Dragon Age: Inquisition - 20 Hours In

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

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

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

The Awesome

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

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

The Could Be Better

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

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

The Unknown

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

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

Pokemon Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game Dev Tycoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Batman: Arkham Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HabitRPG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Torchlight

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

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

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

I'm bored.

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

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

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

I Am Bread

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

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

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