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.