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.