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.

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.