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.

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.