resources are ready to be harvested. You can attempt to rush them to finish, but that can be hazardous, leading to fires, radroach infestations, and loss of time. The benefit is gaining resources quicker, getting some moneys in the form of caps, and everybody involved gets an XP boost, so it's worth it sometimes.

Your dwellers gain XP over time, increasing in level. Higher level dwellers are more difficult to kill, which comes in handy when raiders come a knockin. And they will come a knockin. They run through your Vault shooting or stabbing whoever they come across. Your best bet is to throw anybody you have equipped with a gun to stop them.

However, weaponry and armor are kind of hard to come by. I've mostly gained them by earning lunchboxes. However, lunchboxes are a rarity. I've only gotten a few from completing little objectives, like putting out 15 fires in the vault or collecting a certain amount of water, etc. This rarity is obviously intentional because you can buy lunchboxes with real world money. Not gonna do it... You'll get resources sometimes, caps, a gun, a set of armor here and there, and occasionally a new dweller. Lunchbox earned dwellers are usually high level with lots of skills, making them very useful.

I've gotten attached to my little dwellers. The ones I like most are outfitted with the best guns and armor I can find, which sadly isn't much. These slightly better equipped dwellers are good for protecting the homestead and also for sending out into the Wastes to explore. This is quite stressful. You send them off, and you can see their little journal log. As they come upon more and more dangers, I always want to recall them quickly. However, if they don't stay out there and explore, they'll not have time to bring anything of use back to the rest of the Vault. But it's hard to risk the one of three sets of armor you have and one of four guns people are carrying. I need those things for shooting intruders in the face.

I also tend to get attached to any of the babies that were born in my Vault. When you put two capable fornicators in a living quarters together, they'll get a little chummy, and after a while they'll go in the back, and the lady will come out preggers. After a while she'll have the baby, and you can name them. After they dick around the Vault as a little kid for a while, they'll grow up, and you can put them to work as an adult. I've actually kept track, writing down whose kids were whose. I'm trying to keep shit monogamous in my Vault and avoid accidentally Jaime Lannistering anybody. #nosisterfuckin

All the mechanics work rather well, and it's consumed a lot of my time the past couple days. The only thing I really dislike is that there's no way to pause it, and while I'm gone, shit keeps happening. I can't check my phone every 5 minutes to keep this ship sailing, though my brain keeps telling me it really wants to. I resisted checking on my peeps all today, and when I came back all my pregnant ladies had grown ass adult children, all my resources were low, everybody was irradiated, and my 100% happy people were all bummed out, sitting at like 9%.

Dammit Fallout Shelter! I can't quit you, but for the time being, I don't want to.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - 20 Hours In

I finally pulled the trigger and bought a PS4. The whole reason was so I could play "Dragon Age: Inquisition". If you'll recall from a previous post, I initially bought this game for PS3 under the assumption that I was no graphics whore and wouldn't mind. WRONG. It wasn't just a little dated looking, it was downright bad looking. Now that I'm starting over fresh with this game on a PS4, I'm so glad I did. All my immediate visual qualms with the PS3 version weren't there, and everything is just really nice to look at and not at all visually distracting.

I've been taking in the scenery and finding every side quest, chest, and harvestable item there is. Therefore, this game is obviously going to take me eons to finish, and this blog would be dead for quite some time if I waited until I finished it to write anything, like I usually do. Therefore, I'll be treating Dragon Age a smidge differently, posting playthrough updates as I deem appropriate.

I'm already 20 hours in, but I've barely scratched the surface of this game. 20 hours is enough time to form some opinions though.

The Awesome

• This game is huge. I've only really puttered around the first area, The Hinterlands, and I still have a lot more of it to explore and a lot more quests left to do. 20 hours. First area. Awesome. I'm sure I'll sink more than 100 hours into this game at this rate.
• The game world is so pretty! The first area that I'm in is chock full of mountains and trees and streams. All the textures look really nice, the water is all shiny, and I keep stopping to take screenshots where the sun is streaming in through the trees. It's just really really really pretty.

• The controls seem fairly intuitive once I got used to the new controller. The Options button and motion pad were very foreign to me at first, but now I'm kind of digging it
• Tactical Mode is my favorite thing ever. Tactical Mode is kind of like a combo of the pause button of Baldur's Gate and VATS in Fallout 3. You press a button, and the world is paused. You can look around the battlefield and micromanage your party, directing them where to go, who to attack, what attack to attack with, etc. Once you give your party directions, you can either turn off Tactical Mode and let them follow your orders in realtime while controlling your selected character, or you can inch forward through time, course correcting as needed and micromanaging moment by moment. I'm not quite sure why Tactical Mode is so enjoyable to me, but I rarely enter a battle without using it. In Baldur's Gate, I would pause constantly, repositioning people and dictating exactly what each party member should do, and this is very much in the spirit of that style of play.
• I encountered a dragon, and it was enormous and terrifying and it ripped my face off immediately. I'm excited for when I'll be a big enough badass to take on such a creature, but it was not this day. Today, I shat myself and ran.

The Could Be Better

• Whenever I use the radial menu Hold Your Position command, the party listens all of zero seconds and immediately follows my character like a stray animal you just fed. No. Stay. Staaaaaay.
• Talking to people feels kinda weird. The camera goes into a weird two-shot where you can see both characters' whole bodies. You can rotate the camera around, but not to where you can focus on their face while they're talking, which is what I actually want.
• When you're talking to someone, seeing their whole body makes you painfully aware that their arms just hang there like a dead fish while they're talking. A tighter camera angle when speaking OR a more human-like use of hands animation would be nice.

• In Tactical Mode, I would like the option to keep characters I'm not actively controlling from blowing their Mana wad on abilities I don't want them using. If I need an ice ability, but fire comes available first, away the fireball will fly. And with my warriors, they'll taunt or war cry whenever it's available, but if I have my person tanking that's supposed to be tanking, it's not helping to have your less armored buddy screaming for attention. I don't want them to look at you. I want you to keep wailing on them in obscurity. Shhh...
• Sometimes in Tactical Mode, a party member will just forget that a battle is happening, and they'll just stand there no matter how many times you tell them to go there, do that thing, stab that thing in the face. The way to remedy it is to leave tactical mode and use an ability. This'll unfreeze the moron, and you can use them again.

The Unknown

• I have yet to have a ton of interaction with my party. Those conversations and their catty little side banter with each other is something I really enjoyed in the previous games, and I haven't seen a lot of that yet. We'll see if that picks up as I get further.
• I'm curious to see how my imported world data is going to affect things. I've had a couple conversations with Varric that were informed by previous choices, but I imagine there'll be more effects of previous playthroughs than a casual comment here and there. There better be, at least...
• I hope there's no timed events looming that I'm not aware about. I'm doing a lot of dicking around. Don't screw me over, Dragon Age. Allow me to tarry.

Overall, I'm really enjoying Inquisition thus far. There's been a couple buggy things I wish weren't an issue, but they're not so frustrating that they ruin my experience. In short, whenever I'm not playing it, I'm wishing I were playing it. See ya in another 20 hours or so.

Pokemon Black

My experience with Pokemon mostly stemmed from me watching the cartoon when I was a kid. I did play Pokemon Yellow, but that's the extent of my game knowledge prior to picking up Pokemon Black. With Yellow, I tended to have my favorites from the show and once I collected them, I tended to use those favorites all the time. That's not really the best way to enjoy a Pokemon game, I've now realized.

That's why Pokemon Black was just what I needed. It starts in a new region, the Unova Region, and there are none of the first generation pokemon available until after you beat the game. This turned out to be an immensely enjoyable feature. To be totally new to this world, starting the game blind, everything is a surprise playing this way. What kind of pokemon is that? When does it evolve? What does it evolve into? Every single new one you came across was kind of exciting. I especially took joy when in a trainer battle, and it would say the opponent was going to use one whose name I didn't recognize. Based on the name, I'd guess what type the pokemon was and then choose what pokemon I should use against it. "Lilligant? What the hell's a Lilligant? It sounds kinda grassy, I'll use fire. YES! I AM A GENIUS!"

After a while, I got a little antsy regarding when things were supposed to evolve because my need to be efficient runs counter to this exploratory mode I was enjoying so much. I found an evolution chart online and would cover up the later evolved states with my hands and try to only see the number it would evolve at. I took my ignorance very seriously. lol

I played this way and was super obsessed with the game as a whole for a good 30 hours, but then I started to get restless and ran full steam toward the end. For the most part, the Gym battles leading up to the finale weren't super challenging. Each gym was focused on one type of pokemon, so as long as you rolled in with a type that was effective against their type, it was mostly cake. I think the electric gym was the only one that gave me any issue. Stupid Emolga...

And I don't know if I was just bad about keeping items when I first played Pokemon Yellow or newer iterations aren't as cruel, but with this game, I never got sick of the amount of trainers you came across/random pokemon encounters between Pokemon Centers. Every time I was thinking I needed to get to a Pokemon Center really bad, I'd make it to town or there'd be a convenient doctor out in the middle of nowhere that I'd come across. I think overall, the game is very well balanced to keep you from having to backtrack too much in order to heal. The areas are just the right size to explore. And explore I did.

Once I had defeated all the Gym Leaders and made my way to the Elite Four, the difficulty level spiked dramatically. These four were really high level trainers, as should be expected, but they also used type-specific pokemon that my current team wasn't really equipped to be effective against. I had to hang out in the caves outside the Pokemon League for a while grinding levels of some of my weaker pokemon because they would be good against their specific Ghost/Dark/Fighting/Psychic pokemon. This is when I started just wanting to get to the end and be done. I'm not a fan of grinding. (Kiss my ass, MMOs.)

For the finale, you have to beat all of the Elite Four one right after the other, without the ability to return to a Pokemon Center or swap out your team. You can pause and use items to heal yourself between each one, but you have to ration your items carefully because after defeating the Elite Four, you have to immediately confront the two main villains one right after the other with your same crew. So yeah, your team of 6 needs to be really diverse and capable, and you need to have stocked up on Potions and Revives or you're screwed.

Speaking of the endgame, I gave the story of Pokemon Black a lot of credit to start with because it seemed more logical to have the bad guys fighting for a cause rather than the standard "I want to take over the world" shtick. Their cause was freeing Pokemon. Whether or not Pokemon want to be owned and trained by people seemed like a legitimate thing for them to question. Their methods of forcibly stealing Pokemon because of that belief was obviously wrong, but it seemed like a plausible conflict to center the game around. I was kind of disappointed when the endgame revealed that the pokemon liberation cause was just a front for their real goal...of taking over the world. *sigh* But that's a minor complaint in an overall very fun game.

I'm glad I picked up Pokemon Black, and I'd suggest it to anyone who has been curious about Pokemon but didn't know which one would be the best to start with. This one's as good a place as any to start.

Game Dev Tycoon

In Game Dev Tycoon, you start in your basement, making games, finding successes and failures as you fumble through gaming history. All of the gaming platforms and generations of consoles are represented, slowly being released in chronological order, with little bits of history thrown in that are taken from reality. These gaming platforms and companies behind them aren't called by their real names of course, but it's obvious to any knucklehead what's what. Additionally, if you know your gaming history, you'll know which platforms are fruitful (and you should make games for) and which will flop (and you shouldn't touch with a ten foot pole).

In general, I wouldn't call myself a fan of simulation games. I was dubious, but I actually had a lot of fun with it. There were several nights where I had trouble pulling myself away to go to bed. Just one more contract, just research one more thing, just develop one more game.

I decided to pick it up after reading an interesting article about Greenheart Games, the developer behind it. Apparently, they made an addition to the game that only affected the pirated copies. If someone had a pirated version, the game would start out normally, but as the in-game years progress, piracy will become an enormous problem for your company, and there's no way to turn a profit because of it. And the most ironic thing of all is these real-life pirating sleezeballs would take to the forums, asking for help on how to solve these piracy problems and wailing that it's impossible to make a profitable game. Can you feel the irony? It's so thick.

As in-game years go by, technology gets better, and more options become available to spruce up your games. Games get more complex as a result, and you'll need more people to complete them. Unlike the actual game industry, I was able to hire a mere two people and keep them employed for 30 years. I'm okay with the massive hirings and firings not being simulated. Let's keep it light. lol

I wish there was a little more guidance regarding the effect of having more staff though. As I was able to make Medium games successfully with two people and myself, I never bothered to hire any more people. The three's workload was balanced, and no one was overworked, so why hire more? Apparently, you can't make Large and AAA titles without hiring more people first, a fact that was never mentioned or I at least don't recall it being mentioned. I played through the entire game, assuming I had to somehow unlock the ability to make Large games. Should Large have been unlocked, I obviously would have had to hire another person AFTER I had the ability. #mylogic

No matter. I made millions of dollars, was in business for 35 years, had the number one booth for a decade at whatever the hell E3 was called in-game, and I won a Lifetime Achievement Award. I'm cool with that.

Batman: Arkham Origins

Bluh... Either I'm becoming an overly demanding, complaining pile of disappointment, or the games I've been playing are not delivering. Batman: Arkham Origins is my latest casualty of shattered expectations. Asylum and City were both excellent if I'm remembering them correctly. Origins was just kind of dull and uninteresting in comparison right from the start.

The beginning of the game starts very much like its predecessor, walking through a prison while shit goes to hell. It was so similar feeling that my interest took an immediate dive. Then you're introduced to the main storyline. Black Mask has put a bounty on your head. One night only. Prize goes to whoever kills The Bat. Wait, who the hell is Black Mask, you ask? Yeah, I didn't know either... Anyway, this brings a variety of villains out of the woodwork. Are they any more notable than Black Mask? No, not really. Your "star-studded" cast includes Bane, Copperhead, Deadshot, Deathstroke, Electrocutioner, Firefly, Killer Croc, and Shiva. I wasn't thrilled about any of those mofos. Most of them, I don't know who they are, and with Bane, I was kind of annoyed by him being in there because it was clearly just because he was in the latest Batman movie. Not a great start, Origins.

This is supposed to be a prequel, hence being called Origins, but it doesn't really feel very prequel-y. At this stage, Batman has only been around for 2 years, supposedly. He's a new kid on the block, but he is as bad ass and capable as he was in the other games. He also has pretty much all his gadgets immediately, which you had to slowly earn in the other games. The only way you know it's supposed to be earlier is that Alfred is concerned about Bruce and keeps mentioning that he's not a "hardened vigilante". Umm...you keep saying that, but the trail of battered goons I've left strewn about the city tell a different story.

Later in the game, Joker makes his presence known, and he seems new to Batman. PREQUEL! Also, we see Harley Quinn while she was an employee at the prison, rather than the raving psychopath we all know and love. Yeah, yeah, I get it now. It's supposed to be in the before time in the long long ago. I would have preferred an origin story to be about someone's origin. Why is Joker the way he is, why is Batman the way he is? This isn't anybody's origin. It's like Batman's sophomore year at Bat College. That's not an origin, brah.

At least with the addition of Joker, we get an A-List villain instead of mucking about with all these D-Listers. I am sad though that he's not voiced by Mark Hamill. He is and will always be the best Joker. The replacement Joker gets the laugh right and some of the dialogue is pretty on the mark, but I think Mark Hamill behind the mic would have improved things. I also miss Kevin Conroy as Batman. His voice immediately makes all things legitimate in the Batverse.

On a positive note, the things I enjoyed most about the last game are still present. The flow of combat is still enjoyable to perform and watch, and stringing bad guys up with an inverted takedown is still extremely enjoyable to me.

On the not so positive side, while I enjoyed the group stealth takedown sections the most, the areas in which this happened were all set up very similarly. When everything's set up kind of the same, you end up doing the same things over and over, and as soon as you walk into a room, you instantly know this is going to be a stealth takedown area, this is going to be a group fistfight area, etc. Level design overall was kind of lacking and not very interesting for me. I also hated when I would enter one of these obvious battleground areas and my Batclaw would be disabled, not because there was nothing to climb on, but because they wanted to trap me and force me to stay on the ground. Design the environment that way then... Put in objects that I obviously shouldn't be able to climb on. Another level design problem I had was that there would be times I'd be stuck in a room because I just didn't know where to go after the battle was over.

One time when I was lost in this way, I heard a guy yelling to get him "out of here" and to cut him down. There was a large silo looking thing in the middle of the room (It was either a bomb or a vat of poison or something #memoryfailsme), and every time I'd walk close to it, his voice would get louder. So, I thought he must be in there. I looked all around it for a way to get in to no avail. Turns out, that was just a bug. He was over in this side room where I shouldn't have been able to hear him that loudly. The sound was just centralized on the wrong spot. Also, while he was yelling, he'd say "Yeah, that's it!" or something to that effect when I just happened to move closer to this silo looking thing. That only strengthened my resolve that I needed to find a door into this thing. It would have helped if he's gonna yell things, one of those things should be telling me that he's in the office.

It was the sound bug that made that more difficult than it should have been, and this game's no stranger to bugs. I didn't encounter the crashing I've heard other people tell of, but I did have a lot of problems with the game lagging out before, during, and after cutscenes. It would also stall when switching locations, and there was one point, during the Mad Hatter section, where my directional joystick just stopped working. I had to reload, and then I could move again.

Despite that hiccup, I will say that I did enjoy the Mad Hatter part quite a bit. I'm a sucker for Alice in Wonderland, and I enjoyed all the imagery they included. There was one section where you had to follow the white rabbit. Throughout, there were mushrooms in the background, a raven, you ran across a pyramid of cards, which a metronome sliced through and destroyed. There was also a section where goons would come out through a Looking Glass reflection. I thought the imagery in that whole section was really enjoyable, but I collect Alice in Wonderland books, so that's right down my alley.

At times while in the Mad Hatter section, they used a fixed camera angle where the game felt more like a platformer during some parts, and while I found that perfectly acceptable during this little episode because Batman was not in his right state of mind at the time, I really disliked when this functionality was used during boss fights. Toward the end, where you're fighting Firefly, you have to run away at times in this fixed angle platformer view, and it switches between the fixed camera and normal view and back again multiple times. The camera swinging around made where I was actually heading to confusing at times, and the different vantage point made me slow down, which is not what I needed to be doing against a flame-throwing madman. The boss fights also had a tendency to make you use button combinations that you never use anywhere else which was annoying. To shoot Firefly with my Batclaw, I had to press L2 and the triangle button, which is the Quickfire version of my Batclaw, which I never used throughout the entire game and was never told could be used until that moment.

All in all, Batman: Arkham Origins just seemed a little less polished overall compared to its predecessors. All the locations seemed a little too similar, the world map seemed kind of small as I would go to the same few locations over and over, and finding where I needed to go was oftentimes a chore. Also, while I approve of trying to highlight some faces we may not know from the villain yearbook, there should not be so many D-List enemies that take centerstage.

HabitRPG

As I have mentioned, I am a procrastinator by nature. That was part of the reason I started this blog. It was going to force me to regularly update it by its mere existence. And thus far, it has succeeded in that. Since I started this little experiment back in 2012, I have completed 43 games. Not too shabby.

When I have things I want to do, I either have to trick myself into doing them or they have to be written down somewhere to remind me constantly, or they'll just get stashed away somewhere in the recesses of my brain, along with my 4 years of German, to become dusty and forgotten. To keep this from happening, I'm always making To-Do lists. I'm a To-Do list junkie. It started with Sticky Notes. A bunch of things are scribbled on a Sticky Note, complete it, cross it off, and if I cross em all off, I get to experience the joy of throwing the note away. Problem is, if you don't keep on top of it, the Sticky Notes just keep piling up, and once they reach critical mass, I can ignore them as well as anything else.

Enter the app "Errands". It's kind of amazing. You can split everything up by project. I can set To-Do items to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. I started off strong, and probably used this app hardcore for a solid year. Problem is, the digital version of the Sticky Note problem happened. I made too many projects and had too many things to do, and I included too many long range To-Dos that couldn't be dealt with quickly. These needed to be broken down into smaller bitesize chunks, but it's trading one variety of brain overload for another.

Recently, Todoist entered the picture. Really, it's pretty much the same app only it looks more minimalist, and it tracks how many tasks you complete in a day and charts it. This is mildly interesting from a worthless statistics point of view. The more tasks you complete, the more points you get and the higher level you become as well. I'm at the level of Professional as of this writing, with 314 tasks completed, and 6582 points...or karma levels, or whatever the hell they call it. What does this mean? Nothing. What does this get me? Nothing. It's trying to make a game out of it, and it works slightly, but if I'm not careful, it's gonna look like my Errands app that has 147 tasks sitting and waiting for me to do while I hide it under the couch and pretend it's not there.

Now there's this thing called HabitRPG. I just started using it this week, so it will be a bit of an experiment. It's just another To-Do list really, but it takes that gaming element further. You have a little pixel avatar that represents you. You can equip various armor, weapons, add pets, etc. by buying them with gold. You earn gold by completing real world tasks. There are three varieties of tasks: Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos.

Habits are things you want to do regularly. Some of the things I have here are Take the Stairs, Fix Supper at Home, Get 8 Hours of Sleep, and Make the Bed. I'm trying my damnedest to not eat out so much, so I can save money, and I never get enough sleep. These are definitely habits that I want to build. Taking the stairs is just an easy points type thing, and making the bed is something I would NEVER do otherwise, but it's easy and I'm glad when it's done, so it forces me to do it. Habits will stay there until you actively delete them. Pressing the + button when you do the task will give you some gold and XP, and pressing - when you fail to do that task will cause your HP to take a hit. You can also set up purely negative habits to dissuade you from doing them. (They have Eating Junk Food on there as an example.)

Dailies are things that you plan on doing every single day. The things I have here involve exercise, reading, and working on personal projects. If I fail to complete my dailies, I'll take a shot to my Health Points at the end of the day, but each completion nets me some XP and cash. These will reset each day.

To-Dos are your standard one-off things that you'd write on a Sticky Note. Add it, when you complete it, check it off, and it goes away, giving you get XP and monies. One thing I really like about these is the ability to add a checklist to a To-Do. If I need to do this one overarching thing, but it has multiple steps, I can add each step in the checklist and keep them together as one To-Do, but I'll be rewarded for each step I complete.

Why the hell do I want money and XP anyway? Well, you can get quests and fight monsters, and you want to be a high level and have better gear in order to fight said monsters. You'll attack them by completing Habits, Dailies, and To-Dos while you're in the midst of a battle. You can do this solo or with a party of your friends. If you, or someone in your party, doesn't complete their dailies, the monster will have a chance to attack. This makes you want to complete your dailies as to not fuck over your friends, and if you do complete them, your attacks will help take down the beastie and get your group some fat stacks and XP. This has, thus far, been a compelling reason to get stuff done.

Another added incentive is that when you haven't done a task in a while, it will go from green to yellow and to red if you slack off on it for several days. I like the psychology of this because I feel compelled to get rid of anything red. Red means I'm failing. I've only been using this website/app for a short while, but I've surprisingly gotten a shit ton done. Easy things that I'd usually put off until the next day, I'm doing immediately. Things that I hate to do and NEVER do, like making the bed, I'll complete just because it's easy. And hopefully this will get me used to doing these various things each day, that it will become less and less of a struggle to decide to do them.

I think HabitRPG will only work for a particular brand of crazy person. This person must have the desire to accomplish things, and they must also be opposed to cheating in the very depths of their soul. It would be incredibly easy to cheat at this game, but if your role-playing style is more toward Lawful than Chaotic, you may have a brand of To-Do list that will keep you in line.

Only the days to come will prove if I can keep up this up or if it will become another one of my failed productivity experiments.

Torchlight

If I had to use one word to describe Torchlight, it would be "unsatisfying". I have never played Diablo, but this clicky click game sounds a lot like it, and what I learned is that I don't care for it as a genre.

You're in this town of Torchlight. There's some crazy dude down in some caves causing a bunch of hooplah because of some ember that makes him tetched in the head, and you gotta go down 35 levels of caves to get to the motherfucker because some lady said so. There's beasties on every floor. Mostly the same beasties...over and over and over in levels that all look pretty much the same. Click until stuff is dead and find the stairs to the next level down. Do this 35 times and you'll reach said motherfucker.

I tired so quickly of this game. It was way too grindy. Same shit over and over. Kill a bunch of shit, loot, kill more shit, loot, have too much loot, go to town and sell it, kill a bunch of shit, loot...until you reach the end of the game or you give up. I wanted to beat it, but it was like homework. There are some quests that I suppose are intended to add some variety but no... It's along the lines of go get this whosawhatsit ember, it's crazy rare. Then you bring it back, and they're like that was awesome, but what I'd really like is the whatsadingus ember, and so forth and so on until you find like 47 embers. It's very much the same with the kill quests. Hey, you should kill this one dude, he's totally the worst, and once you do, they're like, that was good, but this other guy...is even worster. It's dumb, and it's boring.

I'm bored.

When I finally got to the final guy, I was relieved because this hell was almost over. The last guy is quite a large beastie, and he summons other beasties, which are ridiculously numerous. I tried to be all tactical at first, but the longer you're around the guy, the more enemies he spawns. They despawn every once in a while to heal him a bit, which just drags everything out more. It felt like how arcade games ramp up the difficulty at the end by just adding more and more bosses so you'll continue to pump in quarters. While you're not trying to steal my money, Torchlight, you did successfully steal my joy. This was a ridiculous boss fight that I refused to participate in legitimately after a while. When you die, you have the option to pay part of the money you have in your inventory to return to the entrance of the level without losing any experience. I just pulled beastie over to the door and shot at him until I died, respawned, and repeated. No, it wasn't a very impressive win, but what's important was that this awful experience of a game ended.

Only it didn't end. The guy is dead, but embers are still fucking up things that I'm supposed to care about, and so if you want, you can continue to travel down further into the caves and Groundhog Day this stupid game as long as you please because the levels are procedurally generated.

No thank you. I'm going to go find something actually fun to do.

I Am Bread

"I Am Bread" isn't so much a game as it is a form of torture. It's from the same guys that brought you Surgeon Simulator, which, if you remember, I bizarrely enjoyed actually. You can tell it's from the same guys because the whole shitty controls as a game concept is in full force here as well.

The goal is to move a piece of bread across the game world over to something that will toast it, be it a toaster, TV, flat iron, blow drier, etc. As your bread traverses the world, you'll learn that the world is disgusting and dirty and touching the floor will turn you into a petri dish of inedible filth. Mmm... Luckily for you, this slice of bread is an indomitable and tenacious sort. It can grab onto things with it's corners, so you can latch onto objects and walls to find a path across whatever clean surfaces you find on the way to your beloved heat source. The guy who owns the house you're in is a slob, so good luck with that.

Someone bought this game for me for the sole purpose of seeing me rage at it, and rage I did. This game is currently in Alpha, so there are only 4 levels available as I write this. I completed them all and am not totally sure I'll return when the full game is released. It's interesting in a what the fuck kind of way, but I think my friend had it right. You'll get more joy out of watching people hate their lives while playing it than from actually playing it yourself.

The Long Dark

The Long Dark is a survival simulation game where you find yourself in the Canadian wilderness. There's plenty of snow and wolves to gnaw off your face but little else.

The game is still in Alpha, so the Sandbox mode is all that's available at the moment. In Sandbox, your goal is to survive as long as possible. In order to survive, you have to have a handle on your fatigue, hunger, thirst, and level of warmth. These all have to be kept at acceptable levels or your body starts taking damage. In the world you'll find canned goods, beef jerky, and whatnot to stave off hunger. If you kill an animal or find a harvestable pre-dead animal, you can cook the meat and have good eatin for a while. There are bottles of water and sodas sprinkled throughout to quench your thirst, and you'll soon learn that toilet water is the nectar of life. The cold will plague you as well, requiring you to build a fire, find a warmer place out of the wind, or to find less crappy winter clothes. I played on the most punishing mode, so the amount of food, drink, and implements to build a fire were pretty sparse.

You never have all that much in the way of supplies, so you are required to constantly trek out to search abandoned homes for more. On the way, you'll come across plenty of those face-gnawing wolves that I talked about, and if you haven't found a weapon of some kind, you're probably in trouble.

This is one of those perma-death games, so if you die, you have to start over fresh. It was interesting each playthrough though because it was a different experience each time. Once I happened upon enough food to turtle for days. Another time I couldn't find any fire making materials and just traipsed around until I froze to death. And another time, I trekked forever to find water. I finally came upon a watch tower with a single bottle of water in its first aid kit, but I was so exhausted and battered by dehydration by that point that I needed to sleep to get rid of my fatigue and to heal. When I awoke, I was thirsty again, and it was pitch black in the middle of the night. So screwed... Nothing good happens at nighttime. Nighttime should be reserved for sleepin. There's nothing but surprise death out in the night.



I'm probably done with this game for now until they officially release, and I can play the story mode. Before that happens, there's a couple things I hope to see out of an update just to improve the experience (You'll notice some of these confusions/complaints come into play in the above video):

1. I really wish I could jump. Getting stuck by a 5 inch rise in terrain is maddening.

2. When I have a weapon on me, I'd like to see it...in my hand...while I attempt to beat the hell out of a wolf. (When you're being attacked, you'll use it if you have something available, but not seeing it is weird. It's probably so they didn't have to bother making an attack animation.)

3. CROWBARS SHOULD BE ABLE TO BREAK ICE!

4. Some tooltips, tutorials, or just clearer text regarding the use of some items would be nice. I ran around thinking it was a bug that I couldn't burn newspaper when starting a fire. I didn't realize you had to harvest it first to make tinder plugs, and it was those that could be used.

5. The UI for my health or strength or whatever the hell it is when I'm being attacked by a wolf is not clear. I can't tell if I'm doing well or should fear for my life.

Still, overall an enjoyable experience. I'll be looking forward to their official release.