Stardew Valley

Holy time sink, Batman! All my addiction centers were helpless to the likes of Stardew Valley. I sit here having spent 82 hours on this game. And much like when I played Harvest Moon back in the day, it's really hard to describe to people why this is fun to play at all.

Stardew Valley is a game about farming. You inherit your Grandpa's farm, and it's just a plot of land with a bunch of trees and rocks and weeds, and it's your job to plant crops and water the crops and pick the crops and sell the crops. Are you enthralled yet?

So the first little bit you're just trying to clear the land and get things to growing. Everything is on a daily cycle, so you get up at the butt crack of dawn, and you're forced to go the fuck to sleep by 1 AM. If you aren't snuggled nicely in your bed by then, you collapse from exhaustion and some kindly hermit is kind enough to take your dumb ass to the hospital. You get a hefty hospital bill and lose some progress as a result of your poor life choices. I was mining when it happened to me, so the progress lost was I forgot the last several levels of the mine and had to explore them again.

So yes, I jumped ahead. There's farming, but there's also a great big world where you can mine for ore, go fishing, collect artifacts, raise livestock, etc. etc. Are you enthralled yet?

What's the point of all this, you may ask. Well, the thing that kept me playing for ages was there's this old community center that's dilapidated. In each room of the community center, there's a list of items for you to collect to form different bundles. An example of a bundle would be the Spring Crops Bundle, which requires you provide a parsnip, green bean, cauliflower, and a potato. Providing all the items of a bundle gets you a little reward (fertilizer, for example). Completing all 5 bundles in a room will get you a larger reward, like fixing a bridge that opens up a new area. What happens when all the bundles are collected wasn't explicitly stated, but that mission was enough to sell me.

In order to collect all the items necessary, the player needs to toil day after day through spring, summer, fall, and winter, harvesting season specific crops when the opportunity is there. I say toil, but there was something enjoyable about getting up each day and performing a routine of watering the crops and milking the cows. After all my chores of the day were done, I would generally head into town. The general store has a job board where townspeople routinely put requests. These requests are generally to bring them items you can grow, forage, or create. Why do these quests? A. Money. B. There's a heart system where doing things for people in the town, talking to them, and giving them gifts they like will bump up the number of hearts in your friendship meter. The more hearts you gain, the less they treat you like some asshole stranger. "Heart events" will also be triggered when you reach a certain heart threshold and see the person again. These events give you a little more insight to who they are, what they like, what's their life like, and whatnot. They're short little stories, but it was a pleasant surprise each time I triggered one.

There are a number of townsfolk who are marked as single and when you have maxed out your friendship meter with them, you can ask them to be your boyfran or girlfran and eventually do the marriage dance and can have kids and such. I ended up choosing the guy who may have a drinking problem and was a real douchebag in initial whatups. #whatdoesthatsayaboutme lol I got to max heart level with him first because I kept giving him gifts (mostly beer #enabler) to see at what point he would stop being a douchebag. Through the heart events you learn he hates his job and feels stuck, blah blah blah. You can do farm stuff instead. I will save you from your cycle of hating life and then killing your feelings with alcohol. #whatdoesthatsayaboutme

Anyway, so seasons pass. I collect things. I have new buildings built, I get chickens and ducks and sheep and pigs, plant fruit trees, and make wine, and then build a cellar to age the shit out of that wine, give gifts to all of the townspeople and make everyone think I am the best at stuff. I do this for a bajillion hours, until at one point, as I seem to do with all games, I think, "Okay, I'm fucking over this." What is my end goal? I want to collect all those damn bundles, and I only need a rabbit foot and a pomegranate to do it.

I have rabbits, but the rabbits have to reeeeaaaalllly like you to start dropping feet. I kept consulting the internet to see if I had to sell the rabbits or kill the rabbits to get the feet because you know, that makes logical sense. Nah. You just gotta wait the little bastards out, and they'll start dropping them like chickens and their eggs. It made no sense, but was happy because I didn't want to kill Bugs, Buster, or Babs. (Yes, you get to name all your livestock.)

So with the rabbit's foot in hand, I just need a pomegranate. Oh woe is me, the idiot who first thought she planted a pomegranate sapling then realizes she didn't, then proceeds to put torches around the one she does plant, which unbeknownst to her was preventing the tree from growing. (They need 6 clear spaces around them to grow.) Days had passed wasted where this fucker could have been growing. Thinking this was some sort of bug and not realizing that I had stunted the growth, I plant another pomegranate tree. They take 28 days to mature and they produce fruit in the fall. The point at which I was over playing this game was early Spring. Oh bother...

So thus begins the steady decline of my farm. I just needed to get to the 1st of Fall then I could be done. The quickest way to do that is to sleep the days away. I stopped planting new crops or collecting anything that was being created. I would wake up say whatup to the husband, whatup to the kid, check the mail, and go back to bed. 6:30AM: "Good night. Mommy has postpartum depression." Every few days I would go say hey to the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, and bunnies, make sure they had enough food, and that their status was "is fine" and go back to my slumber. I didn't even pick up the chicken eggs until they kept me from reaching one of them to check if they were grumpy or not. The only days that ended slightly later were Fridays and Sundays because on those days, there was a traveling cart that shows up with a 1.26% chance of having a pomegranate for sale, and I had to go check.

It never did.

I proceed in this manner for 50+ game days. I feel slightly bad about it but soldier on until glorious fall arrives, with a fresh pomegranate on the tree. I take it to the community center and the building is restored in its entirety. I feel accomplished.

Until I realize that I didn't get my fucking achievement for completing it. No satisfying event is triggered. The last bundle was just like every other fucking bundle. That can't be right, I think. To the internet I go, where they say I need to wait a few more days for an event to trigger.

So I do. It's 2:30AM (in real life) by this point, and I just want to be done.

It took 4 more days of my depression sleep cycle, but there it was...the community center in its former glory, all the townspeople enjoying it. Joja-Mart all pissed off because they wanted to demolish it and make a warehouse. I failed to mention Jojamart before. It's an evil corporation. We hate them. That's all you need to know. Take that, evil corporation. And with that...and one more inconsequential quest, I deem Stardew Valley complete.

Despite my grind at the end, I REALLY liked Stardew Valley. I was obsessed with playing this thing for daaaaaaays. I was embarrassed by how much I was playing that I got in the habit of marking myself as Offline on Steam so people wouldn't see how much time I was sinking into this game.

If you enjoyed Harvest Moon, you'll like this. And just as an interesting note about the game, this game was the work of ONE person, which is amazing! It was a 4 year labor of love BY ONE GUY. That blows my mind and is pretty inspiring. Go buy it. It's $15 bucks. Fucking do it.

Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell

I don't remember what I paid for "Gat Out of Hell", but it was too much... The whole thing felt lazy, even by DLC standards. The story takes place after the events of Saints Row 4. Satan decides he's gonna kidnap the President, your Saints Row character, and marry said character off to Jezebel, his demon daughter.

Johnny Gat and Kenzie Kensington aren't about to let that happen, so they follow Satan down into the depths of Hell. There you reunite with Dane, who tells you that you'll only get The Boss back by getting Satan's attention. You do this by doing a bunch of activities that are reminiscent of activities in previous games. Reminiscent might be a little strong. They are the exact same activities with husks running around instead of human people. There are even cars in Hell, so no creative solutions needed here!

This brings me to my biggest gripe. I enjoyed the activities in Saints Row 3. Very much so. HOWEVER, this was not the main event. Occasionally you'd get a mission that would take you to one of these activities so you would know how they worked, and the rest of them just lived in the world and you could do them if you want, you could ignore them if you want. The meat of the game had a story, A COHERENT STORY, and things generally made sense. This is not the case for Gat Out of Hell. ALL the main story quests in Gat Out of Hell involve going to an activity and doing it.

Each activity starts with Dane explaining what the activity is and telling you how this will really get Satan's attention. Bullshit, Dane. It's a cheap ass way of cobbling together a storyline without actually writing anything interesting, funny, or of the sense making variety.

These missions are given by 5 different Hell-dwellers as Loyalty quests. Why the fuck am I trying to gain loyalty from Shakespeare? I beat the game. I still don't know the answer to this question. It's not like they play into the endgame AT ALL. Their dialogue doesn't add much, and I just kind of wanted them to shut up so I could trudge through the rest of the bullshit quests that awaited me.

I want to mention that in Saints Row 3, I played every single activity available. I did this because I was enjoying the game as a whole, the world, everything about it so damn much, that I was trying to prolong the game. Having a game consist of nothing but these activities makes me instead want to sprint to the finish so I can never play this again.

One more note regarding the "Quests". The quest list is a joke. It says there are 50 quests to do, but if you look at them, it's chock full of nonsense you should find in an achievement list. Example: the quest "Testicular Manslaughter" requires you to kick a certain quantity of demons in the dick. This is not a quest, jackasses.

Next gripe: One of my favorite things about the Saints Row franchise is rolling around with my player character and another Saint. The interaction between you and your buds was always fun, well written, and made you really give a shit about them. There are literally zero missions that involve anyone else. Dane will sometimes chime in with some plot furthering words, but nobody wants to fucking talk to Dane.

On a related note, how the hell was Dane even talking to me? We don't have phones in Hell. I know this because I have no way to play music, which would have helped drown out the voices in my head and their incessant complaining the entire time I was playing.

SPEAKING OF MUSIC though, did you know that this game at one point decided it was a musical? One moment the devil is saying some shit I don't particularly find interesting, the next he bursts into song like it's High School Musical. I pretty much made this face the entire time the singing lasted.

The only good part about that was Jezebel started singing later, and Gat shuts her down, saying we're not doing that anymore. That got a chuckle.

Whenever the sorry excuse for a story would move forward, there would be storybook pages displayed with a voiceover describing what had happened. These coooould have been cool. Nothing really stood out to me in them though. No memorable laughs. It was a neat idea that wasn't really executed all that well.

That could be said about the game as a whole, I guess. I encountered some pretty heinous bugs during my 6 hours with it. Probably the worst one involved the Interaction button (E) suddenly becoming non-functional. This meant I couldn't start missions or activities. This meant I couldn't access the weaponry vending machines to buy ammo. This meant I couldn't open doors! I had to quit the program, and when I started it back up, it triggered the next main storyline point and fixed the issue. Another problem was encountered during the final fight with Satan. Something about Satan suspending me in the air while I was using the Armchair-a-geddon, a chair with Gatling guns and missiles, triggered an issue where I would remain seated but the chair was invisible or I would remain suspended in air as if Satan had ahold of me, but he did not. This was problematic because I couldn't shoot while in this state, but I could take damage and die perfectly fine, which it caused me to do.

On a positive note, the Armchair-a-geddon was a funny weapon. It was as satisfying to use as it was humorous. The cut scene before the big boss fight was also a highlight. There were some funny lines. Kenzie and Gat team up to Wrestlemania some demons. It was aight. And that's where the highlights end. I think the whole game got about 4 chuckles out of me. It was mostly an exercise in willpower to complete it.

I love you Saints Row, but we need an intervention. I'll forgive you for one bullshit cash grab, but my love and my dollars won't follow if the next installment is anything like this.

Banished

Banished, man... Banished sucked me in for a good three days and didn't let go. You start off with a few simple tutorials to get you acclimated to the layout of the game. The mechanics of the game aren't drastically different from similar titles in the genre but what was compelling about this game were the storylines that unfolded as a result of me not being aware of how the subtle differences could royally fuck you over. This is best expressed with a story of three settlements. This isn't my first rodeo with settlement building, so I thought I knew what I was doing. I was so wrong.

It started off well...I thought. People were housed, clothed, warm, had jobs, but I noticed my population wasn't growing. Nobody was homeless, so I had stopped building new houses. In other settlement building games I've played, the houses evolve as they gain access to new amenities and goods. This home evolution also results in expanding the number of people it can house. This is not how this game works. A wood house is a wood house forever. A stone house is a stone house forever, and one family lives there at a time.

It turns out that children don't move out of the house unless there's a house to go to. And grown ass children don't knock boots and make new children while they're living under their parents roof. By the time I figured this out, I had spent a good long while with this settlement in its current state. The next time I booted the game up, I paused it, and looked at all of the houses I had and their inhabitants. I was in trouble. I had a bunch of houses with 70-80 year old parents and their 50 year old children still living with them. Fuuuuuuuuccckkkk!

I needed young people, but they were in short supply. There was one woman who was 21, named Marlotte. I needed her to move out of her parents' house and find a fuck buddy fast for the good of civilization. Luckily I had one man who wasn't knocking on death's door. His name was Beatricki. He was 37. The average age of everyone else was about 76, their boot knockin' days firmly in the rearview. I built a house and Marlotte moved in. Beatricki soon followed, and they ended up having a girl named Bayley. Hope! Young Bayley eventually moved out of the house, but I needed nomads to miraculously show up for her to have a potential baby daddy. Marlotte and Beatricki had another baby, a boy this time, but soonafter Beatricki was killed in a tragic "giant quarry stone falling on his head" accident. Tragic!

With all young couples gone, I needed nomads...and bad. Just when all seemed to be lost, a young nomad named Ramien showed up. He didn't see nothing he liked apparently and moved into a house by himself. Dammit, Ramien! Years passed, and at age 38, he still wasn't picking up what Bayley was puttin' down, and Marlotte was no longer a spring chicken, so that wouldn't have helped anything.

It was about this time that my aging population started dropping like flies. This caused food supply problems because these old folks had been gathering, hunting, and growing the food that was keeping the plates of this society spinning. Everybody was starving. People were dying, but when all hope seemed lost, nomads showed up! A lot of them! I put them all to work in the food providing roles, but the damage had been done. I was now playing from behind and entering winter with no buffer. To make matters worse, the newly arrived fertile nomads had had a bunch of babies which I was now having a very hard time feeding. Marlotte's little boy was one of the first to die of starvation. Once winter came, I threw all my farmers into hunting roles. Hunting and gathering barely sustained us, and the elderly and new nomad babies fell one after the other, all of starvation. When spring came, I tried to switch some jobs around to get more farmers. But farming takes time. Time that I didn't have. It didn't take long for each house to completely run out of their supply. Marlotte then died of starvation, and that was it. I was done with this place.

I started a new civilization. This time, I vowed to build all the houses. Houses on houses on houses would ensure that there were plenty babies, and I wouldn't get stuck the way I had last round. Well...that worked...but too well. I had plenty of babies, but I had not built the food supply quick enough to sustain that growth. I was pretty much in immediate food danger. I was just eeking by. No one was starving, but people weren't exactly thriving either. Everything was balanced on the edge of a knife, and when a house caught on fire, the balancing act came crashing down.

I had built wooden houses because they took less resources to build and could be built quicker. They were placed close to one another to pack as many of them into the space I possibly could. This became problematic when one of them caught fire... Soon, they all had lit up like Christmas, and everyone stopped what they were doing to try and put it out. The problem is when everybody is playing fireman, they're not gathering, hunting, or growing all that food they're already desperately needing. I gave up on that town before the blaze was out. Onward and upward.

Take 3. I was going to go at a more measured pace this time. Keep an eye on how old everybody is getting, but only add housing when you can feed everybody. Only build structures when you need them, when you have the resources to build them, and for the love of God, put a buffer between structures so fire isn't so devastating.

Keep Gatherer's Huts and Hunting Cabins in places you don't intend to chop down all the trees. While in the midst of the previous two trainwreck settlements, my town's insatiable need for lumber led me to clear the forests around my food gathering structures. Wildlife and woodland edibles don't exactly stick around without the woodland. Multiple times, this made my already strained food situation worse. Putting Forester's Lodges in places where I did need to chop things down ensured that it would at least regrow and resupply me in time.

Even taking these steps, I still had trouble getting enough lumber for building purposes AND for firewood. My current map had lots of creeks/rivers separating the different land masses. I built bridges to hard to reach places that had resources, but when your lazy little settlers are too far away from their house, they take about two licks at a tree and go home for lunch. Slackers. That wasn't sustainable, so I strategically cleared nearby what I needed to clear and didn't raze the earth unless absolutely necessary.

All in all, I was smarter this round. I only took in nomads when I had enough food to keep them alive and I had a job need for them. One time I had 11 nomads show up, and I told them to get the fuck gone because I had just barely made it out of a lean winter.

After that, I beefed up farming, adding more fields. I had a shit ton of fisherman and farmers, hunters and gatherers. At one point I was producing too much food to even remove it from the field. As Banished doesn't have any programmed objectives, quests, or levels, your goal is to simply survive as long as possible. I had reached a point where I felt in control of my civilization, they had more food than they knew what to do with, and I felt like if I kept playing, it would essentially be more of the same. I decided my end goal was to get my total population to 100. I was at 61 adults and 20 children at this moment. To give you some context, my first settlement...you know, with all the old people, stagnated at about 20 people. My second trainwreck started going sideways about 10 people deep. Getting to 100 was a significant improvement.

Every time I would get to 99 people, someone would die of old age. That was the biggest difference of this playthrough, most of my deaths were because people were so old, they had turned to dust. There were a couple quarry workers that got crushed to death, and a hunter that was gored by a boar, but those were outliers. No more starving people. No more death by human popsicle.

Soon, I made it over the hump. 100! I felt accomplished. Then I decided to sit and watch it for a little bit longer. Someone immediately died. Then another. "Don't care, I already reached my objective." Then disaster struck. Tornado time in my pristine town. Death. Death. Death. Building destroyed. Forest destroyed. More death. More destruction. It moved across the map leaving a trail of fuck your shit. Once it roped out, I was down 20ish people and many necessary structures.

Don't care. I completed my goal. Goodbye Banished. You were 17 hours of fun. No more, no less.

Deadpool

Deadpool was interesting. Not "interesting" in the way your mom says it, which is just code for bad. It's interesting in that there are parts of it that are super enjoyable and parts of it that drag on until I don't want to play anymore. I feel like the tone is spot on for Deadpool, the gameplay is fun for the most part, but for some reason, I still was in a hurry for it just to be done, which is kind of sad for an 8 hour game.

So the conceit of the game is that Deadpool has been approached to have his very own game, but Deadpool being Deadpool he's not about reading scripts and following a plan. Plans are for people not nearly as awesome as Deadpool. The whole thing is very meta, as you'd expect. He uses a bunch of explosions right out of the gate, which ruin the game's budget, and the studio makes one of the levels uber shitty looking to save money, resulting in Deadpool calling them up and yelling at them to fix it. Things like that abound.

The fighting is fun and kind of reminds me of the current gen Batman titles in that you're surrounded by goons on goons on goons, and you bebop from jerk to jerk, jacking them in the face and countering them as they try to attack you. I say "kind of" though because I don't think it's quite as good as all that.

You can use guns, swords, and explosives. I laughed out loud the first time I ran away from a goon while still shooting, and Deadpool just shot behind his head without looking, yelling "Pew pew pew!"

There were a lot of things that made me laugh. Like I said, the tone is great. There was one point where you were trying to wake up an unconscious Wolverine by pressing X. Each time, Deadpool would slap Wolverine and say something like "That's for never calling just to say hi.", "WHY", "WON'T", "YOU", "WAKE", "UP?", "That's because the player keeps mashing the button.", etc, etc. This went on for like 5 minutes if you kept pressing the button. You could have pressed "B to be a quitter", but I was enjoying it far too much for that.

Speaking of Wolverine, there's quite a few X-Men that show up in this game as well as villains in that universe. Each time one of them shows up, you can press Spacebar, and Deadpool will tell you all about that person in fun little cutaways that show images from the comics to illustrate what he's talking about. These were a really nice add.

Onto what I didn't like as much. The combat was fun to a point. I liked sneaking up behind unsuspecting baddies and watching Deadpool one shot them in creative ways. I liked the special moves that became available when I beat the hell out of enough people to gain the "Momentum" for those moves. I enjoyed the countering finishing moves. I liked that Deadpool mocked me when I did a crappy job. What I didn't like was the fact that ramping up the difficulty was done like you'd see in an arcade game. Just add more bad guys. More and more and more bad guys until at the end, you're fighting off a dozen waves of bad guys, and you're just tired of the whole thing. Every area was very similar looking, and you'd just have to fight through a bunch of guys to get to the next area that looked the same and had more guys. This was fine for a while, but I think there needed to be more variety in the things I was doing.

Back to the comparison with the Batman franchise, I would have probably had the same problem with it if it didn't have the stealth areas mixed in there. That's not really Deadpool's style, so I wouldn't expect something like that, but I would have appreciated some sort of mix up regarding gameplay every once in a while similar to that, just to break up the areas.

All in all, I enjoyed it, but it could have been better. If this game were a chimichanga, it'd be one from Taco Bell. Not everybody's gonna like it, but I did, and there's only a slight chance it'll give you the shits.

Pokemon GO

I am so incredibly amused by this game. Not necessarily the gameplay itself but the fervor in which I see people playing it. It's unlike anything I've really seen. The office is abuzz, the majority of people playing the game and talking about what they caught and things they learned the night before. That type of communication is fostered 1. Just because people are enjoying themselves, and 2. Because this game doesn't have any sort of tutorial system. You're thrown into the world, pointed at 3 starter Pokemon, and once you've caught your first one, you're cast off into the world.

Much like Ingress, Niantic's last app, Pokemon GO is location-based, meaning you gotta get off your ass to go play. As you walk around, recognizable locations around you are designated as Pokestops or Pokemon Gyms. If you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're going to have a harder time finding locations than if you're downtown in a large city, where Pokestops are plentiful. Pokestops are places were you can get random items given to you every 5 minutes. Things like Pokeballs, Potions, Pokemon eggs, etc. are found here free of charge.

My first two days of playing Pokemon was pretty sparse with regard to resources as my neighborhood didn't have but one Pokestop a couple minutes from my house, and downtown where I work was oddly bare considering Ingress is flush with locations downtown, and Pokemon GO uses that data. Downtown was fixed three days after launch, and I went from having to ration about 6 Pokeballs a day to having about 60 at my disposal at any given time.

Anyway, on one of the sad time, drought days, I was out of Pokeballs for most of the day. My only hope was to level up by hatching a Pokemon egg I had incubating. Eggs hatch by walking around. Each egg takes either 2km, 5km, or 10km to hatch, and no, driving doesn't contribute to your walking total (unless you're driving less than 15mph, so hope for traffic. lol). On this Pokeball-less day, my co-worker wanted to take a break and go walk down to the lake to see if he could catch some water Pokemon. We could see the leaves being flicked up, indicating that there were plenty of Pokemon down there. I was all for a walk as it served my egg hatching purposes, so away we went.

This is an interesting thing about this game, it's absolutely making people get up and get active. A lot of these people aren't necessarily people who are excited about such things, BUT they'll do it for Pokemon. I saw so many people walking around my neighborhood. I'm walking the dog more. I work at a very sedentary job where I stare at a computer screen all day. That whole get up and move every hour thing doesn't normally happen, but it has been the last few days.

Yesterday, someone in another department found a Haunter while she was just sitting at her desk. The word spread and everybody started looking by her desk, Design talking to Dev talking to QA talking to Project Management. A lot of times we're very insular in our departments but not so when we're all trying to find Pokemon. It's become a sort of group activity. It's a fun thing that connects us, and I've talked to people at the office that I hadn't really interacted with much prior. One of the rather quiet devs has been talking a whole lot more as we all try to figure out all the mechanics of the game. People have been going with each other to lunch and interacting with each other a lot more as result of this game.

However, some of that daily chatter involves the common question about if the servers took a shit or exclamations that one lost a [insert Pokemon name here] because the app crashed. Pokemon GO has been fraught with trouble from day one. I had to log in dozens of time as the app crashed and kicked me out. I'll lose at least 10 Pokemon a day because the app decides to shit the bed at the exact moment of capture. I'm fairly certain that if it weren't for this being a Pokemon game and everyone being so stoked on the mere idea of it, people wouldn't stand for an app that has this many problems. I'm sure things will improve, and this fervor for it can't last, but while we're in the thick of it, I'm enjoying the hell out of Pokemon GO.

Every time you see a Pokemon nearby that you haven't caught yet is exciting. Every time I get enough resources to evolve one of my Pokemon is exciting. Every time I walk far enough to trigger a Pokemon egg to hatch is exciting. I'm going to keep playing as long as I'm finding joy in playing it. See ya out there.

Day of the Tentacle: Remastered

Day of the Tentacle has long been one of my favorite adventure games, and when the remastered edition came to Steam, I had to have it. Well...I had to have it once it went on sale...

It's odd to review something you've played through dozens and dozens of times. From the opening sequence, I started quoting all the dialogue. Did I mention I've played this a lot? It had been about a decade since I played it last though, so I was kind of surprised by my recollection of everything. It's ingrained.

One of the nice things about the remastered version is that it has a creator commentary track that's available on many of the screens that give you an insight into the creation process. It was really interesting to hear things like the composers were often told their music files were too massive at 32k or the fact that CD-ROMs becoming prevalent right at that time made them decide to do complete voice over for the entire game in the last month of development when the original plan was that all dialogue would appear as text.

I played the new version of this game through twice, once using the Remastered art and without commentary and once with the classic art and creator commentary overtop. I was kind of shocked because as I played the remastered version, in my mind's eye, that's what it looked like all along. That is how I remembered this game. The only kind of weirdness I noticed was when the location required the the camera to truck left or right, it seemed too smooth. It didn't seem as natural.

During my second playthrough, I turned on classic art mode, and I had to pause a moment because it was far more pixelated than I remembered. When I played the remastered Monkey Island, the opposite had happened. I turned on the remastered mode at first, and my brain absolutely rejected it, thinking, "This wasn't what this game looked like at all!" I turned on classic mode and never looked back in that case. I played Day of the Tentacle fully in classic and fully in remastered mode, and both look great, once my brain kind of acclimated to my 1993 eyeballs.

I loved this game then. I love this game now, and if you love adventure games, you should love it too. Go forth and Steam.

Organ Trail

"Organ Trail", it's like Oregon Trail but with zombies. That pretty much sums it up. You pick a character to be your main, and you name 4 companions to travel with you in a beat up ol' station wagon. The world has gone to shit, and you need to make it across the country from east coast to west coast without getting bitten, shot, starving to death, or dying of cholera, measles, or a mean case of the shits.

You start out allocating a finite amount of points into food, money, ammo, fuel, scrap to fix your car, or various car parts that will undoubtedly blow up in your face along the road. You start out at an encampment, and it is from there you can buy, sell, or trade supplies, scavenge for food, rest your party, or perform odd jobs for people, risking life and limb for most likely very little reward. When you're ready to leave the safety of the encampment and take on the open road, there's no going back, only forward onto the next encampment.

The road is a terrible place with biker gangs that try to run you off the road, bandits that steal your shit or want to kidnap your people. Simply driving is apparently taxing as every bit of progress you make in miles or hours translates into wear on your companions. You'll need to manage when to stop and rest, when you need to scavenge for food, and when there's just too many zombies out and about and you just need crawl up into a ball and sob.

I played the game on Normal. My first time through, I made it to about St. Louis. I had a friend get bitten while taking a piss and subsequently, I had to put her down, another friend just wandered off and we had to leave her behind, another friend kept getting all the diseases but somehow pulled through each time only to die of exhaustion, and a fourth broke about every bone in her body, slowly dying as we drove, the medkits being long gone. The car is dangerous. I continued on alone, cut down by a horde of zombies while trying to find something to shove in my face hole. It did not go well.

My second playthrough was much more cautious and measured. I didn't get stuck out in the middle of nowhere looking for someone to trade me for gas. I paid the outrageous price for guzzleine every chance I got. I scavenged whenever my food was less than a shit ton. I didn't leave safe places when the horde was indicated as being ravenous. I didn't let my car reach the abhorrent levels of disrepair that my actual real-life car is in, and for the most part, it worked out. I still lost one to a bandit. I had the chance to save them, but I shot high, and then the bandit shot them. I'm not proud, but I am alive, and so are my 3 other dysentery-stricken friends.

Organ Trail was a relatively short game, but with the harder levels of difficulty available, you'll probably be glad that it's no longer. It was a good time, and if you played Oregon Trail as a kid, you'll probably get a kick out of it.

Overwatch

Not often do I buy a game on release day. Even less often is a game I buy on release day a brand new IP I know absolutely nothing about, but I bought into the hype train of Overwatch. Everybody was talking about it, so I had a moment of weakness. Even I am surprised by this because as a rule I don't buy multiplayer-only games either. I'm breaking my own rules all over the damn place with this one, but it was worth it. Overwatch is an excellent game.

It's very much Team Fortress-like. There are several different maps, and the goal is generally to capture or defend a point or to move or stop a payload, necessitating teamwork and an overall balanced team makeup. You have 21 different characters to choose from, each with different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. These characters are split up by role: Offense, Defense, Tank, and Support. The characters are the most interesting bit about the game, so I'll touch on each of em a hot minute:

OFFENSE
Genji: A badass ninja that hucks ninja stars at people's faces and whose deflect ability is the bane of any rapid fire character's existence.
McCree: Straight out of the old west, this revolver toting cowboy delivers ridiculous amounts of damage from his six-shooter, IF you're on target that is.
Pharah: Death from above, Pharah, flies into the air and rains down a barrage of face-fucking missiles.
Reaper: A dual-pistol packing grim reaper whose AOE Ult ability strikes fear into the hearts of all those nearby with his chant of "DIE, DIE, DIE!" #heythatrhymed
Soldier 76: Your standard gun toting multiplayer pew pew option with some healy AOE skills as a bonus.
Tracer: Quick as she is cockney, Tracer uses her speed to flank enemies, and can literally roll back time if she gets in too deep of a mess.

DEFENSE
Mei: An ice-wielding chick who can freeze you in your tracks and throw up ice walls as a defensive measure. The most powerful character becomes downright docile as an ice cube.
Bastion: A robot that can transform into a turret and make any choke point a site of mass murder.
Hanzo: A sneaky bow-wielding motherfucker that can wipe out whole teams with a well placed dragon Ult.
Junkrat: An absolute madman, Junkrat is all about hucking explosives into a den of enemies and blowing them to kingdom come.
Torbjorn: An engineer type who builds turrets to protect the homestead and can build upgrades for his pals using crud he finds lying around.
Widowmaker: The snipey-est sniper who ever sniped. An effective Widowmaker can stop an offensive attack dead in its tracks.

TANK
D.Va: Inhabiting a mech, D.Va runs into the fray causing chaos with powerful short range boomsticks. If her mech takes too much damage, she can bail and continue on foot, making her kind of a cockroach to kill.
Reinhardt: A tank in every sense of the word. Reinhardt's big ol' shield can serve as a protective blanket for his teammates and is great for pushing a payload forward.

Roadhog: Hog is right. This portly mofo is slow, but who needs speed when you can pull your enemies toward you with a chain hook of no escape.
Winston: Space monkey, thy name is Winston. Winston is great at jumping from a great distance and wreaking monkey havoc amongst a group of clustered enemies.
Zarya: An energy beam canon toting tank who grows stronger in attack power as her shields on herself or others take damage. She can also round up an entire team with her Ult, making them easy pickins for her and her team.

SUPPORT
Lucio: A dude that's constantly jammin' to music, which serves as an area of effect ability to either heal or speed up nearby allies.
Mercy: A Valkyrie-like angel of HOLY FUCK, HEAL ME. Mercy flies from ally to ally to heal or boost their damage and has the ability to revive fallen party members.

Symmetra: Turret droppin', shield granting lady that's useful when you need a strong defensive position.
Zenyatta: A floating, orb-slinging support character, Zenyatta has the ability to heal friendlies and make baddies take more damage, as long as he can see them. A sadist that guy is, apparently.

A big thing everybody else is all hot and bothered about but I don't quite get is the customization of all these characters. You can get new skins, and tags, voice emotes, and action poses, etc. These are all found within Loot Boxes you can earn through gameplay by leveling up, or you can buy them...oh and how people have bought them. The chance that you'll get what you actually want is slim to haha, fuck you, so I'm glad that I neither care about those little extras, nor have the proclivities toward gambling that would make me waste inordinate amounts of money to acquire them. But I digress...

I haven't clocked a ton of hours on this game, and I haven't even played all of these characters at length yet, but what is clear is that Overwatch is a shit ton of fun. There aren't a ton of maps or game types yet, but the team make-up can be so different each time, with each of those people at different skill levels, that no game feels the same. Additionally, every person should be able to find a character that matches their play style, with 21 options to choose from and all. Also, at $40 bucks, it's cheaper than your standard AAA game (as long as you don't fall into the microtransaction trap). Take it from this pinch-penny, it's well worth the cost of admission.

BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien

"BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien" is the sequel to BIT.TRIP RUNNER. While the name is significantly longer, the game itself was not. I was kind of surprised that each world only took me about an hour to burn through. There were 5 worlds. I was wondering if the game was significantly shorter or if I just was better at the game this time around. I sincerely doubt it was the latter as it's been nearly 3 years since I beat the original.

If you're unfamiliar with this franchise, go read my write up on the first game here.

Not a whole lot has changed. Everything's just more 3D-y, and the backgrounds seem unnecessarily busier. It might have been on purpose because on occasion, the background really bugged out my eyes while I was trying to focus on the foreground elements attempting to kill me.

Overall, it was an enjoyable enough experience, but it wasn't significantly different from the original. It wasn't necessarily good or bad. My reaction when asked about it was simply "Yep. That was a game I played."

Undertale

Undertale is an amazing game. I finished it at nearly 4AM last night. It's one of those games that you just want to talk with someone immediately about and read all the things on the internet about it because the experience is that good. I'm not going to spoil the entire story or anything, but I am going to talk about some memorable/surprising moments where the game defied my expectations. If you don't want to be spoiled at all, why are you still reading this? Go play Undertale, ya fool! You won't regret it. Promise.

Anyway, this game throws all standard RPG conventions on its head right out of the gate. After years of RPG playing, having things attack you and fighting seemed like the standard fare. And fight I did, initially. The only thing is, I had other options. At no point in this entire game do you have to kill anyone. Instead you are given the option to show mercy and perform different actions based on the enemy. Each enemy is different. Some just want you to laugh at their jokes, some are broken and need consoling, some just want you not to pick on them. Since literally every single other RPG I've ever played was all about getting better at stabbing things in the face by stabbing a ton of things in the face, this was really jarring and wonderful.

The mechanics of fighting or sparing a monster are the same. Each turn a box will appear on the screen with a red heart placed in the middle that you can control. The monster will attack you, throwing projectiles in various patterns. Each turn you must dodge these projectiles and protect your HP. Lose all your HP and you have to restart at the last save point. Some of these fights, especially boss fights, are insane. The rate and number of things you have to dodge is sometimes absurd.

Sometimes in these encounters, it seems like it would be easier to just fight them and kill them because figuring out the route to mercy sometimes takes a LOT of rounds to get through. At one point I couldn't figure out how to spare an individual I was fighting, so I ended my pacifist streak and killed them. I felt completely terrible and reloaded my last save, but this was another instance where the game went against everything I'd ever seen a game do. Even though I had spared that person the second time, it KNEW I had killed them before, and it called me out on it! Mind blown.

This realization that there are truly no reloads in this game made every decision all the more important. I tried to spare every single individual I battled. I showed mercy even though it was the much harder road, even when those characters had been hounding me forever. The game rewards you for this, though. Several of your antagonists can be transformed into friends before the game is out. These monsters you encounter are fully formed characters with their own goals and motivations, sense of humor, and ultimately heart of gold.

The characters are great, the music is great, the art style is charming, the fact that everything you do actually matters is fantastic, and every time my expectations were shattered was amazing. At one point, I had just defeated an incredibly difficult boss. I had tried numerous times and failed, and when I finally succeeded, the game crashed... I was so pissed. I reopened the game and everything was glitched out. You slowly realize that the crash was all part of the game as a means for another antagonist to toy with you. I was grinning from ear to ear. So unexpected.

As I'm going through the ending, I wonder how many people gave up throughout the course of playing this game, who didn't realize the crash was on purpose and merely rage quit, who never made it through certain battles because you actively had to die multiple times to continue on, who stopped after seeing the first batch of credits and didn't probe deeper...

The theme of the entire game was DETERMINATION, and through the entire game, you absolutely had to prove you had that. I got the True Pacifist ending, as it's called, and holy hell was it worth it. The ending will give you all the feels.

Undertale is a truly amazing game, and I can't really give it enough props. If you haven't played it, you need to. It's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played.

Fallout: Complete (105 Hours)

Welp, I've finished Fallout 4 after 105 hours. I could have played a hell of a lot more, but Fallout has a way of making you ignore life responsibilities and sleep and on occasion forget that you haven't eaten in an inordinately long amount of time. At a point, I just had to decide to make the final push on the main story path.

The main story's twists and turns, while my friend claims to have saw coming a mile away, I did not and found it both surprising and entertaining. This game, I felt, was very good at having these factions and characters that you could see value in their goals but also see there were flaws present in all of them. There's plenty of ideological grey area where everyone sets up camp. Toward the end of the game, these opposing viewpoints force you to make some tough decisions, as one cannot fully back one faction without running counter to the goals of another.

In this game, I had been helping out the Brotherhood of Steel, among others. From the get go, I would have never thought I'd turn on them to help the "evil" Institute. Fuck those people stealing, murderrobot-making assholes, right? Well...situations change. New information enters the picture, and a decision needs to be made eventually that cannot be undone. Helping the Institute brought me into direct conflict with the Brotherhood, and I ultimately couldn't side with the Brotherhood because overall they were kind of dicks, and I don't want to say Nazi-ish...but yeah, they were Nazi-ish.

But I didn't really want to side with the Institute whole hog either. They do steal people and replace them with robots. #therumorsaretrue It's all in the name of science, of course. They do a lot of questionable things in the name of science...and I'm not okay with aaaalllll that. *waves hand*

So the Railroad then? These guys are all about freeing synths. They think them sentient beings that are being kept as slaves. I wasn't totally convinced at first. The ones I ran into first are metal faced hostiles that do nothing but shoot lasers at my face for getting within earshot. Later models, however, are more advanced, and some of them don't even know they're robots. (It's very Battlestar Galactica.)

I had actually intended to ignore all three of those bickering jerks and ally with the Minutemen, but I didn't trigger whatever was necessary to get them involved, and not being involved seemed like that would be their M.O. anyway. I decided to continue on with the Railroad as they seemed the least morally intolerable. There was one fairly epic battle where I showed up with the Institute, but had warned the Railroad of the Institute attack, and the Brotherhood was also there to pick on the Railroad. Everyone on the battlefield was green to me because they were technically allies with me and didn't know I was with any other faction but them. But I was with the Railroad, and it felt super icky to shoot Brotherhood guys in the back. I didn't feel so bad about betraying the synths, as the ones I was with were toaster style, 1st Gen models. Killing Brotherhood guys with names that I recognized, people that I had helped earlier...that felt icky. And destroying the Institute later wasn't without its icky feels.

With Fallout, it never seems like there's ever an everything is peachy, life is great ending. It's generally about having several semi-shitty options and choosing the one your character could live with and/or accept.

Overall, I thought Fallout 4 was a great game. They added a lot of great new things in this iteration that I felt were very successful. The settlement building, scrapping mechanic was amazing. I felt like the NPC companions were more realized and actually added something to the game. The story was a believable motivator for your character, and the world was pretty damn big and full of pretty interesting side quests to be discovered. After beating it, I've still been listening to a Diamond City Radio playlist on Spotify on my way to work. I beat you Fallout, but I can't quit you.

Thirty Flights of Loving

I feel duped. I picked up Thirty Flights of Loving knowing it would take all of 10 minutes to play through in its entirety, but it came with the stamp of approval from a couple internet famous game enthusiasts whose opinion I generally agree with and respect. We don't agree with the definition of amazing in this instance though.

Thirty Flights of Loving isn't really a game. I knew that going in. It's more of a short story, but when you hear nothing but praise, you expect a good short story. Walking through the environments, you get bits of background story, before you're flashed to another point in time to get a little more of the background story. Everything's so disjointed though. I know that was a stylistic choice to flash to different points in time, and granted, that's kind of interesting to tell a game story that way, but there's not a ton of story to tell.

I just expected more of a payoff is all. Instead, I'm just super confused what I just played and why I spent money to play it.

Fallout 4 - 60 Hours In

As I sit here waiting in the airport, wishing I was playing Fallout instead, I think it's time for an update on how that whole thing's going.

At 50 hours in, according to my quest stats, I had completed 1 Main Story Quest mission. Dicking Around: Level Expert. It was about at this time that I decided I needed to get it together and do that whole finding my son thing, so I headed to Diamond City. Once I got on that storyline, my play-style definitely started to shift. I was far more interested in seeing where that story took me and solving that mystery than bebopping from settlement to settlement being the Oprah of turrets.

It was interesting talking to others about their playthroughs and realizing how different each of us were playing. Some of them got super wrapped up in the story and "beat" the game quicker than I imagined possible. Others took my route and kind of played Minecraft: Post-Apocalyptic Edition. (I don't "get" Minecraft, by the way, so it was kind of a shock at how much I took to the settlement building mechanic.) Others got actively angry at all that "crafting shit". They just wanted to shoot stuff in the face, and they thought the game was making them do things they had no interest in. Chill, dude. They make you do like 3 tasks to make sure you understand the mechanic. You can never do it again if you so choose. Go forth and put holes in faces.

Another element that varied greatly was their relationship with the radio. Someone sent me a link to the song "Personality" and commented that this was the worst thing about Fallout. Another chimed in, agreeing that the only sound he wants his enemies to hear was the sound of his footsteps right before they got a brain bullet. We'll just have to agree to disagree, chief. Like I mentioned previously, I LOVE listening to the radio while wandering the Wastes. I didn't realize how much until I had turned it off for a while to hear some dialogue and forgot about it. I was walking through a kind of empty area to my next quest marker, and I had this thought of, "Why am I not having fun right now?" Then I realized the background music when your radio isn't on is kind of stress inducing by nature, and I apparently need a jaunty tune to murderface raiders to. As soon as I turned Diamond City Radio back on, I immediately enjoyed myself more. To each their own.

As I get further into the story, I've decided to leave Dogmeat at home and try to socialize with the companion characters more. They each have personal quests that will unlock once you've sufficiently bro'd out with them for a while. I'm really enjoying the characters I've met thus far. And it's interesting because your friendship with many of these characters will, at times, conflict with the agendas of the various factions you're working on aligning yourself with. It brings an interesting moral element and kind of makes you think about how prejudice is pretty bullshit in the real world and in fictitious post-apocalyptic ones.

For example, Super Mutants are generally thought of as big, dumb, lumbering idiots that want to rip your arms off for kicks. And a lot of them are. I shot em without question at one time, but then you meet Strong, a Super Mutant that protected a human and got locked up for it by his mutant brethren. After hanging out with him for a while, I paused a bit when the Brotherhood of Steel wanted me to eradicate an island full of Super Mutants. I still did it...because fuckers threw grenades at me, BUT I thought about it for a minute longer than I would have otherwise. Even Synths, which are kind of like Cylons, looking and acting like humans as they do, aren't so easy to vilify when you meet Nick Valentine, an older model Synth that has the personality of a likable detective, just wants to find a place where he fits in, and genuinely wants to help you find your son.

I'm not sure how many more hours I'll sink into Fallout 4, but one thing's for certain, I'll be doing it while listening to Bing Crosby.

Fallout 4 - 25 Hours In

Fallout 4 has been one of my most anticipated titles in recent memory. It's one of the few franchises that I'll go to a midnight release for, and that I did.

Starting out, the intro is far different than what we've seen prior, starting pre-world going to hell. Character creation allows you to be a man or a woman, which I'm always appreciative of. You've got a spouse and baby, fancy house, and a lovely babysitting robot that comes with circular saw arms, clearly a necessity for child rearing.

This idyllic suburban lifestyle was not meant to be, and soon you're in the midst of a mad dash to make your way to the nearest vault which isn't quite what it seems. You were allowed in for reasons that are presently unclear. You're jammed in a stasis pod, your husband gets Tupac'd, and your baby gets nabbed. When you get out, the world's been shit for a while, and you gotta go from June Cleaver to Furiosa to survive and find your son.

25 hours in, I still have no idea where my son is. I don't really have any inkling, and therefore I've pretty much just been wandering The Wastes. One thing that's far different about this incarnation of Fallout is that starting out in your old stomping grounds pre-world-wide shit show, it's an obvious place to set up shop post-apocalypse, and for the first time, you can do that. After one of the first quests, you can return to this area with a group of people, and start a community.

Building up settlements is such a time suck, I love it. In any game like this, I always have the problem of picking up anything and everything that's not nailed down. I generally will be in a state of inventory crisis within 5 minutes. The beauty of being able to build things and create a settlement is that all this junk that's normally worthless is now valuable, and my hoarding nature is an asset rather than a burden. Each item has crafting materials that you can get out of it. If you scrap old desk fans, you get Steel, Gears, and Screws, Tires get you Rubber, piece of shit Lamps get you Glass and Copper. Not only can everything you pick up be scrapped, but if you're in the middle of one of your settlements, you can scrap most of the set decoration. Old cars, fallen trees, cinder blocks...it all can be scrapped, and there's something extremely satisfying about it.

In order to have a functioning settlement, you need people, and to bring in people you need a radio beacon to send out the message that you've set up a place that doesn't suck. You'll need a power generator to make this beacon run. These items and everything else can be built using what you scrap and find in The Wasteland. When people start showing up, you need enough food, water, and beds to accommodate these people, and the defenses to protect them. You'll need to assign settlers jobs for everything to run smoothly, some to tend the crops, some to man the guard posts, etc. Your defenses are a combination of manned guard posts and turrets. The bigger and better your settlement(s) get, the more attention they'll garner from unsavory raider types, which you'll need to dispatch with a nice personal face bullet.

This building mechanic is probably the biggest difference I've seen thus far. Everything else is the same old Fallout you know and love, and that's exactly what I wanted. I've got Dogmeat by my side and Roy Brown playing on my Pip Boy. I'm a happy Wastelander...except for that whole missing son thing. Don't worry, I'll get to it.