ahhh… the unlucky ’13 year was quite a year for games– or, dare I say, it should have been. We had some MASSIVE releases last year with the culmination in some cases of decades of work for some development teams. Yet for all their glory, the massive budget games were not the ones that I played and enjoyed, with a few exceptions.
Let’s run down the releases I got to play. Now I’m an ancient person with familial and work duties so there’s no chance in a given year that I’ll be able to play even close to everything that’s good. I have to make choices– very difficult choices with my budget of TIME.
Here we have the list of stuff I played or was seriously considering in order: Anarchy Reigns: This was the first game I bought in 2013 and it was…not great. The price tag was good at 25$ or so, but I couldn’t get through the single player and the multiplayer, while interesting, just didn’t hold my attention. The key issue was the core of the combat system– it just wasn’t all that great. Compared to the AMAZING Urban Reign for the PS2, which is quite similar, it was a vast disappointment and from the ex-Clover team, that was sad.
Crysis 3: I am a huge Far Cry fan and though it pissed in my mouth with Far Cry 2, I still like the original developers a lot and I picked up the original Crysis and it was great fun. I haven’t bitten on 2 or 3 yet but probably will in the future. I guess what did it for me was continued play of Battlefield 3. Crysis 3 just seemed redundant and I didn’t buy it.
Hotline Miami: The first indy game of the year I picked up. The ad campaign for this one was so incredible it was a must buy. I never finished it — to be truthful after the school shooting last year I just couldn’t play it anymore– but I got a long way into the game before moving on to other games. It was awesome.
Hear of the Swarm: Ok, for all it’s polish, Starcraft 2 is not fun for me to play. The single player is quite boring and the actual storyline EXECUTION is just shit (the ideas are really cool though, just executed poorly and all tongue and cheek with the shitty-accent space rednecks and trying to be serious at the same time plus romance? what a space pissery!), the multiplayer, the meat of the game, feels like a fucking chore to me. Plus, it’s a terrible annoyance to have to use Blizzard’s version of steam and ALWAYS BE ONLINE. I figured out finally that as much as I love RTS games and Warcraft 3, I’m just not a Starcraft player so I skipped this one and will likely never play Starcraft 2 in any form again because it’s jsut goddamn tiresome.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: This was an impulse buy and I didn’t get through it but played it a bit and was impressed. It’s essentially a rail shooter with a CRAZY story integrating with just about every Old West hero in the late era (think Jesse James/Butch Cassidy). If this is cheap, pick it up, you won’t be disappointed even if you get like 3-4 hours of play only.
The Last of Us: Ok so this was a PS3 exclusive and I had no chance to play it. Apparently this is a great game for the story as it integrates stuff from the hugely influential THE ROAD into a zombie shooter. I just wanted to note that if this had come out on other consoles, it would have sold a LOT more copies, especially PC. Plus this has that short lady that’s in all the fucking movies these days that is always talking too much on screen.
Xcom: Enemy Within: This is a follow up to Xcom: Enemy Unknown from 2012 and I just didn’t bother with it despite my love for the first game. I hope this combat engine sees more life as it’s great. I will pick this up eventually…
Company of Heroes 2: Ok so here is a sequel to one of my favorite RTS games. COH, along with Warcraft 3, redefined what I wanted out of an RTS, and they did it in very different ways. Unfortunately, the ENTIRE COH team left Relic Games long before COH 2 was started and I read so many bad things about the game that I didn’t pick it up. The comments from Russians about the game is pretty crazy if you check metacritic– I guess they forgot that Stalin was a murderous dictator that was able to save the country from another murderous dictator?
Rogue Legacy: While I don’t have a controller to hook up to my PC, I gave this one a shot and it was pretty interesting. It’s not Battle Block Theater though.. no sir. Hence, I had problems playing it for very long.
Dota 2: 2013 IS the year of DOTA2, hands down. The game came out of beta and everyone was playing it before, and everyone and their MOTHER is playing it now. It is the best game of 2013, no question about it. Obviously it’s a game that doesn’t appeal to everyone and it’s a very very deep rabbit hole to get into (and you have to practice) but I think this was a huge release for the year. It’s tough to say it was the best when you want to give it to something new– since the game is getting close to 10 years old from it’s first incarnations, but DOTA 2 is by far the most important and best game of 2013.
Saints Row IV: I loved Saint’s Row 3. Loved it and played the shit out of it. IV is excellent— except I can’t play it anymore. Whether it’s my configuration (unlikely) or a patch I can’t tell, but the game will no longer run on my computer. I got 20 hours in and then simply had to stop playing after one of the patches hit. I uninstalled, reinstalled, check the interweb tubes for a solution which ended up being “wait for the next patch” which I don’t even think ever came. Sad that they didn’t take their PC users seriously this time around.
Diablo 3 (consoles): The monumental failure of a game that is Diablo 3 hit consoles in 2013 and they did a good job. Unfortunately, the game is fundamentally flawed and cannot be ‘fixed’ with the removal of the real money auction house. This is what happens when you spend 12 years and millions of dollars on what amounts to a PAY TO PLAY iPHONE GAME.
Total War Rome 2: How the mighty have fallen. This was my fucking BIGGEST disappointment of the year. I warned my wife and wee children that I would be huddled in the basement for MONTHS on this fucker, but I put in 40 hours of frustration and was done. Rome 1 was my second choice for game of the DECADE from 00 to 10 only second to the almighty Warcraft 3. What the fuck happened? 1) Too large of a budget 2) Too short of a timeline 3) crappy battle engine. This series is dead to me. Shogun 2’s battles sucked despite EVERYTHING else about the game being excellent. The design choices + the battles being shit tanked this game forever. Warhammer Fantasy Battle Total War will suck.
Path of Exile: Another Diablo 3 killer, I did not get a chance to play this and probably won’t. It’s been on my radar for a long time, but — I just want to keep playing Torchlight 2– like forever.
Battlefield 4: Why come out so soon? I still feel like I didn’t have the time to get into BF3 and ALREADY there’s a new BF game out? And it’s not an offshoot like Bad Company or 2142, it’s the full on thing… why? I just didn’t want this and saw no reason to buy it. This does not need to come out every 2 years…
And for all that– it’s still just the year of DOTA 2.
After I finished off the excellent Rubicon (detailing the events and people leading up to the death of the Roman Republic) by Tom Holland, I delved into some pulp stuff for a bit but was itching to complete my reading of Robert Fagles’s Aeneid to tie in the fantasy with the reality. It was a long haul this one. I think I started reading it in 2010 got a bit into it and moved on to other things–lots of other things. Modern translations of the classic trilogy (Iliad, Odyssey and the Roman Aeneid) are amazing compared to the shit we had in the 80’s when I was struggling through some early 1900’s direct translation in High school that had no ear for the words. The modern translations take a lot of liberties with the text and come out amazingly readable in comparison. I started with Stanley Lombardo’s version of the Iliad years ago and immediately went in for his version of the Odyssey. Apparently he actually PERFORMS these stories for audiences. That’s heavy stuff and the lyricism used in actual telling was not lost in his translation.
My dad gave me the Robert Fagles’s version of the Aeneid and I was skeptical at first but it turned out to be an excellent read– though Virgil is much longer winded than Homer I felt.
The plot is this– Troy gets sacked after the Iliad ends (we never get to see the sacking from Homer though) and apparently a bunch of Trojans survive and head out to found a second Troy. Aeneas is their leadeger and he knows he is destined eventually to found a city in Latinum (Italy). He fucks around a bit on his boats and ends up in Carthage betrothed to the queen there: Dido. He’s fucking her all across the palace for months and months and then has a vision of his destiny and clears out that night with his fellow Trojans. Dido tries to stop him and then kills herself. There’s some more stuff on boats (sounds like the Odyssey doesn’t it) and Aeneas goes to talk to his dad in the underworld, seeing future Roman leaders in the process (?!). His dad tells him to go kick ass. Eventually, the Trojans get to Latinum and the Latins are at first amicable, with the King betrothing his daughter to Aeneas. Unfortunately the gods all get involved because Juno (Hera) is still fucking raging pissed at the Trojans over the whole golden apple thing that started it all (if you trace it way back, it was the seduction of Atalanta that began this whole bloodfest) and they fuck up the betrothal and everyone starts throwing down. The rest of the book is the Iliad again with fighting on chariots and 99% of the characters dying in the paragraph that they are introduced. This is an amazing part of the book with the gods trying to help out their favorites, chicks fighting with bare breasts on chariots, people using magic weapons and armor and a lot of people, surprisingly, getting brained to death by rocks and boulders. The book ‘The sword decides all” is probably the best in the entire thing with just a massive dust up after an attempt at a peace treaty is fucked up by the gods again. And the end, like the Iliad, just sort of stops when the main antagonist (Turnus) is killed. That’s the end. No denouement or anything like that. Turnus hits the ground and that’s the last paragraph in this giant tome. Amazing.
So how is it? The Iliad and Aeneid are sort of tied for good reads, while the Odyssey is by far the best because it’s just about this one guy and his desire to get home, and I really felt I could relate to that a ton more than all the hero fighting. There’s not a lot of confusion in the Odyssey about all these other characters and their motivations as well. You really don’t know what’s going to happen to him in the end– what the COST will be for him to get home and what home is like. Whereas the Aeneid, you know Rome is going to be founded (not by him though) and it’s really just watching Aeneas kick ass to get there and having his friends die. Yet, once he started balling Dido– I was like “Who is this guy?” The whole Dido distraction doesn’t make as much sense as the Circe one in the Odyssey. In the Iliad, there is this huge group of Greek heroes that you start to figure out CANNOT BE KILLED and every time they fight they just kill everyone. Achilles? Ok badass, but there are so many Greek heroes that are made to seem just as powerful, the Iliad seems like an episode of the Superfriends to me. The verdict? Don’t bother with the Aeneid if you haven’t read the Iliad. You could skip the Odyssey, but since it’s the best one you may as well read it before the Aeneid as well. The Fagles version is excellent and I will likely pick up the Lombardo one for a comparison of the translation. Don’t mess around with stuff not translated by either of these two. You will die of fucking boredom.
I promised myself to play Warhammer a full ten times before writing a review of the new edition and it happened, the review, which you are reading, and ten games (fourteen actually). Finally after months of waiting, I can spout off about how much I love the current edition. I love it so much I now (shockingly) have three armies for the game. I wanted to get a second so I could play with people that don’t own anything and I got a deal on a third that I simply could not pass up (my main is Beastmen, second Dark Elves, and last Chaos). One could say I am all in on this version, so if this review seems a bit of self-justification that’s because it certainly is, gods damn it. Note, that reviewing a game like Condotierre or King of Tokyo after 10 plays means a few hours of play here and there, reviewing and edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle after fourteen plays means 50+ hours at the table throwing vats worth of dice and probably 30+ more hours teaking an army list or ten, painting and priming and building a rather massive army of toy soldiers (if you can call packs of slavering, rapine goat-men soldiers).
A wave of unpainted goblins assault the partially painted undead and fully painted dwarfs.
To frame this review, I have to relay the shameful nerd path I have traveled in the hobby. It’s not very different than many people who were closeted nerds in their youth during the nerd-harsh 80’s–but I have to say I’ve always played GW’s big games rather casually and vastly preferred the skirmish games to the big fuckall table spreads like the current 40K and WFB. I started playing WFB just after junior highschool, around the same time Warhammer 40K first edition came out. After saving for and buying the rather expensive 3rd edition hardcover, I dabbled in the game and got a few of the miniature box sets (rudlugs armored orcs, etc) that were around at the time, but never really played a ton because, quite simply, there was no way to afford enough lead to put out a decent sized army like the pretty pictures in the book. Even in this early time, some of GW’s first plastics had come out, and while a few of the sculpts were OK, they didn’t stand up visually against the lead that was out at the time (this has drastically changed). We did get in a few games, mostly with our old Grenadier D&D miniatures (which had also been used for a battle using the ancient and comparatively rubbish TSR Chainmail/Swords and Spells rules) and a handful of citadel chaos warriors.
While Warhammer Fantasy Battle proper was an unrequited love in High School, both because I was trying to eschew the kids stuff like D&D and gaming altogether (this failed after only a few weeks in 1987 after I found out almost the ENTIRE wrestling team not only had played D&D but wanted to again RIGHT FUCKING NOW!). I didn’t get into the game hardcore until college when the Realm of Chaos supplement books hit the shelves. This introduced a variant of play where you start with a small force of maybe 8-12 fighters and then slowly grew a warband as you fight battles against friends min a narrative campaign, eventually to gain daemon-hood from one of the fickle and capricious chaos gods. We chewed through many weekends (and a lot of class time) grinding through short, decisive skirmish battles in a long campaign where dozens of warbands would be rolled under the dirt and new ones arise. Notably, only one champion made it to the highest “honor” during the campaign. The rest either croaked or became slathering, mindless spawn. Great times, but that’s most of the Warhammer I’ve played, well, until now.
Fourth Edition, the edition rightly-deemed “Herohammer,” really set the bar high for production values and components to help you play. Gone were the big hardcover rulebooks (for a time that is) replaced by a big box with lots of plastic guys and softcover rulebooks, all the templates you need, magic item cards for everything rather than having to dig around in a book for them, and tons and tons of dice. However, even from cursory plays, it was obvious that the rules were really about decking out a hero that can destroy armies all by themselves and started the system down the path of a highly competitive game that people would focus play at tournaments and leagues of one off games. Rather than some scenario concocted with what miniatures you have, or a narrative campaign like Chaos Warbands, two guys get together with armies balanced out by points and fighting it out for the win. This was to be what Warhammer is all about from this point on: single, competitive battles with pre-made armies, usually just a slugathon rather than any type of scenario. Though I played a few dozen times, the game headed in a direction I didn’t want to go (and I still couldn’t afford to put an army on the table really, deciding to eat, however meagerly, instead). Yet 4th was the ‘break out’ edition, and tons of people played and love it. Additional distractions from GW at this time were Epic 40K and Necromunda– along with 3rd edition Blood Bowl, so while I was playing a lot of GW stuff, it wasn’t Warhammer.
I ignored 5th edition (what with Blood Bowl 3rd edition, Necromunda and Mordheim around at the same time, who needed it?). After Mordheim fizzled out (our campaign went from 22 people to 6 or so in less than a month and that wasn’t due to anything but the rules being not too good), and with the release of Warhammer Fantasty Battle 6th edition I started officially! on my beastman army—and I really did want to play the normal, non-skirmish way that all the other dudes played–actually taking the time to put together a big army rather than a bunch of ragged bands of (unpainted) chaos warriors. I picked up the main book and the army book for the Beasts and gave a run at painting on a regular schedule, but just couldn’t keep the momentum of painting and buying figs to get enough to the table. Going from painting a few figs a year to a row of 50+ was quite daunting, especially since I refused to play the game with anything unpainted.
7th edition came so fast due to real life I barely noticed and it seemed only for the hardcore tournament players anyway and really just an update of 6th– and then came 8th in 2010, down from the heights of Nottingham to us gamers, what is, in my humble and rather inexperienced opinion, the best iteration of the game so far with the best production values for books and miniatures I’ve seen out of GW. At a time in life where I have a couple kids, a pretty demanding job and just general “I have responsibilities now” chaos, I knew it would be a tough row to hoe trying to even find time to paint, let alone play a game– but THIS is the edition to set aside severely limited freetime for. The hardback book is nothing short of incredible (and shockingly priced at 80$), with absolutely lavish illustration, photography, graphic design and content. Granted, as a rulebook, it’s a heavy fucker to carry around, but it’s easy to find the pages you need to find via the index– it’s just that well over half the book you will simply not need during any given game as most of the book is not the rules at all, but page upon page of backstory stuff, illustration, and a giant painting showcase. None of this stuff about the book quality and photography would matter if the rules themselves sucked–but they don’t and here’s why: from 7th to 8th the designers made some fundamental changes to the game, some subtle, some drastic, to make the game flat out more fun. Now, 6th edition was fun with getting rid of the herohammer a bit, hell 4th was a great time until people were able to ‘break’ the game a few months in– but 8th blows them all away and while the reasons in the rules are below, the core reason is simply this: they let Jervis Johnson all over it and he made it more fun than it’s ever been.
First: any stuff can kill any other stuff. If GW learned one thing from Rackham’s Confrontation, it’s that it’s important that every model on the table can pose a threat. This is a huge change from earlier editions. Essentially, from 4th edtion on, you had stuff on the table that could not be hurt at all by most other stuff on the table. Picture a bunch of goblins are running around with spears. We all know goblins are terrible in combat, run away a lot and generally get stomped, eviscerated, eaten, boiled, and basically harvested like bilious green wheat. However, goblin players bring a lot of goblins to any dust-up, so many that for every 20 or so you mulch, 40 more are there to poke you or net you and scream insults. In older editions of Warhammer, no matter how many goblins were out there, they were not going to be able to hurt your pimped out dark elf lord on a black dragon– even with the best rolling, they couldn’t touch him. The lord could fly around without a care in the world if the table was filled with just goblins–essentially they became tar pits that he could get stuck in for a period of time murdering them, but they weren’t dangerous to him or his gods damn dragon at all. In 8th edition, it’s the dark elf lord that’s afraid of the masses of goblins. If he doesn’t position and plan right, he has a good chance of getting swarmed and trampled by little green hobnails because GW added this simple rule: a 6 always hits and a 6 always wounds. That means no matter how badass you are, you have a 3% chance with every attack of having to take an armour save, no matter how high your weapon skill or toughness. When you are rolling dump-trucks worth of dice, as goblin units are wont to do, that 3% happens a LOT. Even with a 2+ armor save and a ward save of some kind, death can come quick to the heroes.
Second: charging distance is randomized. A huge, simple and most welcome change, one that will be with the game probably forever after. Charges are now 2D6+movement. So dwarves with their short little leggys can charge minimum of 5 inches (their max before was 6) and maximum of 15 inches on boxcars. In older editions, units had a fixed charge range, usually double their movement. This meant that people had to be very precise about when they charged and positioned. This took a long time and it wasn’t very fun. Random charge distance makes things crazy fun. This was the rule change that when I saw it, I had to buy and play the new edition. Along with number three below, while the games may not be shorter, you are spending your time on the fun stuff and not the boring stuff. This is key.
Third: you can measure everything at any time. Another positive thing about randomizing charges is that it allowed the designers to simply let the players measure every single distance they want at any time. Want to see how close your archers have to move to be in range of the pumpwagon? Measure away! Want to check your distances before declaring a charge? Well you better! This just cuts down a lot of the fiddling around with units and positioning stuff and painful guess work. For measurements before 8th edition, I would set up my armies and then measure out the table– memorizing little landmarks like the side of a bush or a shadow on the table and such so that I knew that from X wall to Y scratch in the table it was 6″, etc. This was just not that fun and felt beardy as hell when you are placing dice on the table and not moving them to mark off distances…
Fourth: the poor bloody infantry is king. This is something 40K already had figured out: people like to see big close in dust-ups between big groups of models. Battles are decided by positioning, tactics, magic usage, dicerolling all as part of getting your best infantry units winning combats against your opponents infantry units. Games come down to one or two big blocks of guys hacking at each other and that’s why people want to play, so they made it king and called it a day. Sure heroes are important, but they are so much better in the midst of some crazy combat than fighting alone. Can my 9 minotaurs stomp their way through 60 goblins before being perforated? Can my horde of bestigor sustain the horrific casualties from the initiative 6 black guard to attack back with their slow but powerful great weapons? Because infantry fights in huge units in 8th edition and has massive advantages over any unit that is unranked (such as the dread lord on a black dragon listed above), infantry dominates the battlefield: as it should be since the tactics around infantry positioning, movement and when to charge should be the meat of this type of game. What changed? Hordes (see below), the fact that the second rank can lend a supporting attack to the front rank fighters, even on the charge the fight is in initiative order and finally, the ranks behind the front can step up where there are fallen to continue the fight ( so no more charging units wiping out front ranks of units with no retaliation that turn).
Fifth: Hordes! Hordes are units with 10-model frontage. All this rule allows is another rank to add supporting attacks (so you need a minimum of 30 models to get the most out of a horde formation). Normally the front rank gets their attacks, plus the second rank can lay in a single supporting attack (with the exception of monstrous infantry that get more). With a horde, your unit will get two ranks of supporting attacks. This is a great example of a simple rules change that has massive effects on the game. The Hordes rule particularly combines with the “any stuff can kill any other stuff” above to help make the game a game of infantry fighting and not ‘my guy on the dragon kills everything without a scratch’ fighting. You want to throw your Hydras up against a 40+ goblin horde with spears, the outcome is going to be one stone dead hydra while the infantry unit is still probably viable. Combine an assault by some Dark elf spearmen with the hydra supporting or hitting the flank of the goblins, and you have what the game is all about.
Six (and this is the last one, I promise): Terrain does stuff. Almost every game of Warhammer 8th will have some crazy-ass magical terrain that has an effect on play, sometimes drastic, sometimes not. Phantom towers shoot out bolts of lightning into anything nearby, altars give every unit within range blood rage, and mysterious forests have random effects only discovered when entered by troops. One could say this just adds whimsy and randomness, but it creates a bevy of critical tactical decisions that can be the key to victory. Unlike mob-swarm 40K, unit placement and movement is everything in WFB, so tactics and placement around terrain that benefits or hurts your army is huge. The eleventh game I played had a Dwarf Brewhouse right smack in the middle of the table, giving anyone nearby “Stubborn.” Since I was up against Lizardmen who had a unit that was innately Stubborn, fighting around the dwarf brewhouse nullified that advantage because we all had it.
Games Workshop has had almost three decades to work out the kinks with Warhammer Fantasy Battle and with this ruleset, it shows a change in the ideas behind the game moving away from something akin to controlled, balanced play and far more into the fantasy world of Warhammer with all it’s insanity and things getting sucked into the void at the worst times (for you anyway!). While good tactics, placement and unit counters will win you the day, there is so much randomness in the game , and yet so much focus on having a balanced army, that I can see where it would put people off that are used to older editions. For me, it all adds up to big death and big fun. This is the best big miniature game out there.
Yes, I know summer is over, but I finished this bad boy just after the solstice so it counts dammit! Jim Thompson– crime writer, very under-read, if not underrated. I find while reading his stuff that I have many V-8 head slapping moments of “oh THAT’S where they got that from!” El Rey from The Getaway is referenced in From Dusk Til Dawn, and the whole “son is the father of the man” thing in Blood Meridian is straight out of The Killer Inside Me (not that Thompson made that up himself). I’d say No Country for Old Men is almost a homage piece to Thompson’s style. Though there is no doubt in my mind that McCarthy is the better writer overall, a virtuoso with diverse novels like Suttree and All the Pretty Horses, but for crime novels, Thompson is the best I’ve read, blowing away even Hammett in terms of construction and language. That said, Cropper’s Cabin is not Thompson’s best, but it is a great fast read delving into the psychology of a kid that is pushed to the absolute brink by those around him, and like a powder keg, the reader is just waiting and waiting for him to implode or explode. I won’t spoil it, as it has a few twists and turns to get to the inevitable conclusion, but suffice to say it has a pace change in the middle and some horrific revelations. What I dug most about it was the window into the cropper’s (and their Indian landowner’s) world and lifestyle as a backdrop for the events. In some of the other crime novels by Thompson, the place and situation don’t matter all that much, but in Cropper’s Cabin, the cultural context is crucial to the story. I’d put the book slightly above The Getaway due to that book’s almost tacked-on ending (the El Rey bits), but not quite as good as After Dark, My Sweet. If you’re looking for an intro into Thompson’s work to see if you’ll dig his stuff, Cropper’s Cabin is a good one. Unfortunately this was last published in ’92 as part of the Black Lizard line of crime stuff so might be tough to find– but with electronic books (bleh!) it’s instantly available.
The character models sort of look like clothed scrotes anyway.
I was flipping through Google Chrome apps and saw this bad boy dubbing itself (as far as I can tell) as a MMO fantasy shooter(?!). The first part is bad, but the second parts (the shooter + fantasy bit) was too good not to check out. It plays like Smash TV and has all the generic fantasy tropes you can imagine. Of course it’s free, but you can buy shit in game as is the M.O. for every MMO these days.
After playing for a good 40 minutes or so it descended into tedium for me soloing around–especially since quests are for everyone on the map and can get gobbled up faster than you can get there to even see the enemies. Sure I appreciate the permanent character death when you get shot from all sides, but it started to get tedious. Then, out of nowhere, I got on what I’ve only heard described as a “RAPE TRAIN” and that made all the difference. A rape train is a truly massive conglomerate of players, probably 100 – 200 at a time that run along a road way in a map zone as fast as they can shooting everything everywhere. You can’t even see the enemy mobs that pop up before they are destroyed, let alone grab any loot that drops (you can’t see the ground— there are too many players on scren) unless you get off the train. As there are many high-level characters on the train, the mobs that spawn are superlative and give mass amounts of experience– but if you get off the train you can find yourself totally overmatched weeping all alone as you are surrounded and your 50 pixel character tossed into the permadeath pile.
Overall, an interesting game, it’s skill based and is completely unapologetic if you are fat fingering and get stuck between some rocks and killed. Along with the perma-death, the fact that you can get GOOD at playing the game physically can be appreciated. The game would be completely overlooked if it wasn’t in the browser, but it is, and it makes a pretty cool pick up game.
Due to some much-needed wiring assistance over the weekend, I got the new box all set up and downloading FURIOUSLY from Steam. Though I was able to spark up Bad Company 2 for a few moments yesterday morning, my lovely, darling daughter came in to ask if she could sit on my lap while I ‘rode in the car’ which was actually a boat headed towards some nameless pacific island. I said yes, but then I remembered the first kill in Bad Company 2 was up the back with a knife and so just shut it down before seeing any of the amazing particle or lighting effects denied to me with my socket 939. That said, the first game I actually played last night, guiltily, was Torchlight. I just wanted to check if my character data was actually there up inside the steamcloud and, being that it was, ended up being an hour of destroying goblin hounds and the like.
I did span some time with Bad Company 2, just the single player, and goodness me it is pretty. The initial area of the Bolivia mapset is nothing short of amazing with the lighting, particles and foliage. Breathtaking stuff. Combining that BFBC2 is just flat out fun as shit makes this probably my only pick for game of the year 2010 on the PC (like all the magazine’s and websites have already stated, and I wholly agree, Red Dead Redemption is the game of the year in the Xboxen region), because I haven’t gotten around to Starcraft 2 yet. One cannot judge 2010 from any level: technologically, socially, musically, culturally or emotionally without experiencing Starcraft 2 (well, I was in the multiplayer beta for some beatings but that’s not enough), so I have to officially hold back judgement of GOTY until I get that shit put to bed. Given that I still play Warcraft 3 from 2003, I have a feeling.
Very happy with my build out and thanks to sensless for coming by to help put it together and everyone for their advice. The Ars Technica article that came out the day before I was making my purchase choices helped enormously, especially in the choice of case (Power is on TOP so no tiny hands switching off the power randomly) and solidifying the motherboard choice. I could have gone more hardcore with the video card, but the GTX 560 is doing the trick. Here is the list of stuffs:
LIAN LI Lancool PC-K7B Black Aluminum/ SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
ASUS P8P67 (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Sony Optiarc CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model AD-7260S-0B
2X G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
EVGA 01G-P3-1561-AR GeForce GTX 560 Ti FPB (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
Ah the wasted weekend. No not the good kind, you know when it’s Sunday and you realize that all you’ve done is gone to Checkers twice and had sex with your girlfriend 13-17 times since Friday,or been in a single room with smellnerds playing Terrible Swift Sword (note I’ve never done either of these). This weekend was nothing like that, but sick like a fucking animal with a fever, hacking dry cough disallowing any sleep at all (literally) and lots of snot, kids screaming and crying. Delirium. Awesome. Given that I was in a state of semi-consciousness for almost 36 hours straight, I decided to do something I rarely do– watch movies, or rather, have movies on while I stared blankly into space. I always watch Ninja Scroll when I’m sick– sometimes on repeat the entire time. The main character is dying of poison and all the rest of the characters hate each other so much (or pretend to) it just works. I’m worried that if I ever do watch it while well, I might start to get sick. However the real gems this weekend were found hitting up the Netflicks for some of the instant view Godzilla movies.
Now, having grown up in the late 70’s, I used to walk every Saturday afternoon to my neighbor’s place up on the hill as they had a GIANT antenna and could get channel 44 out of either Madison or Chicago. Every afternoon this station would have a double feature monster movie– usually a kaiju one and then a real monster/horror movie after that (which I didn’t want to see!). My neighbors were good kids but loved giving beatings, especially the oldest one who was in 7th grade. If he wasn’t out shoplifting or trying to fingerblast some bezitted hoyden on a Saturday afternoon, he would grab a bean bag chair, throw me to the ground and then sit on me for most of the film. Sometimes I couldn’t even see the films (let alone breathe). The worst was when he would make me watch the movie following the kaiju movie instead of letting me run home– which was invariably shit like Bucket of Blood or some movie with a chick melting in a volcano (I was forced to watch that fucker TWICE)–enough to creep me out for a week or more.
Most of the time he was off fingerblasting and I actually got to see the movies– Godzilla Vs King Kong, Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, Godzilla vs Mothra, and even some Gamera here and there. All awesome incarnate, but I really hadn’t seen or followed the Godzilla films since then–except both Godzilla 1985 and the shit-stain Americanized ‘Godzilla’ movie with Matthew Broderick. Both of these flicks were not too good, and I figured whoever controlled the IP, just didn’t have what it took to get to the same level of awesome the 60’s and 70’s allowed. I think I was sort of wrong, though the 80’s certainly was not a good period for our radioactive friend, the 90’s (that I always think of as the 70’s 2.0) gave us some good films it seems, none of which I’d seen.
The first flick I watched was Godzilla Vs the Smog Monster; AKA Godzilla Vs Hedorah from ’71. While not one of the worst Godzilla films, this is an odd one with all these crazy ass people dancing around, some Monty Python-esque illustrated bits and all the Godzilla/Hedorah fight scenes taking place at night– and shot in such a way that you can’t see a damned thing. I watched this with the sound off, so I don’t really know why all the people were dancing around but it seemed like a bad people-bullshit / Godzilla ass-kicking ratio. Now I had see this before as a kid– I just didn’t realize how fucking weird it was.
The second was the only newish Godzilla film on instant play: Godzilla vs Destroyah from ’95. That’s right: Destroyah. I watched most of it with the sound off, lying in a feverish haze as I was and I didn’t realize that there were actually two Godzillas in this film: the main one that looked like he had been attacked by red hots on his rubber suit and the other that didn’t have big back fins. Most of the beginning of the film is about this red hot Godzilla being real pissed off and destroying shit and then people talking about it. Then he gets frozen by some ice ray contraptions on an airplane and sinks into the ocean. Then the second one shows up on the beach and I wasn’t sure what was going on there. Meanwhile, some aquarium fish are attacked by some small red crabs that grow into crazy big crabs that shoot lightning. These crabs go to a power plant, kill some people and then get attacked by squads of swat-like dudes in an Aliens homage sequence. The swat guys even have the swivel-style heavy weapons that the Marines in Aliens had. The swat guys take a terrible beating, but eventually they burn up some of the crabs. Apparently there are a lot of them and one of them keeps growing into, of course, Destroyah.
In the end, the little Godzilla and the red hot Godzilla take on Destroyah, little Godzilla gets his ass kicked and Red Hot has a melt down that destroys Destroyah and while he dies (yes, Godzilla dies) it heals the little Godzilla.
Overall, the monster battles in this one could have been awesome, with some great cityscape models, tanks and planes flying around blowing up, yet piss-poorly edited– one minute Destroyah and Godzilla are fighting close up and Godzilla knocks Destroyah to the ground and next we see Godzilla wandering through the city as if the editors forgot that the two were in close combat, only to have Destroyah fly out of nowhere for an attack. I honestly though it jumped a reel. Another example in the same fight: Godzilla gets swarmed by the ‘little’ crabs — one second he’s covered in them and knocked to the ground and the next he’s thrown one (just one) to the ground and then he’s wandering through the city with none of the others around. Where was the sucker punch from Destroyah while Godzilla is fighting off the younglings? It doesn’t happen! Its unbelievable all the effort that went into the explosions and model design (and yes even the acting) only to have the editing fall flat. Inexcusable really. Despite all that, this is a pretty badass movie, for, you know people wrestling around in rubber suits as is the kaiju way. Godzilla is SUPER pissed off in every scene he’s in– obviously in terrible anguish as he’s all red hot with radiation. Both the special effects and direction did a fantastic job with this there’s little confusion to the viewer that GZ is out to just terribly fuck shit up all over the place.
All in all this wasted weekend whetted my appetite for more Godzilla flicks– especially the most recent ones (Final Wars and the mega titled: Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack – yes that’s the title).
I must admit, my eyes are far bigger than my stomach sacule when it comes to buying games. If I dedicated my few moments of free time each day to the games I have instead of buying new ones, I would save a lot of money. But then, what would money be for? Would GOG and Steam still exist?
This year was one of abject failure in the realm of completing games. I’m simply astonished at the pile of games for the PS2, 360 and PC that languish, unfinished on my hard drive or save slots. Why? Kids, work, freelance, boardgames and, for the first time in quite a while, reading books outside of the Aubrey/Maturin novels. There I’ve gotten quite stuck, but I digress. Below is my list of gamefails along with conjectural excuses of note I care to make, as well as an expounding at how good the games are in most cases.
10. Bayonetta. This is not a difficult game, and it is quite a fun platformer, item hunter and boss-fighter. The plot is ridiculous and if I had finished it in the first week or so, I wouldn’t have had time to mull over what I think is going on between plays. Since I do, I have to say that they could have kept the plot all very simple and still been successful, instead they went for a really wacky ploto-obscuro that is largely irrelevant when you are fighting building size angels who’s pristine armor comes off to reveal demon-like MEAT as the fights get heated. I aim to finish this one up this winter.
9. Empire Total War. As I am a Total War freak, this is quite embarrassing as they came out with a new version of the game before I was able to finish the grand campaign to Empire. I blame it on the fact that I had the victory conditions completed 70 turns before the game ends– and yet saw no victory screen asking if I wanted to stop and savor my victory rather than wait until the end. I can essentially press NEXT TURN over and over to complete this one, but I just can’t stop myself from mucking about with unconquered Spain or Italy, making the turns take over an hour each at best. This will be finished or I am not a man.
8. Red Dead Redemption. Any of the two people that regularly read this blog will remember my lingering obsession over the summer with the Old West action brought on by yet another viewing of The Good the Bad and The Ugly and two reads through of Blood Meridian. This obsession manifested itself in some stints of miniature painting, looking at various Old West skirmish rules, and of course the purchase of probably the best old west game in existence– one I have barely scratched the surface of. Frankly, this may never be ‘finished’ insofar as the % complete goes but I’ll give it a good college try.
7. Portal. Just didn’t finish. It’s great and I know it’s short but I got bored and felt like shooting some shit instead of bouncing balls around.
6. Mass Effect. This is really a movie game with some sort of lame fights in between and some extremely tedious side missions that fail to really keep up the impression that you have the freedom to move around the galaxy. Still, some really fantastic pieces of game here. Someday I’ll wrap this up.
5. Dragon Age Origins. This is long. It’s a long movie game like mass effect. I found myself waiting for the good parts people talked about while trying to pretend it didn’t suck. Bottom line: the combat is just plain bad compared to almost every other party-based fantasy game I have played. I just wish people would look at Temple of Elemental Evil by Troika and realize that, for all it’s faults, that and Jagged Alliance are the way to do party based RPG combat. This probably won’t be finished as when I play it I start to daydream about other stuff I should be doing instead, like home repair and basic grooming.
4. Painkiller. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get this one completed as I started playing multiplayer (the same thing happened in 1996 with Quake) and sort of forgot about the single player. I may try to rock through this again, but it’s unlikely.
3. Gratuitous Space Battles. This one I really can’t blame myself for. I started the campaign twice only to have a patch to the game invalidate my current save. Though fun, the campaign game did not live up to my hopes though I still think this little indy game is one of the most important 4X space games for the genre that’s been out since MOO3 destroyed it.
2. Left 4 Dead 2. I got it late, the year ran out. We are going to finish this and it’s going to be awesome. As my buddy Graham says: The undead aren’t going to destroy themselves.
1. GODHAND. This is number 1 for three reasons. First, because it is the most difficult game on this list both in terms of gaming stamina and technical skill. Second it’s the most embarrasing because one of my buddies completed Demon’s Souls before I was able to finish GOD HAND, and I started GODHAND in early 2009. Third, this is one of those games like Metroid, Mega Man, Samurai Shodown, Urban Reign, and Guilty Gear Accent Core that are truly difficult to complete, a game where by necessity you have to learn the system of play inside and out before you have any sort of chance of victory. It’s a game so difficult that the hapless and fail-ridden reviewer at IGN gave the game one of the lowest scores to date, totally discounting any review IGN does as valid forever. This has to be finished.
Rockstar “making it fun to kill cops since 2001” entertainment has set loose its new murder simulator Red Dead Redemption. RDR is fun to play, beautiful to look at and filled with all the annoying shit that plagues Rocktar open world games. I have RDR for the 360 and have played for about 10 hours.
Where RD Wins:
– Graphics. The fucking horses look great. The clothes the main character has look badass. The old west buildings / scenery look perfect. The cycle of day and night is well done and adds loads of atmosphere to the game. JUST FUCKING WAIT UNTIL IT RAINS ON YOU SOME NIGHT IN GAME!
– Sounds is fucking great. I’ve a 5 speaker setup and I just love hearing people shooting at me from behind, bullets whizzing past my head as I make my get away. Sometime you hear gun shots echoing off canyon walls, alerting you to trouble near by. JUST FUCKING WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR THE THUNDER IN THE EVENING WHEN IT RAINS IN GAME!
– The world feels very open and full of lasting consequences. No more shooting up the place and simply driving away to make a clean get away from the cops. In RDR you develop a bounty for all the “bad” shit do you, and that bounty doesn’t go away after you ditch the sheriff and his men, the bounty is on your head, growing ever larger in the event you commit more “bad” shit until you pay the bounty off with hard earned cash or get a pardon. What this does it make you less likely to just randomly shoot the place up when you are trying to progress through the game. It just adds a nice layer of consequence that is sorely missing from the GTA series.
– Multiplayer seems fun. I don’t fucking hate it. I’ve played maybe 4 hour of it. Most of that time was spent in “Open World Mode” which is just unstructured play time with the entire world map as the play ground. Players joining/leaving your game at random free to work together on “quests” to earn XP, or free to fucking open fire and grief like there’s no tomorrow. I prefer the shoot now, listen to players calling me asshole on live later option. I shall need more time with the Multiplayer once some of my real life friends pick up the game, it’s the only way I’ll play nice, playing with real life friends. The idea you can just ride around and shoot things together is a good idea.
– Shooting shit feels wonderful. Shoot some poor assfuck while he’s riding a horse, and the poor fuckass may blasted off his horse but get stuck in his saddle, causing a wonderful scene of man being dragged by horse. Aiming on the console controller is of course a challenge for an old school PC gaymer like me, but i just use the “casual” targeting mode which includes a snap to target feature that kicks in when you aim, which 90% locks onto the intended target. Bullet time! The game has Dead Eye bullet time, a feature you can activate to slow time down and line up 1 to N shots and then blast away hitting each target in real time. I always forget I have this option making for some failed combat encounters.
Where RDR falls flat:
– Fucking boring old west story so far, about 8 hours in maybe? While some of the dialog is interesting, and the character models are wonderfully detailed and well animated, it’s just average story telling. “Hey can you find this for me? Can you kill this person for me?” repeat, repeat, repeat. Ya we have some old west activities in there, herding cattle, roping wild horses, but the main portions of the story and just find this and kill this. What’s to be expected though here? Despite the “no new ground broken” nature of the quests, they don’t detract enough to be faulted.
– Might be getting old fast, the third time it rained on me at night the magic was already gone compared to the first time it happened.
Were RDR Loses:
– Fucking TERRIBLE minigames. I hate minigames, and I hate the minigames in RDR.
– Go in water, YOU FUCKING DIE! This only a problem when you are riding a horse top speed and fail to see a small river in front of you, before you can stop the horse or turn your end up the the water , “YOU FUCKING DEAD”.
– Launch time DLC failure. I bought the game from Amazon, it came with some code for Gold Guns, and for the last 5 days the code entry process in game has FAILED! Fucking Rockstar, er I mean Fucking Game Devs/Publishers that skimp on launch data server capacity/network infrastructure.
– No save anytime any where feature? This happens to me with all Rockstar games though, I play for 10 or so hour,s the missions get more complex and require too many start overs from some arbitrary save point because i didn’t drive/kill fast enough, I give the fuck up and say “FUCK YOU GAME FUCK YOU FOR NOT LETTING ME SAVE WHEN I FUCKING WANT TO SAVE”. It’s always some fucking timing mission mechanism that puts me over the edge and makes me quit. LET ME FUCKING GO AS SLOW AS I FUCKING WANT ASSHOLES!
(if/when RDR hits PC, a Deadwood mod will be a must)
Anarchy Reigns: This was the first game I bought in 2013 and it was…not great. The price tag was good at 25$ or so, but I couldn’t get through the single player and the multiplayer, while interesting, just didn’t hold my attention. The key issue was the core of the combat system– it just wasn’t all that great. Compared to the AMAZING Urban Reign for the PS2, which is quite similar, it was a vast disappointment and from the ex-Clover team, that was sad.
