THE BIG REVIEW OF DOOM (2016)

I can admit it.  I thought Doom was going to be trash.

Every sign that overly serious nerd tea leave readers use in these sorts of scenarios was there.  The review copy embargo.  The awkward E3 presentations.  Bethesda.  Seeing the game in action on various preview videos certainly made it look more Doom-y than the eternally unfortunate Doom 3, but they still looked clunky, and that melee kill mechanic, talk about a buzzkill.  And all those fights, it's just some lame arena shooter!

On that last respect I was partially right, and I should be clear here:  if you're looking at Doom to be the revival of the original two title's gameplay style and NOTHING ELSE WILL DO, you're not going to be happy.  Doom is a straight up arena shooter, where 90% of your combat will be from entering a room that locks you in while fighting a bunch of monster men.  But, oh my brothers, what an arena shooter it is.  Doom is the fulfillment of a promise started by Serious Sam and Painkiller, a breathing mix of adrenaline, humor, and copious gore that works in almost every way.

Where Doom triumphs over previous games of this sort is in the beautifully designed nature of its fights.  The biggest weakness of these FPS experiences starting with Serious Sam has always been the developer's reliance on fights just being a constant influx of a bunch of fucking monsters spawning over and over in the same area, long after you've figured out the best plan of attack against them.  There's alot of good things in Serious Sam, but did you -really- enjoy those rooms where you had to kill like 400 Kleer Skeletons for about ten minutes?  Sure it's fun for a little bit, but eventually you're just doing the same sidestep on a charge over and over with no variety in that murder motion.

can i just say how happy i am they retained the cacodemon's original look

No fight in Doom tends to go longer than four minutes, which is the perfect time to determine whether you're able to stand up to whatever the game flings at you or if you're going to be looking at an imp pulling off your arm and beating you to death with it.  I can't emphasize how important this change is, considering how every game of this sort previously relied on just throwing legions of cannon fodder at you until you went OKAY I GET IT JESUS PLEASE LET ME LEAVE THIS PARKING GARAGE.  Doom's fights are nasty and short affairs, just long enough to put you in a state of stress and force you to utilize the environment and scattered items to the fullest right before you glory kill your last Revenant.  A couple of fights near the end actually had me whooping in excitement as the last enemy fell and the last heavy metal guitar lick twanged out.  That never happens, and it says alot about how the game knows exactly how long it can keep up a player's adrenaline before it starts to drop off.

Speaking of glory kills, I'm still on the fence.  For those not in the know, glory kills come from when you've battered a demon enough that they start glowing, allowing you to perform an execution move on them.  Generally this nets a tiny amount of health, but if you're near death, enemies literally explode into a pinata of tiny health packs.  From a gameplay perspective, they're absolutely essential to do, because any difficulty level above the default mode is going to feature you getting shit on by the sheer unrelenting aggression of your foes, and holy fuck do they hurt.  Nightmare, the highest difficulty, will have you getting two-shot by an imp's cough, to say nothing of what the bigger baddies can do to you.

As a result, fights are an exhilarating affair, forcing a straight up run and gun experience where you pray to god that that imp is going to get stunned by your shotgun blast before you get a fireball to the face.  Still, after about halfway through the game, some of the kills become rather stale, and it feels sort of gimmicky that the only way to survive sometimes is to take advantage of the invincibility frames during your execution move to dodge a certain death attack from another monster.  And of course, you will occasionally fuck up the timing of your kill, coming off of the canned animation to be immediately murdered by an undodgeable attack.  Thankfully, checkpoints in this game are generally pretty fair about depositing you right before MurderBrawl 2016 begins anew.

What I'm not on the fence about is the utter fucking brilliance of what they did about the chainsaw.  The person on Doom's dev team that thought up the new chainsaw deserves a raise and an infinite supply of oral sex, because holy fuck.  For those not in the know, they transformed the chainsaw from an awkward melee weapon used by ammo-conscious nerds to kill Pinkies into a vicious hammer of god that not only instantly kills any demon you use it on, but also showers the player with an absurd amount of ammo.  The limitation is that the chainsaw now has fuel as ammo, and larger monsters require more fuel for the blood-making.  This forces the player to choose between using the chainsaw to kill more fodder-y enemies for essentially infinite ammo, or to deal with that raging 14-foot-tall Baron of Hell immediately but risk running out of ammo for your favorite Gunny.  Not only does this place the player in an immediate tactical choice, but it also highly diminishes forcing the player to root around in the given Fight Room for more ammo.


Guns are also almost uniformly goddamned amazing.  No fucking two-item weapon limit here, assclowns.  All of the old favorites are here, along with a few new guys like an assault rifle which I'm sure has the purists crying all over again but whatever.  All of the base weapons have some sort of relevance, but what puts things over the top is the introduction of weapon mods.  Yes, that means the dreaded UPGRADE PATHS, but it's okay here really!  Throughout the game you'll run into upgrade robots that let you place one of two attachments to a weapon of your choice.  Each one drastically alters the way the weapon operates.  For instance, you can make your shotgun fire a handy grenade every few seconds, or after a short charge, make it fire three rounds in quick succession.  You can upgrade the capabilities of these add-ons further with upgrade points, which drop from just playing through levels, finding secrets, and completing various combat challenges.

Unlike certain other severely overrated trash games, Doom does a really good job in giving you slightly more than enough points to let you experiment without fucking you over if you over-invested in a questionable upgrade path.  There's even strategic choice in that it costs more points each time you upgrade a specific attachment, but unlocking everything on an attachment opens a combat challenge which boosts that upgrade to an absurd degree.  For instance, for the shotgun's grenade, unlocking everything gives you the challenge to directly hit 30 imps with grenades, after which your grenades drop fuck-you clusterbombs after exploding.

However, there is a problem with weapons.  And that problem is named the Gauss Cannon.

The Gauss Cannon is one of the new weapons in Doom.  It is essentially a sniper railgun.  It hits like a goddamned truck.  Both upgrades for the cannon bring that absurdity further, one a chargeable scope that kills anything in two headshots, the other a siege mode attachment that forces you to stand still, but if fully charged will kill anything in one headshot, oh yeah and it also pieces through enemies.

I hesitate to call any enemy in Doom a bullet sponge because my definition of that term is something that is only hard to deal with due to its resilient nature, but most of the enemies in Doom do not go down easily, unless they're versus the Gauss Cannon.  It's obvious the developers tried to lessen the overpowered nature of the Gauss Cannon by forcing the player to limit his or her maneuverability while using it, but this just makes alot of fights a matter of getting enough distance between you and the Prime Bad, squeezing off a shot, then running away before everything in Hell hits you.  It's not that the Gauss Cannon is the only thing I used in the later stages of the game, but it certainly was my default "we are in a jam boys" option.

The other issue is that the Gauss Cannon shares ammo with the Plasma Rifle.  I was not a big fan of the plasma rifle in the original Doom games, but it had its place as the "I need to clear out a room of squishes as quickly as possible."  Here, the fact that the Gauss Cannon is a jealous and needy penis substitute undercuts the already questionable usefulness of the plasma rifle.  To put things nicely, the best way I can describe the plasma rifle's feel and power is "the water gun thing from Super Mario Sunshine."  Even imps require a thorough dousing in the supersoaker before going down.  Attachments don't help, since your options are some sort of area of effect blast that requires you to fire a bunch of rounds before becoming available, or a stun grenade that would be good if it wasn't for the fact that any fight in the game features about five deadly threats coming at you from any angle.  Still, for a game like this, one pretty overpowered gun and one pretty shit gun is pretty good.  And it's not like Doom 2 wasn't guilty of this shit (hello super shotgun, I love you but you're so goddamned stupid), so whatever.

I'm not going to discuss the enemies because part of the joy in this game is discovering each new baddy and how they're going to completely fuck you over, but I do want to talk about Imps.

Look at these fucks.  If they original Doom imps were annoying cannon fodder, and the Doom 3 imps were embarrassing cannon fodder (seriously, every time they blundered out of monster closets or summoning circles 2 inches from me and my shotgun I couldn't help but think of The Shockmaster), the new Doom's imps are unbelievably dangerous and obnoxious cannon fodder.  They're fast, they climb things, their fireballs are fast and hit like a truck, and they can even throw them over their shoulder while running away from you, like some sort of goddamned infernal banana peel.  The number of times I've been wrecking in a fight with full health and armor, only to be laid low by some imp that was hanging on a rafter above me and decided to scratch my butthole out is significant, always led to a GODDAMNIT, and always made me laugh.

Ultimately, that's what makes Doom work so well and why the accolades other critics have been giving it are not unwarranted for once.  It's a genuine joy to play, whether you're nailing the perfect Gauss Cannon headshot or getting hilarious murdered by some shit you didn't even seen because you were trying to dodge the 15 other stuffs guaranteed to kill you.  I've heard complaints about the game forcing you to look for secrets and complete challenges for weapon upgrades, but unless you're playing on Nightmare difficult or a total baddy, you don't have to deal with that, and what's the point of Doom if you're not taking some time out of murder to rub your face against the walls looking for secrets?

Likewise, I don't really want to discuss the plot aside from making fun of this awful Penny Arcade comic:

Ignoring the fact that somehow the art style has become even worse than when the comic started, actually yes the game is entirely about the increasingly inhumane nature of corporations, and a parody of the fps protagonist that blindly follows the commands of his establishment overseer.  Again, no spoilerinos, but one of the high points of joy in this game is Doom Guy's body language in contrast to how a player is supposed to react to the disembodied voice telling them to save the space whales.  It's not a perfect plot, but the fact that there's maybe ten minutes of unskippable plot sequences in a ten hour game forgives everything in this depressing day and age.

tl;dr: Doom is as good as Penny Arcade is wet shit

On Bioshock Infinite and the FPS Weapon Limitations

For awhile, I considered writing a review of Bioshock Infinite.  The game is shit, but honestly I wondered if there was any point in my saying it's shit.  A crapton of game journos have written million-word screeds about how the game is bad and how every traditional game review site should feel bad for loving Elizabeth.  I try to not cover topics that have been beaten to death, so I shrugged and assumed the zero people reading this blog would assume that I hated the game.

But I was talking with a friend about the game a few days ago, and I realized that for all the plethora of hate that people have plied on Levine's artgame baby, most of them barely covered or just straight up ignored the thing that absolutely pissed me off the most about Bioshock Infinite: The Two Weapon Limit.  Or rather, the most horribly implemented Two Weapon Limit ever implemented.

it was a good way to die.

FPS wasn't always like this.  I remember playing Doom as a kid, and giddily hitting the 1 through 7 keys to check out all the ways to murder monsters.  The early FPS existed as a non-stop murder fest, where you learned the best weapon for the best situation, switching from one to another with gleeful efficiency.  There was a downside, of course: unless the game flooded you with monsters, generally about halfway through any FPS you became a walking nonstop armory, using your best weapons on trash because otherwise you weren't going to be able to pick up that ammo.  Games like Half-Life became an obsessive compulsive nightmare for me, since I couldn't handle not having full ammo on every gun, but also couldn't handle leaving VALUABLE AMMO behind.

Still, things were good for awhile.  Then came HALO.

I should be clear:  Halo deserves hate for directly leading to what I had to deal with in Bioshock Infinite, but ironically Halo, despite being the first game to go "you can pick this gun, but then you can't use this one," was probably the best one to use this system.  Why was this?  Simply put, the developers designed the weapons to naturally induce players to experiment, while never frustrating them with a shitty weapon combo situation.

a typical halo gun value decision

A big part of this was that all the weapons in Halo can be divided into two fields: human weapons and alien weapons.  Human weapons were a little more effective than those of the aliens, but since you were fighting on an alien planet, finding extra ammo for these weapons was always slightly spotty.  The upside (and this is important) was that human weapons also had a deep ammo capacity for the most part; the assault rifle held something like 780 bullets max.  On the other hand, alien weapons were weaker and ran out of their ammo quickly, but there was almost always a new or slightly used plasma gun to pick up when you needed to finish over stragglers from a large engagement.

The level and weapon design worked together to encourage players to experiment, while never forcing them to abandon a favorite weapon for too long.  When I see people play Halo, they tend to stick with a favored human weapon, while using the second slot for a backup alien weapon.  If there was a situation where a specific weapon was REALLY important to use (such as the FUCKING LIBRARY) the game usually threw more than one of that specific weapon to make sure you would pick it up.  You'd be forced to abandon one weapon or another from your generic arsenal, but unless you were playing at the hardest difficulty, usually the experience didn't detract from whatever enjoyment you were feeling.

Since Halo, the FPS has been pretty split between giving the player all the goddamned weapons he wants, and imposing some sort of a limit.  The best of the latter, like FEAR, try to make up for the loss of total player choice with some sort of strategic depth, giving enough ammo depth and drops that you can use the weapons you like while encouraging the spotty use of other weapons at appropriate situations.  In addition, such games usually tried to make it so regardless of the weapon combinations you held, you would be able to handle yourself in any situation provided you had the gamer skills to adapt.

pictured: a rare example of swapping done right

So here's Bioshock Infinite, a game that cost ONE HUNDRED MILLION to develop.  How does it handle weapons, at least on hard mode?  JESUS FUCKING CHRIST IT'S SO BAD.

So first, you only get two weapons at a time.  I don't know why this is a thing, especially since there's about a dozen weapons total.  Oh wait actually I do, because they wanted people to use all the PLASMIDS VIGORS, despite the fact that there was literally two good combat plasmids and the rest are pretty much dumb trash that only exist to prolong any engagement.

So the two weapon thing wouldn't be so bad, except for some reason despite all the money, everyone thought that what players wanted was weapons with the fucking wimpiest ammo capacities I have ever seen.  I was agape when, about two hours into the game, I opened a garbage can and saw "AMMO FULL" for machine gun ammo.  The machine gun that had about 180 bullets total in it.  WHAT THE FUCK, I said, HOW IS THAT FULL?  Elizabeth chuckles, slipping her hand into the waistband of her frock: Sorry Booker, I can't find any ammo right now....

i luv sponges

Every weapon is like this.  That is to say, on hard mode, any gun you have will go from maxed out to completely empty in 1.5 firefights.  It doesn't help that ammo pickups are usually completely pathetic, and I have never played an FPS that loves to throw boring bullet sponge enemies to the degree that Bioshock Infinite does.  Memo to FPS designers of the future: no one likes to fight the bad guy that requires you to hold down the fire button for ten seconds, especially when said bad guy is appearing every three minutes.  The only saving grace is that you at least are able to hold onto ammo for guns you aren't carrying anymore, so after a few more battles you'll maybe be able to use the guns you like again with full capacity!!!


I know what the game is trying to do, of course.  The combat specialists wanted to foster a TOTAL BATTLE EXPERIENCE, where the player is forced to use every weapon and spell at his/her disposal to get through the battle, like we're in a Cowboy Bebop toot a toot toot.  Of course, this is a fucking failure for a few reasons:

1) It's STUPID AS SHIT to force a player to switch their weapons out all the time.  Players develop attachments towards certain guns, and making me drop the carbine I'm making MLG360 headshots in the middle of a battle so I can pick up the garbage grenade launcher isn't fun, it's a fucking drag.

2) It's especially STUPID AS SHIT to do this when the game lets you upgrade your weapons.  Usually weapon upgrades would mean you can customize your absolute favorite weapons to really cause some carnage on the battlefield.  However, since in Bioshock Infinite you'll never get to hold onto a given gun more than a quarter of time, you're instead forced to budget your money to slightly upgrade every goddamned gun in the game.  Naturally, the upgrades also include ammo capacity, so you're gonna have to wait even longer before you start doing more damage.  As a result, the Bioshock Infinite game experience is less of being a MURDER KING MAXIMUS, and more like a guy with 12 half-filled Supersoakers against a bunch of cannon-fodder and a sentient raincoat.

3) Most importantly, even on hard, despite all this shit, combat is PISS EASY.  Aside from GHOOOOOOST MOOOOOOM, every fight in the game is a cold piece of cornbread, where you shoot a bunch of guys in the head (MUSIC SWELL) and then spend the next two minutes wandering from body to body in the hopes you can hold onto your weapon just a little bit longer, because otherwise you're gonna have to pick up that shotgun and we don't want that do we??

a million dollar garbage bin

I guess that's all I want to say.  I'd probably still hate Bioshock Infinite if they hadn't dropped the ball so spectacularly on one of the most core concepts of the FPS genre, but with it, it makes me want to die that this is the game we're supposed to love.

Diablo 3: REAPER OF SOULZ

Previously, on Was Never a Fan:

"So ultimately I have this game, and I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it and the expansions.  I'm not proud of this.  Actually, I'm really not proud of this.  But really, the first step of living a true life is accepting our bullshit tendencies towards self-destruction, so who cares?  I've got a boring 1000 DPS dagger to find before my journey will complete, and I can shoot myself in the head without any regrets."

Prior to Reaper of Souls coming out, I made a joke to some friends that "HAW HAW HAW I AIN'T GONNA BUY THAT DUMB XPAC BECAUSE I WOULD BE PAYING BLIZZ THREE DIGITS MONEY HAHAHA AM I RIGHT???"  They all chuckled because they knew as well as I did that despite the fact that Diablo 3 was probably the most shitty disappointing thing I played in years, I was still going to get the expansion because it was Diablo.  All I could do was grab my ankles and hope that something had been done since my Witch Doctor was lying in a sand gutter, riddled with tiny mosquito bullets.

Here's the amazing thing.  Reaper of Souls is not terrible.  In fact, it is genuinely good.  The reason for this is that unlike every stupid game I've played recently, RoS actually recognizes the shortcomings of its platform and embraces the essential stupidity of the loot hunt.

The story is IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR STORY IS DIABLO 3.  The only thing that deserves to be said about Act V is that the final map, which is a return to the Pandemonium Fortress.  You might remember it as the staging area in Act IV of Diablo 2, but now it's a full dungeon.  A dungeon that was modelled on The Arcane Sanctuary.  If you played Diablo 2, that sound you hear is your soul screaming in agony.  For those that aren't hip to the lingo, the Arcane Sanctuary was 5000 miles of single lane monster traffic, three out of four possible paths going absolutely nowhere, grey and tiley and a background of black because SPACE or something.

So, on the positive side, they removed the three dead end paths for Panda Fortress 2.0.  On the negative side:

• They added some delightful portal/door things that randomly turn on and freeze you in place for a good five seconds for no other reason than Blizzard somehow felt that the core Diablo concept of "run constantly unless you're killing monsters" needed to be shaken up.  
• The monster placement is 95% "two monsters that randomly pop up and will follow you to the goddamned ends of the earth so you better waste your time and kill them :D"
• The colorization is gray on gray on gray.  Also lightning flashes i think.

The story mode is pretty dumb.  But that's okay, because Blizzard did something I've rarely seen any game company do: they recognized their base game was total shit.  

I can't overemphasize how fucking happy I am that the Auction House is completely dead.  In it's place, Reaper of Soulz now has Loot 2.0, which at its core is "stat distribution on drops is now heavily weighted to the present class you are playing, also legendaries are not fucking impossible to find."  The faustian tradeoff of this fucking item bonanza is that unless someone is in your party when a legendary drops, it is bound to your account.  Alot of reddit fags are bitchy about this, and while I miss my days of Diablo 2 wheeling and dealing, I don't really have a problem with Diablo 3 being far more single-player oriented.  Well actually I do, but it's not for that reason.  Dot dot dot.

To explain why I'm mostly okay with the Reaper of Souls method of the loot grind, one has to look at the average experience of whenever I started a new ladder season on Diablo 2.  

1) First, I made a necromancer.  

2) I'd grind that necromancer to Hell difficulty.  Depending on my drops, I'd either be able to start slowly plinking away at Act 1, or spend several hours on Nightmare killing Mephisto until my resistances weren't at -400.

3) Eventually I'd be able to sort of farm bosses.  Since I always start off with a summon-based Necro, my farming speed would be entirely dependent on how cooperative my skeletons were being.  Farm Den of Evil, Farm Prindleskin, Farm Baal, Farm Andariel, Farm Mephisto.  Repeat hours upon hours of painfully slow killing.  Hoard a bunch of gems and trade on B.Net or trading boards for chump change equipment upgrades so I could murder Baal a half-second faster.

4) Usually from some garbage mob I offhandedly smacked, would fall The Item.  A socketed ethereal Herald of Zakarum.  The 40% damage/15% IAS jewel.  I wander into the market, brandishing it.  I spy the merchant with the Ber and Jah Rune.  The offer is made.

5) Regardless of whatever else I have, with Enigma my killing speed goes up a threefold.  Now I can farm in earnest, racking up rare item after rare item.  Eventually I'm able to build up enough material wealth to start fitting a second character.  He wanders out into the world, bankrolled by my necromancer.  Life is good.  Empty, but good.

Here's the thing.  Not even discussing the trading, which was always risky regardless of whatever board you used (or god help you, WUG WUW), most characters you played were dependent on just a few items in order to play effectively.  If you didn't have those items, playing Diablo 2 on Hell Difficulty was just a fucking boring disaster.  And you almost always had to trade, since even if you found a decent item for your class, it had to be something that fit your build, since until the twilight years of the game, there was no respeccing.  On some ladders, I found the rare items I needed to put together an Enigma in a few weeks.  One ladder took me several months.

To put things another way, Diablo 2 resembles an old-time slot machine.  One day you may get the jackpot, but generally the gameplay experience was KACHUNK KACHUNK whoo whoo whoo *FAILURE*.  Of course, this was superior to the vanilla Diablo 3 experience, which was a slot machine that electrocuted you every time you touched the lever, and deposited chips which required a doctorate thesis in order to determine their true value.

By comparison, Reaper of Souls is a pachinko machine.  By that I mean that while the ultimate goal remains the jackpot, there's alot more going on between the time you're a fresh-eared welp and when you're basically able to kill anything by blinking. And while alot of the sturm and drang is ultimately empty, it's still entertaining and distracting, and that's all I want in my Diabolololo.

A large part of the appeal is the more noticeable powering up of your character.  The fact that items are now heavily weighted to roll for what your character could conceivably want means that, at least starting out, you will regularly find items that, little by emasculating little, raise your damage and survivability.  You'll get alot of legendary items, and while most are bland stat sticks, some have neat little effects that you can play with.  Finally, being able to respec your character's skills is actually interesting!  My witch doctor throughout the course of the game has transmogrified from a poison-based aoe nuker to a quasi pet/close ranged fire tank to a sit on my hands and watch some dots babyman to the promised land of full pets being able to murder anything better than I could ever accomplish by myself.  You can also actually reroll a single stat of any item, which I'm sure makes purists scream in agony but finally makes the thin stab of pain when the set helm you've spent 10 hours farming for has a key stat roll of exactly the lowest number possible much more bearable.  Difficulty levels have also been evened out to an absurd degree, culminating in Inferno being replaced with TORMENT, which is subdivided into six different strata, each progressively tougher than the last but also with better item drops.

Grinding is also less of a fucking soul destroying task from the Vanilla days, when loot runs were doing the boss monster of the last Act you're able to handle on Inferno mode over and over and over.  Now we have Adventure Mode, where your characters goes on bite-sized quests around the game maps, the completion of five of these quests giving you a loot box which contains RIFT KEYZ (and other stupid things).  KEYZ are used to open Nephilim Rifts, which are randomized maps filled with randomized enemy selections.  Kill enough enemies, and a big bad boss appears.  Kill him, you can get BLOOD SHARDZ, which are used to gamble for specific pieces of armor.  It's a tidy little ecosystem, and one that lets the player engage in bite-sized pieces of joy.

So where am I going to complain?  There are still lots of problems, though most seem to at least be recognized by Blizzard as the game is progressing and patches get shit out.  Alot of legendaries are still crap, but there's a gradual move away from that, and there's always going to be best in slot items, and there's always going to be garbage legendaries that exist purely to be destroyed.  Early on, certain Rifts were like a I Am Legend Simulator in terms of monster density, but that's been mostly fixed.  Hell, Blizzard even removed the Pandamonium Fortress map from the possible rift map pool.

No, my big issue is simple.  Think back to my description of the Diablo 2 Farm Journey.  There, when you had your god character, you farmed to be able to gear out new adventure dudes and dudettes.  However, Reaper of Souls presents a big fucking problem here.  Loot 2.0, while great when you're building a character, is not so great when that character is built, since 75% of all drops are designed for your character.  Put another way, when you're in the ultimate Torment level and killing everything without a problems, you are for all intents basically done with that character unless for whatever surreal reason you're wanting to make another character in the same class.  I'm almost-not-quite at that level, but it's sort of depressing me that once I reach that level, my options are:

A) Be like those weird streamers that still farm at the highest level so they can possible get a new version of the best in slot item that already have with +4 more vitality
B) Roll a new character and start the grind nightmare all over again.

Blizzard obviously recognizes this problem and is planning to reintroduce ladders where everyone starts from scratch, but this seems pretty goddamned silly, to say the least.  So this is where the dumb nerd with zero game design experience suggest something that, for whatever reason, I have not seen anyone else offer:

Give an option to remove Loot 2.0.

By this I mean making it so any legendary that drops (aside from those set and class-specific items) can roll any stat combination.  This would result in alot of the same retarded garbage that I had to wade through in vanilla D3, and that's the point.  This would be something that only completely pimped out characters would use and get any sort of farming efficiency out of, giving them a chance to find that powerful item to stick on a new character so they wouldn't waste ten hours in the kiddy pool before graduating to Torment school.

It's weird to say it, but I actually have high hopes for Reaper of Souls.  If anything, Blizzard actually seems to have figured out the Élan vital of loot grinds, and while it's fucking absurd that it took a hundred dollars to get there, at least we're there.

samuel kite ate my copy of fallout 3

I've been playing lots of Fallout 3.  I actually had tried it once before, but it crashed on my computer despite my attempts to get around its well known issues with multicore processors.  This time, however, I realized that my workaround failed because I had altered the property files on my giant hard drive, not realizing that the game installed itself on both that drive and my SSD.  Hilarious, Bethesda.  It's a fun game, but not something I really felt worthwhile talking about.

But then I checked actionbutton, and glory be, here is Samuel Kite talking about how much he hates Fallout 3 and Skyrim, even more than he hated Kingdoms of Amalur under the auspices of a review of Dungeon Defenders.  I say "under the auspices" because literally less than 1% of the review is actually about Dungeon Defenders, and the remaining 99% is "god I hate modern video games."  It also, despite being written in June, had exactly one comment (that I couldn't access because maybe they're moving servers).

Maybe it was because of that one comment, but I did something I rarely do for actionbutton articles: I read the entire goddamned thing. Well, the entire thing minus the opening five or so paragraphs talking about the cultural exegesis of game design or something that maybe Ray Kurzweil could translate. And you know what?  It made me think a little.  I mean Kite is a terrible writer, but congrats dude, you compelled me to think for about an hour whether I was actually enjoying Fallout 3 or just being tricked by evil game overlords, ala some fat dude with his over a crystal ball as I kill my three hundredth raider.  The answer is that of course I was being tricked, but...

--

Now you may have clicked my link and gone "oh hell no I am not reading all this."  Don't worry, because since this is an article inspired by NEW GAMES JOURNALISM, the points actually presented can be distilled to about a hundred words.  Here's the fivescore for this review:

"I enjoyed older games where I genuinely roleplayed.  However, as gaming has changed into a widespread cultural phenomenon, the notion of gaming, especially rpgs, has become soulless repetitive tasks without a complicated system because it's easier to make money from these.    Skyrim and Fallout are bad because they are particularly emblematic of this problem, going into an infinite series of rooms where you have a chance of getting junk that really doesn't matter.  Instead, please look at Axis and Allies for an example of good games, otherwise we are becoming social media in everything we do, and this is very scary.  vibio gaems." SO.

So the biggest problem I had with this review was his argument that Kingdoms of Amalur was a better role playing game than whatever Bethesda has pumped out (though still shitty, of course).  His reason for this was: "KoAR is exhilarating to run through. It’s a large world but when you head for the horizon and push the sprint button to start trucking, you don’t feel like frustrated like you won’t get where you want to go before you’re bored–you feel excited. Exploring is interesting. Perception of movement speed is a real thing."

When I was growing up in Arkansas, my house had like ten acres of relative wilderness, full of hills and trees and even a stream.  I used to come up with lots of stories and adventures around these things.  My soul died awhile ago so that no longer exists, but I remember enough to say that anyone who thinks that Kingdoms of Amalur was "exhilarating to run through" compared to Fallout 3 is either full of bullshit or lived in a Bioshock style bathysphere until they went to college. His reason (I think) is that the main character in Amalur moves his legs really fast, even if it's just an illusion, and that means that it seems fun.

Really?  This is why "serious" video game criticism is such a gigantic joke.  It's like if Cahiers du Cinema wrote an article on how Patch Adams was a better film than Ms. Doubtfire due to the steadily receeding hairline of Robin Williams providing a simalcrum of empathy with all the balding manchildren of the world.  But I'm digressing, and unlike certain people, I consider this a bad writing habit.

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To be clear, his criticisms of Fallout 3's hollowness aren't wrong.  I felt a sense of shame at his pointing out how incredibly dumb the endless amount of checking every Metal Box, Box of Ammunition, and Medical Box is and how antithetical it is to actual gameplay.    Alot of modern video games have fallen onto this bizarre idea of having a billion little containers in their open world, 1% of which containing stuff actually useful  in your journeys and the rest being utter bullshit items that flaccidly attempt to convey the illusion that a society existed, or once existed, in this random gas station.  Fallout 3 at least has the forethought to make most of the dumb items components in random crafted items, or the means to make money in repeatable quests, but it's still incredibly empty.

On the other hand, isn't that pretty much how all video games are?  Kite really liked Left 4 Dead, and I do too, but what's the meaty substance of that game?  That is to say, aren't these hordes of zombies basically existing in the same distracting, meaningless roles of Fallout 3's containers?  I open a Metal Box and find a piece of scrap metal, I shoot a zombie and watch it explode, maybe with three other people watching in an attempt to create a sense of community.  Kite doesn't even mention V.A.T.S., which is sort of strange since it's the most perfect parody of our facile attempts to "control" video game action ever created.  Video games are by definition stimulus-response, and attacking Fallout 3 and alot of other modern games because they're a little more honest and cynical about their attempts to addict you makes you seem less like being "a shrieker of terrifying holy truths" (an actual quote, jesus christ) and more like an old man who doesn't want to admit that video games have and always will be at their core a gigantic con.

Or maybe he thinks that.  I can't tell, because despite what some people will try to tell you, writing like this isn't stream of consciousness, it's a sirocco of fearfulness, specifically the fear of having genuine opinions about things as opposed to coy blase whining about everything.

While thinking about all this, I loaded up Fallout 3 to explore a little more of Washington DC.  It's easily the worst area of the game, since it's filled with obnoxious Super Mutants that take a million hits to kill for little reward.  Also, rather than just letting you just walk around the streets and admire the landmarks, almost every intersection has unpassable debris, forcing you to use the subway, which is a linear series of the same three rooms filled with zombies and more Super Mutants.  Eventually, I figured out how to reach the destination I was trying to find to turn in a quest reward, and while I was trying to find the entrance, some guy with a loudspeaker started yelling at me about worms and the sun influencing John 3:16.  I wandered into an alley, where suddenly everything exploded and I died.  I tried the other end, where some random guy was hiding from the same dude, and telling me he couldn't move because he would blow up the alley.  Thanks to my incredible charisma (6 out of 10), I convinced him to run into the alley and talk to him.  Both people promptly exploded.

I still like Fallout 3.

Kirby Super Star Ultra

I've been deliberately avoiding writing in this blog because I really do not want to talk about Super Star Ultra.  This isn't some ridiculous "oh it's gonna be so bad it hurts my eyyyyyes" reluctance to pass judgment, it's that I just have nothing interesting to say about Super Star Ultra.  It's a good, fun game, but good in such a dull, retreaded way that I'm prevented from gushing about anything.  Like, man, did you not play the original?  Well, you should get this.  Otherwise, I guess it's still okay?  I don't know leave me alone *curl up in fetal position*

One problem I have with approaching this game is that I've played Kirby Super Star for the SNES so many fucking times I don't even know if I like it anymore.  The concept of Super Star, giving the player multiple bite-sized games with slightly different mechanics as opposed to one big boi playthrough is clever enough, appealing to the central attraction of Kirby games (bright, easy distraction from the crushing hell of modern life).  And even now, after roughly two dozen play throughs, I would still be more than happy to redo Revenge of Meta Knight.*  But the rest of the segments?  Fuck, man.  I loved them as a kid, but now the algorithm has changed in inperceptable ways, like I'm in Jacob's Ladder and Super Star is dancing with me but out the corner of my eye I think I see Squeak Squad slowly crawling from between its legs.

Because that's the primary issue of Super Star and Super Star Ultra:  Once again, it's just too lazily easy.  Granted, it doesn't have the unrelenting sameness of non-difficulty that Squeak Squad features, but there's still virtually no point in the main game where something is going to even momentarily throw your dinosaur gaming brain for a loop.  Ultra changes very little from the core games, if anything, though adding a few modes that mostly are somehow even easier (I'm pretty certain at this point I could do the Meta Knight mode blindfolded) or, in the case of the updated arenas, try to respond to the ease of the original game but holy shit I see your padding mall order batman, get out of my face.  The only addition I genuinely like was the return of King DeDeDe, if just for the fact that someone on the staff recognized that Revenge of Metaknight was far and way the best thing the original had to offer.

Ultimately, I guess it comes down to whether one religiously played the original Super Star.  Unless you're some sort of weird Kirby fanatic, there's not a whole lot going for Ultra if you've already beaten the original black and blue.  Still, if for some reason you never bothered doing that, you should thank the gods for your luck and get Ultra, because then you will probably never hate yourself again.

*- I love it when games have those "HOW IS HE DOING THIS OUR DEFENSES ARE SO LAME" baddy conversations that you can hear, to the point it makes me sad when I don't hear them, because they have to be astoundingly easy to program.

Kirby: Squeak Squad

I don't remember much about Squeak Squad, but I remember when I played it.

It was roughly into the second year of law school.  I had borrowed the game from a friend, and was deciding to play it while I got my oil changed.  I hate having my oil changed, from the cost of having it done, the fear someone will do something horribly wrong to my car, to the embarrassment that I, a normally competent human male, cannot change the oil myself.  But I am more terrified of having my engine explode, so here I was, ordering some horrible Burger King abomination and turning on my DS, for the SQUEAK SQUAD.  For an hour, I felt about as challenged from the game as I did using a free hand to move fries into my mouth.  When the car was ready, I saved the game, saw that I was already 35% complete, and said a silent prayer for the people that paid like thirty dollars for this shit.

And believe me, Squeak Squad is shit, for the same reason I can see why people hated Return to Dreamland for the Wii.  Both feature the same goddamned gameplay we saw since the NES days, and while I'm sure that's goddamned exciting to nerds who think retro by itself is somehow worthwhile, it's also snoozetown for me.  I realize I said in my Canvas Curse review that I liked Kirby because it was easy, but there's a difference between easy and easy.  Canvas, at least for half the game, was engaging, but not frustrating, new areas requesting perhaps a few seconds of your brain farting a synapse before proceeding.  There is literally nothing engaging about Squeak Squad if you have ever played a traditional Kirby side-scroller.  Or hell, any side scroller.  Hell, have you ever just held a game boy in your hands?  Congrats, you can probably beat Squeak Squad.


The apparently element of "challenge" is that to fully clear a stage, you need to grab treasure chests.  However, the title bad guys also try to grab it, which means you have to complete some pathetic puzzle and/or fight a mouse boss.  The mouse bosses are sort of fun, but a problem exists in that there are literally only 4 main baddies in the Squeak Squad, and no, their fighting tactics do not change at all.  There is strong guy, ninja guy, mouse in saucer, and main mouse and I don't even know if you fight the main mouse until the end so let me amend my statement to only THREE main baddies.

BISHY SQUEAKY SQUADUU ^_____^ COPYRIGHT FAT GIRL 2009 DO NOT STEAL

I actually visited the wiki page for the game to see what I could remember besides "stupid easy" and "fight the same 4 bosses for treasure chests."  Wikipedia told me that there are apparently modifications to your powers that drastically change how they work.  I DON'T REMEMBER THIS.  Like I think there was a UFO power, but otherwise the gameplay was completely forgotten to me.  I'm generally not one to completely forget something I played to near 100% completion, so I'm going to make a safe bet and assume that the modification powers were both really poorly implemented and completely unnecessary to completion aside from those areas that forced you to use them because we all like that riiiiiight?

Jesus what else am I supposed to say here.  This is not a game, it is a nap simulator with fucking rats and memories of burgers that upset my stomach and my own failure of masculinity.  Do not play this.  Just play Kirby Superstar or OH NO WHAT AM I SAYING END TRANSMISSION

Kirby: Canvas Curse (2005)

I really like Kirby games.

For me, Kirby has always been the perfection of "casual action."  You don't play Kirby to be stressed out, but instead to get slackjawed and murder waddle-dees or some shit.  There's that pink puffball, wonder what wacky adventure against dark matter or another forgettable monster boss he's going to get into.  Oh great, got the sword ability, time to beat the game.

With that purpose of these games in mind, it makes sense why so many Kirby games seem to revolve around villains gimping Kirby in one way or another.  We, the audience playing, don't want to be concerned with a whole lot of unrealized potential in our playing, so thank you Dark Poopsock for making Kirby into a golf ball now I just have to hit him into holes.  Oh great, Kirby is yarn, so much for worrying about copy abilites and and floating, wow these graphics are soooo preeeeettyyyyy.  So on and so forth.  The day that Kirby has upgrade points and combo actions is going to be the day we see a massive commercial failure for HAL.

So roughly six months after the DS launched, we got Kirby: Canvas Curse.  A villain transforms Kirby into a literal ball, and HE NEEDS YOUR HELP.  No, don't touch those complicated buttons or d-pad, this is stylus only.  Just lay the DS down on your desk, and use your free hand for some cookies or something.  Aw yeah.

The big control scheme in Canvas is that, as Kirby is a ball, he cannot move on his own.  You can make him dash by tapping on him, but more convenient and versatile is the ability to use the stylus to paint lines on the screen, which Kirby can ride upon, regardless of height or angle.  The only limitation is that you have a limited paint gauge which refills when you're not drawing, but you will virtually never be in danger of running out of paint unless you're making Kirby ride up 30-feet phallic symbols (hint: this is the best part).  There are also enemies, but they  can be simply tapped on to stun for easy pickins' by Kirby, so they exist entirely as moving power-ups.  Unfortunately, all ability changes do is replace your dash ability with some other sort of vague mobility power that you use maybe two or three times in contrived puzzle sections, some of which involve you not being about to use your paint ability.  I could give you a precise rundown of every ability in Kirby Superstar, but I cannot remember what any ability in Canvas Curse does.  Maybe fire gives you a horizontal fireball??  Ultimately, running completely contrary to previous Kirby games, powers are too lame and useless that unless the game forces you to grab one, you're going to be best off with regular Kirbs.  What a depressing situation!

On the other hand, the painting ability is a wonderful.  Almost all DS games with lots of touchscreen control are pretty awful, or at best suffer in quality due to said touchscreen gimmicks.  Canvas Curse, especially for being released so early in the DS's lifecycle, has the perfect sort of touch control, with only a few points  where I recall going "I didn't touch the screen I did not this is bullshit."  For like half of the game it was like being on a magical cruise where despite some kind of obnoxious guests and a table with a short leg, you still loved every minute.

But then you slowly realize that, while the sights are magical, it's all sort of the same sight and why am I on this boss minigame again.    The touch control is great, but when the entirety of your roughly 8-10 hour gameplay revolves around "draw line, watch kirby roll on line, occasionally draw other line to block enemy shot," boredom crawls in and will not leave your basement.  The environments do basically nothing to liven things up, with you visiting thrilling locales such as "ice stage with ice spikes that fall from ceiling" and "fire stage where lava rises from the floor."  The game rarely adds anything to spice up the formula, so you're stuck gawking at the touchscreen and little else.  There are collectable medals and time trials and "conserve your paint meter" trials, but winning the trials are largely a matter of trial and error, with the hardest stages forcing you hope the camera doesn't lurch out of control and cost you another restart, which I guess invalidates my previous complement about the regular game not having any control issues.  The unlocks are mostly total garbage, with the best things being a few extra stages and having balls of King Dedede and Metaknight, the latter could be fun to play around with if the stage design wasn't so goddamned boring in the first place.

Canvas Curse isn't a bad game, and in the context of a stylus-only near launch game for the DS, it's also pretty good.  Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough content to manufacture a great title.  Would Kirby find his way and not release a game that I had to add a million provisos to?

Eventually.

So is today wacky opposite day in game reviews

Here's Tim Rogers utterly giving up and doing his best to emulate garbage game review language and getting pageviews via trolling about Skyrim in the most mundane way possible (link omitted because god damn if I'm going to give more ad revenue to that chucklefuck and Kotaku).  Can you tell the stylistic differences between his review and Lisa talking about video game cereal???

(no, you can't, you stupid, stupid man.)

And meanwhile, TheBestGamers, who have previously done some of the most obnoxious, hackneyed, and poorly over the top troll reviews, come out with basically the perfect denunciation of Minecraft and what a piece of garbage that game (and its creator/community/illusion that Minecraft is any more legitimate of a form of gaming than Angry Birds or Zynga) is.

Earth is weird.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom

I really shouldn't like this game.  Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, like fucking goddamned Breath of Fire 1, represents the bad side of the supposed "golden age" of snes rpgs.  Released by Taito at about the same time that BoF was disgorged by Capcom, it's sort of depressing to realize that at this point Squaresoft had released both Final Fantasy IV and Secret of Mana, while Atlus had put out Shin Megami Tensei.

Lufia is the living definition of generic jrpg.  It's possibly even more generic than BoF, which at least had some clunky character fusion dynamics and multiple party members.  Lufia gives you four party members the entire game, so I hope you're willing to put up with their kooky adventures for like 25-30 hours.  There is exactly one side quest, which is a glorified fetch quest that in the later stages reaches near impossible levels to complete unless you break down and take out an faq.  Combat is basic as imaginable, even having the (every baby console gamers rage now) "targetting an already dead enemy group leads to a missed attack on air" trait.

Easily my biggest problem with Lufia, though, lies within the graphics, especially in dungeon areas.  Here's an easy to understand pie graph that details literally the proportion every non-overworld area in the game where you fight a monster:

It should also be noted that when I say caves, I'm not fudging the numbers and including variants on the cave theme, like maybe some crypts or a dragon's nest or something.  No, they are all goddamned caves with the same elements in all of them, the biggest change being that some have a slightly different color scheme.  I take back all the mean stuff I said about Breath of Fire having unimaginative settings.  At least BoF had those cool rats running around in the caves.

And yet.  And yet.  While eventually I just went FUCK THIS SHIT to BoF, I played through and beat Lufia with a bare minimum of teeth gnashing.  What gives?

Challenge, for one.  I can't think of a single point during my illustrious BoF journey where I felt vaguely threatened by the baddies.  Lufia, on the other hand, is very good at utterly wrecking your life.  The vast majority of battles in the game force you to consider the capabilities of all your party, adjust tactics, and then scream at the monitor when 3/4s of your party is paralyzed and slowly picked off.  It's a good thing the battles are generally fairly engaging, because the game's encounter rate is patently ridiculous.  Sometimes there's some mercy, but I experienced multiple instances of "step fight step fight step fight" phenomena.  As noted above, the biggest challenge in fights is usually derived from status effects, which roughly 2/3rds of the monsters in the game have the ability to inflict, often casting on the entire group with a 50/50 chance of success for each member.  DO THE MATH, and shake your fists at the heavens.

One should note that this challenge factor does not apply to bosses.  While they can hit hard, they also seem to be more obviously designed to challenge your party's specific capabilities at that time, rather than a designer coming up with an enemy that is sort of annoying by itself and suddenly the game decides you need six of them.  The final bosses are especially jokes, with several of them casting magic and status effects that might be threatening if you didn't have a magic mirror spell that doesn't fade away after it is hit.

With such challenge, one naturally looks for any sort of advantage, and here comes what really kept me going for thirty hours: trying to figure out the game's bizarre stat system.

Nothing you do in Lufia seems to really affect your character's roles.  Your main guy is the dude that hits things hard and has alot of buffing magic, the green haired guy hits things really hard, the blue haired chick casts magic and gets hit really hard, the yellow haired chick also casts magic but has an enemy group-affecting bow.  It took me the entire game to eventually learn this, but there is no tinkering with what your characters do.  In one of the more humorously cynical motions by whoever was in charge of mechanics, there's even a set of color specific rings that correspond to each character's hair color and naturally bend towards that character's statistical strengths.

But say you do what the game wants and just give your dudes the equipment they're supposed to have.  The game doesn't care.  There's never a point in the game where you get some piece of equipment that makes you feel like a king badass, even for a little bit.  Most successful jRPGs succeed by effectively hiding your limited choices through lots of distracting bells and whistles.  Lufia proudly hangs a picture on your wheel stating that "no enemy will ever be more complicated to kill than 'have girl hit it then have a dude hit it' so keep buying those swords we've already adjusted enemy defense."  In addition, the game's RNG for damage taken and received is large enough that if you really did a sword that meaningfully affected your mean damage, it's going to take awhile to calculate.

In the midst of all this, we have the rings.  Lufia stuffs your face with rings.  Some are obvious, doing various stat buffs that naturally affect nothing.  But others I was never able to figure out.  The hell is a "Fly Ring," I ask no one in particular.  The game sure doesn't want to tell you, as it certainty doesn't change your stats.  But it's worth 2000G!!!  That must be pretty important, right?  It was only after I finished the game with all my rings taking up a full page in my 5 page maximum that I learned that the Fly Ring made you stronger against flying enemies, and most of the other unexplained rings had similar, utterly worthless bonuses.  Jesus Christ.  It's a testament to how awful the lack of explanation of equipment is that Taito apparently felt bad enough about it that Lufia II leaves no leather helm un-lored.

Perhaps the worst thing, stat-wise, was the conundrum of agility.  The strangest part of Lufia's combat system is that while you generally start out your battles by giving everyone a command, one combat starts flying, your character's turns and actions appear seemingly appear at random.  Sometimes my executioner green guy would attack first, other times he would go last.  This wouldn't be such a problem if not for the whole "no enemy means whiff" and the fact that one screw up can easily mean, at the very least, spending more minutes of your life on the magic screen, trying to wrangle the malevolent cursor to actually heal your people.  So, in total frustration, I ended up placing as much agility boosting power on my bow-user, even feeding her all the microscopic agility boost potions, since theoretically that means she would go first and I could soften up as many bads as possible.  

If anything, she was even slower.

Ultimately, I guess I did sort of hate Lufia, but perhaps out of residual guilt of Breath of Fire, I kept going.  In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to pay some young boys money to put on a puppet show of the plot so I could get all the amusing references in Lufia II, which after playing for roughly fifteen hours I can say is so far second only to Chrono Trigger for favorite SNES rpg.  oh boy a review where I don't have to grit my teeth and bitch, fun

The Coolest Guy: Persona 3 FES

Escapism in video games is a curious thing.  I'm not just talking about the fact that video games place us in the lives of people whose decisions actually have a purpose, but additionally give the player himself the illusion that his actions are to be celebrated as tasks are accomplished.  Other forms of media are also rife with the first form of escapism, but save for the primative forms as seen in shit like American Idol, you never see much of the second outside video games.  The two types of escapism are closely intertwined and strengthened in video games, not only are you identifying with some hero, you feel as though you have some form of control over his actions although designer choices limit your actual involvement to about the same extent of deciding whether to keep turning the pages of a book.  Most games naturally try to hide this fact from the player, both through sneaky game mechanics or making the protagonist someone either blank-slatey or flawed enough that we don't feel ridiculous for having this guys life for 20-25 hours.

Persona 3 is pretty amazing how it utterly lays bare its contempt for the player and his attempts to gain escape from his/her own terrible life.  Your character is a wonder boy; no sport or subject is beyond his grasp, there's never a need to really try to make friends, people throw themselves at you and always call you, never a need to seek them out.  Even in the magical fantasy fighting world, you're clearly top dog, being the only one that can summon multiple beings of indiscriminate destruction (and the only one that doesn't decide that an elemental break spell is totally a worthy use of magic points).  No one ever seems that perturbed by your completely perfect perfecthood; one character gets jealous for like 2 weeks and subsequently feels bad and apologizes to you with no real effect on the game itself.

While this degree of flawlessness is bizarre, by itself I don't argue that escapism is affected.  I raved about Stocke is Radiant Historia, after all, and he was for all intents a slightly more gruff version of Persona 3's protagonist, doing shit like the "I just mastered what took you a decade to learn" and having every character fall over themselves in worshipping you.

The difference between Stocke and Persona 3's protagonist (we're just going to call him CHUGGO for the rest of the review, shall we) is twofold.  In Radiant Historia, while you controlled Stocke, he sort of felt as his own man, the player himself was just a sort of subconscious along for the ride who occasionally told him to take the obviously wrong choice because you wanted that time map totally filled out.  Chuggo, on the other hand, is you yourself and nothing else.  You tell him what to do for everything, and never says anything that you aren't selecting from a list that has no point.

There's also the setting.  Stocke is a pretty perfect dude, but he's also head of a kingdom's intelligence operations.  It's understandable and expected that he's totally qualified and kicks amounts of ass all the time.  Chuggo is a high school student.  If you're a person playing an Atlus game, there's a fair assumption that you did not exactly peak in high school.  It's fine for you to admit that, don't feel bad!!!!  But now you are faced with a game that is essentially going "hey look at this dude who is in the JAPANESE high school who does everything without trying, everything including fucking a girl that has been scientifically tested to appeal to your greasy interests (for the record, Elizabeth)."  You're not in an escapist fantasy anymore, you're strapped to a machine that is going to feed you all the DOUGHNUTS IN THE WORLD.  Some gamers are going to be Homer Simpson and be totally fine with this, but at least for me, fantasy was rubbing a little too hard against the fabric of my reality and giving me a boner that I could never tell my girlfriend about.

The biggest issue, as alluded to above, is that Chuggo has no real personality aside from "perfect."  He is a tofu god filled with gold, and the game essentially forces you to take over the controls, pretending that you can do everything easily and sexily.  This wouldn't be an issue if you could at least impose some of your personality on the character, or at even pretend to impose it when it had no effect on how the game went.  But Persona 3 isn't going to have that shit, no fucking sir.

The only time in the game you actually get to express yourself (aside from choosing to pick that cute little mitama as your point man against the sleeping table) is during social link conversations, when you have to say correct things so you can make your personas big and bad when you fuse them up.  You might think on your first social link, talking to the guy that wants to fuck his teacher, that the conversations are sort of a test of helping to guide various characters in correctly choosing a path through life via careful logic.  But this is absolutely incorrect.  Chuggo's role in people's lives in Persona 3 is very simple: enable.

I mean, sure, you could tell the sexually confused French exchange student that sewing a dress for his uncle back home is probably not the best way to stay in Japan, or counsel the young girl that running away from home isn't a good idea, and that choosing which parent she needs to stay with is a choice she has to make.  But, then you won't get invisible progress that makes your personas better, culminating in a special MYSTERY PERSONA that could be either utterly game breaking or terrible useless, depending on who you're talking to (indeed, the golden rule of Persona is that the less interesting a given social link is, the better the associated persona arcana is gameplay wise).  So if you want to get those shiny mythological figures as interpreted by a back issue of Heavy Metal, you are required to be bland as humanly possible, grunting in vague agreement when people tell you dumb things.

Leigh Alexander said that this phenomenon was "suggesting that all others ever really know of your “self” is the mask you choose to show them." That'd be a good theory if you knew what the fuck your actual self was in Persona 3.  As it stands, I think the actual truth is that Persona 3 does, for all intents and purposes, place one into the rule of someone your real-life self could never hope to be even today, then deny you of even experiencing the fruits of that role by forcing your personality out of the equation entirely.  In other words, Tartarus ain't just a pretty boring dungeon that comes out of your high school at midnight.  Going back to what I was talking about above, Persona 3 takes the two kinds of escapism in video games and forces you to experience how empty they are when the artifice is stripped out.  I still beat the game after one hundred twenty hours, mostly due to one of the best fucking soundtracks around, fun battles and art design, and a plot that more often than not fucked with my mind in a good way, but I have to wonder about those people cosplaying as Chuggo.

Radiant Historia (Nintendo DS)

Okay so this was a pretty rad RPG.  I'm not going to carefully discuss every stupid minutae of this game, because let's face it this is more about me mulling over the game to better understand it than finding the JIN SAY QUOI of the menu system (which I will say was amazingly well-done, aside from deciding to hide a character's skills in the stats section, or giving any real indication of how powerful said skills are though it's not like the game punishes you for using them in any way).  So, what made this game so rad?

1) Stocke.  Stocke Stocke Stocke.  In a modern era where RPG protagonists are either embarrassing pastiches of Shinji Ikari and John Wayne, tilting towards whichever extreme best suits some retarded storyline, Stocke is one of the very few RPG heroes I actively rooted for. How does he do it?

a) A personality capable of intelligent thought.  I think we can agree that most RPG main guys, despite their central role in the plot, tend to be pushed through things.  OH NO THE ORC KING HAS ATTACKED OUR VILLAGE QUICKLY YOU ARE THE LEGENDARY HERO.  While Stocke also has destiny thrust upon him, he reacts to the news with a "whatever okay let's fix this shit."  He considers ramifications, but also actually does things without needing player input.  I still kind of like Persona 3 a little more than Radiant Historia, but going back to the former took a fair bit of time getting used to my character being less a fleshed character of his own and more of a depressing simulacrum of what a lonely nerd would imagine a true high school experience to be like.

b) He's such a fun character.  Radiant Historia manages to avoid the "BUT THOU MUST" yes/no dichotomy that usually suffices for character development by plainly characterizing Stocke as an asshole that gets shit done.  I'm sure there's some hardcore RPG players that were mad they had no input in how the character they were controlling was going to react, but holy shit fuck these guys right they probably smell really bad.  It's fun to see an RPG, let alone a JRPG, where while all the other characters are going "WHY MUST WAR BE SO PAINFUL HOW CAN WE SURVIVE," the guy you're controlling responds with "jesus christ let's kill some bitches and be home in time for dinner."  It's a good thing too, because the game is so fucking chatty with its story (though people complaining loudly about this detail have clearly never played Golden Sun or its sequels, which featured 50% more talky and 300% less plot advancement per word GOD YOU'VE REPEATED THE SAME CONCEPT TWENTY TIMES DUDE LIGHTHOUSES STONES I GET IT CHRIST)

2) Other characters aren't so bad?  Honestly, it's like a 50/50 deal.  Some guys, like the starting healer sword guy, are pretty generic and lame, but Historia does get a special award for making the 9-year-old girl character genuinely likeable and not OH GOD DIE.  Which is pretty good, because she's also by far the best character in the entire game, thus allowing me to bypass the conundrum present in alot of RPGs where a really good character on paper is ruined by having a personality so wretched you can't bear to deal with them.  Yeah, fuck you too Ken.  But there's no characters I really actively disliked, and even the lame healer sword guy revealed some surprising sides if you bother with sidequests, so hurray for that.  Even better, the worst character in the game is also the one you'll see the least of, so you won't even have to worry about not using him in any point ever!

3) The battle system!  While I have alot of issues with the battle system, it's vaguely creative and is much more often fun rather than not, and occasionally is an utter blast to use.  Without getting into things, every battle has the enemies arranges on a 3x3 grid, usually, though not always, with each enemy taking up a single spot in the grid.  You have a regular attack, but generally you will be using MP-consuming skills (as there is almost never a point where you will run out of MP provided you don't play like a spaz, not to mention that I was  drowning in items by the end of the game).  Skills are not just magic, but also include abilities that either move the baddies around on the grid, or target specific sections of the grid regardless if there are enemies there or not.  The big trick with the game is using skills to bunch enemies together, culminating in one final nuke attack to deal massive damage to everyone you swept up in your combo.  Generally, when battles don't have any added issues, the system is simple and fun to use, especially as you get new party members with new ways to explode shit.  So, what are the issues?

The primacy of magic is probably the biggest problem I have with the game.  The position an enemy occupies on the vertical part of the grid plays a major role in the effect of physical attacks on both you and the enemy.  If an enemy is on the furthest column, any physical attack he gives will be severely reduced versus if he was on the front row, but any physical attack you make will also be horribly reduced.  But hey, guess what kind of attack is completely affected by distance?  Boom.  Alot of battles against things that I couldn't immediately kill with a first round combo usually resulted in me pushing them to the back row while whatever mages I had slowly ice spell'd him into oblivion.  It also doesn't help that generally most trash enemies attack purely physically, and even if they use spells, usually the best party members in the game follow a pattern of having terribad defense and physical attack, but godly magic offense and defense.  As a result, two of the three physical characters in the game are unbearably gimped, with the third being useful only for two moves that literally break the game in their power.  So, are there any problems with the magical characters?  Not really, except for the 

Randomly placed grid spanning bosses.  It's definitely a curious decision on the part of the game maker: "I've made a battle system that rewards strategic thinking over simply mashing the attack button, now let's add a ton of bosses that cannot actually be moved!"  Also, by ton of bosses, I actually mean recolors of the same fucking giant spider.    Battles with these spoiler not really bosses are easily the worst part of the game:  Suddenly, my game has transmuted into generic RPG turn-based combat where I hit and heal and hit and heal, which wouldn't even be so bad if the game was built for that sort of thing, but generally enemies tend to hit like trucks if you don't dispatch things quickly, so the fights tend to go hit heal revive revive hit revive get hit by random aoe fuck you spell get pissed restart game cheese fight by using limit break ripoff abilities to remove boss turns and amass giant combo to kill.

Finally, there's a pretty weird ass difficulty curve.  The first quarter of the game is pretty basic stuff, though featuring some tricky fights if you aren't properly leveled.  The second quarter is EASILY the hardest section of the game, where the game suddenly places you in battles against like six enemies at a time, all of whom are pretty good at murdering you while your own characters have basically learned nothing useful for the past ten levels, culminating in a boss fight that is nearly impossible to beat unless you break under pressure like me and realize that you need a character that you will never use again.  The last half of the game, however, gets progressively easier as you unlock the skills you should have had like eight hours ago and suddenly you're killing everything in a single round and bosses just cry to message boards about you.  The final boss especially is only a threat if you haven't learned that getting combos in battle drastically increases your damage.

4) A pretty good game length.  I finished Radiant Historia in about 30 hours.  Part of that length was based off me using faqs to locate sidequests, though I didn't complete them all (my reaction to the optional bosses was a "NO THANK YOU SIR").  I echo a complaint from another blogger critic (whose sidequest guide I gleefully used) that the game drags towards the middle, though by the end everything reaches a satisfactory pace.  Still, compared to the tactic of many rpgs in just forcing endless circles on you to reach some magical gameplay length mark (fuck you golden sun seriously), this was pretty damned good.

5) The ending was so great.  Especially the (spoiler not really) super secret ending you get if you complete certain sidequests, which I am not going to spoil because it is seriously worth getting and made me grin so goddamned hard.

DS Games no one cares about review medley

So I decided this weekend to try a bunch of DS games that I'd always heard about, but never actually played.  THE DRAMATIC RESULTS AS FOLLOWS:

Star Fox Command (got roughly four endings): At the risk of blowing my cred as a nerd who's willing to call out series other than Sonic, this actually wasn't a terrible game.  It's not actually good by any means, but it actually kind of impressed me that with all of the potential ways they could have fucked up a touch screen Star Fox, it came out just kind of clunky and dumb.

The big gimmick of the game is that the missions take place on a turned-based strategic map, where you move your ships around to attack enemy formations.  Pretty much every battle takes place on the open field range like that first robot boss in Star Fox 64, and the objective of almost every battle is finding the target enemy in a field of other enemies and blowing them up within a certain time limit.  Control isn't exactly awkward (the bottom screen and stylus is used to control the arwing, with buttons and circle-makin' doing barrel rolls and shit, all  buttons fire a lazer).  The only obnoxious parts are when you have to kill evil fast ace-type ships like star wolf, as while the game compensates regular trash for easier shooting, the aces still act like this is a game with human controls, and meanwhile I'm trying to remember which button does the loop and which on does the 180 degree turn (chance of success: none).

The other big thing of the game is the fact that you can choose your paths, which would be nice if the game had any sort of bridging mechanism between missions.  Instead, if you choose a plot branch that doesn't necessarily make sense, the game just tries to smash all the character motivations into some melodramatic space opera stew that really doesn't work too well. Still, at least two of the endings involves making Star Fox all depressed cause he can't get yiffy blue fox tail, so that's a plus.  VERDICT: WORTH CHEAP AS HELL

Batman: The Brave and the Bold (beaten): I beat this in 3 hours.  And I don't just mean beaten in the minimum amount of content beaten, I mean EVERY POSSIBLE THING.  It's a pretty big shame too, since this is a surprisingly awesome little game.  In keeping with the (also surprisingly awesome) show, the game is a stage select go beat some bads deal, with each stage featuring a different DC hero teaming up with Batman.  Each hero has a variety of powers, with some being a joy to control (Plasticman and of all things Aquaman), other being death incarnate but kind of lame to play (Green Arrow and Green Lantern), and others existing purely to tag in with specific platforming sections (Red Tornado why do you fucking exist).  Batman himself is perfectly fine, with tons of beatdown options, including items that you can buy and items you gain from completing stages, ranging from the useless to the utterly broken "belt sword" that is literally a red-colored Z-saber from the Mega Man X series. Control is incredibly fun, especially combat, which has sort of a Monster Tale attribute without having to feed Batman doggy biscuits every thirty seconds.

Again, while I don't think anyone likes filler, THREE HOURS.  FOR EVERYTHING.  The worst thing was that some stages started to repeat themselves in platforming.  I mean, come on, just steal some gimmicks from Mega Man 2 I won't tell anyone I swear.  It doesn't really help that gameplay is pretty easy peasy.  Even the optional challenge stages are generally simple if you remember that you have a invincibility frame roll that completely fucks over baddy AI.  VERDICT: WORTH REALLY CHEAP AS HELL

Monster House (beaten on hard mode because I am amazing):  Every game reviewer that bothered to play this game called it an homage to Smash TV, and they're half right..  I never watched the movie (DOOM HOUSE?), but the game itself is three kids going through a basically linear series of rooms shooting books.  The difference from Smash TV is that shooting is controlled by touching the touch screen, ala Geometry Wars for the DS.  Each kid has a vaguely different basic attack, with a straight shot, vaguely straight short-range rapid fire, and low-rate spread which sounds really good until you realize that enemies take either one hit to kill or a million.

This was actually a fun fucking game, though.  Granted, I love the arena style splatterfests, so I might be biased, but the gameplay actually felt somewhat balanced, which is sort of amazing for a film tie-in that wasn't lauded by manbabies as a game that CHANGES EVERYTHING.  The biggest problem with the game (aside from length, but no one can be surprised there) was that since your player character is a polygon eight-year-old rather than a straight sprite, determining a hitbox is an exercise in futility, making any enemy that shoots projectiles a doom train headed for your genitalia   VERDICT: seriously if you find a version of this game for more than five dollars you probably live in Dubai or something.

De Blob 2 (beaten, 100%): This game was like a box of Cheez-its.  Deliciously empty, with no effort except your attention span to complete.  Sadly, my attention for this game ran out when I beat it, so suffice to say that it's YET ANOTHER short but fun platformer, distinguishing itself with pretty boss art and sound design, and a control that is partly sonic and partly generic ninja game.  Special mention to the plot, which will probably be hilarious to you if you're twelve years old.  verdict whatever bro

The Legendary Starfy (world 4, apparently a million stages to go): For some reason, I had always seen this game as a spin-off to the Princess Peach game that set feminism back to the Industrial Age, but it's actually the first domestic release of an apparently crazy-popular Japanese series.  I can't really give a full review of it yet, but while it's still pretty easy as hell (especially bosses, which are literally incapable of giving me a problem so far), the graphics and awesome gameplay (essentially an underwater Kirby with shitloads of various minigames and optional content) are pretty spiffy.  Also, unlike virtually all of these other games, it doesn't show much signs of stopping any time soon.  WE'LL SEE.

Knights in the Nightmare (took one look at the second part of the tutorial and quietly filed away):  Who is the audience for this game?  Oh wait, that's easy: horrible gamer elitists that want to play obscure and difficult games to magnify their gamer dong.  Seriously, the concept of meshing needlessly complex SRPG mechanics and bullet-hell shooters is like a New Games Journalist dream, and a stupid fucking idea to everyone else.  Hay guys, check out my Roberta Williams adventure games that requires you to defeat an AI version of Daigo in Street Fighter IV whenever you want to pick something up!  Truly, I have turned this gaming world asunder.

unggggh.