I don't really leave the house much anymore these days, what with me working at home and most of my friends and family living on the continent. So I don't really have any need for handheld devices, meaning I've never actually owned a smartphone and I had to throw away my ancient Sony Walkman cellphone when the battery had started to get all bloated and massive for some reason. Sadly, this also means that my PSP is collecting dust in a dark and damp corner of the crap shack. But I went and turned it on the other day and fiddled around with the emulators on there and tripped over an old favourite: Seiken Densetsu 3.
This isn't just one of the best SNES role playing games, but one of the very best games of all times. I will never understand why Square didn't release it outside of Japan, but the game has been translated by fans a long time ago and a ROM has been available for what must be well over a decade by now.
Look, I don't care about how you normally feel about emulation - if you don't speak Japanese and you can't get your hands on the original, then there's no excuse for you not to play this thing right away if you care about 16bit games at all. It helps if you've liked the previous titles of the serious, Secret of Mana on the SNES and Mystic Quest (or Final Fantasy Adventure for you Americans) on the Game Boy.
This game features some of the most amazing visuals of its generation, it has multiplayer, six playable characters, which all come with their own personal story, branching class upgrades and some fucking great music. Most importantly, it's insanely fun to play, even twenty years after it came out.
And yes, we're still fucking playing Everquest. Turns out that you can spend a lot more time playing only one game when work doesn't force you to finish half a dozen or more titles all within a month. I can run it in 4k (not so great) and in 1440p (slightly less not so great) and record the latter, which looks like this:
I had an interesting conversation on Facebook last night. Apparently my uncle is unhappy with how Facebook displays personalized ads based on your used apps and liked websites, so he's taking a break from it. Fair enough. Of course you can also just disable this feature if you don't like it, but to each their own. His announcement also sparked a strange response from a lady, who suggested giving up on Facebook altogether to go back to "normal communication".
Aww, how romantic. Or something. I asked what she meant by "normal". Post cards, maybe? She said meeting in person, talking face to face, having a conversation, that sort of thing.
Right. By that definition writing a simple letter would not be normal. I mean, where do you draw the line? Is a phonecall normal? Maybe landline is, but VOIP is not? I have no idea and I'm not getting any more responses from her, because she refused to talk to me ever since I've asked whether or not communication by post is normal.
Look, I get it, people update their statuses all the time, like and dislike shit, share pictures of their food and "oh my god, people don't really talk anymore". But maybe it's time to accept we've reached the 21st century. If online communication isn't normal, then the way I've met my partner and stayed in touch with her before we started living together wasn't normal, the way I do my job isn't normal, the way I talk to friends and family back in Germany isn't normal and all you people reading this blog right now so aren't fucking normal! Now if only somebody could tell me what the fuck "normal" is even supposed to be. But hey, gimme another 20 years and I'll moan about telepathic implants and how I miss normal Facebook conversations.
I have found the most amazing Everquest 2 artwork, featuring some of my favourite playable races. Too bad it's all porn. Had to censor that image up there a bit, but I sure as fuck wouldn't mind having my ingame character drawn by that guy. Though maybe with a little less of all the dick sucking.
Yeah, yeah... it's that time again.
I'm fully aware that I'm talking about some MMO you've been ignoring for over a decade and nothing is gonna change that. So I'm not gonna talk about how Everquest 2 is oh so fucking great and you should totally try it, because I'd be lying to most of you.
Instead, here's just a little quickie about two unique little features I really enjoy about this game. Perhaps stuff like that exists in other MMORPGs as well, but I'm not aware of it. First of all, I can now make my characters pull some incredibly stupid faces.
Hey!
While SOEmote has been hyped as a cool new feature for the (eventually, maybe, one far away day) upcoming Everquest Next, it has already been implemented into Everquest 2 for a while and it's glorious. The game recognizes your facial expression and transfers it onto your character. It's not perfect, it works better on some faces than others and Claire's character looks like Daenerys Targaryen before her first cup of coffee, but it's an amazing little toy, which equally fascinates and entertains me.
There's almost a faint Disney-Pixar kind of flair going on here. If nothing else, you can truly act "in character" now.
Another fun thing is mounted combat. Look, it's not exactly the greatest thing since tits and the animations look kinda goofy on older mounts. If nothing else, it's nice and convenient how you can fight shit without having to dismount. And you can make the mount temporarily "disappear" in combat if you don't like fighting on horseback. But there's nothing quite like attacking something whilst riding a raptor, only to watch the dino join the fight and pounce on your enemy. In fact, many mounts have combat stats on them and provide all kinds of passive DPS bonuses, so mounted combat is a good thing and can look pretty good, too. Look at the raptor in this little video:
Playing and writing about games for money is easily one of the greatest jobs I could possibly imagine. I've been working as a freelance games journalist for several magazines for more than a half decade now - and I still would, if it paid the bills. But nowadays it's mostly news, translations and the occasional bit of ingame text when I'm really lucky. I still do the occasional bit of reviewing when I get a good offer, but I'm not into it as much as I used to. In fact, if you consider getting into the business - DON'T! And that's because...
5. You rarely get to play what you want
Imagine sitting on your ass all day playing all the games you could eat in a year! Brand new blockbuster titles and stuff you're dying to play, anyway - work or not. But unless you're one of the select few who can manage to get a job as a full fledged editor, then you can forget about all the really good stuff. As a freelance writer, you get the leftovers and all the stuff none of the regulars want to play. Don't get me wrong, you still get to play video games for money! Playing a game you may not personally care about is still one of the better jobs out there, right? And sometimes you may luck out and get to review a great AAA-title. That does happen, especially when you've been doing this job for a while and you've established yourself as a capable writer. If you're new, however... hoo boy!
One of my first ever reviews was for Hello Kitty Online. I still remember that phonecall. I laughed really hard when they asked me to write about it, they laughed, everybody laughed and I was convinced this was some kind of prank. Then I've spent the next two or three days playing Hello Kitty Online. It was well-paid work, I didn't hate it, but sometimes you have to be ready and willing to play some really weird games or stuff you simply don't like very much. I had to review World of Tanks when it just went into beta and I told the client we should drop the article, because the game sucked and it was doomed to fail. The game has what now, 50something million registered accounts? I was absolutely clueless. I hate strategy games, I don't care about tanks, I have absolutely zero patience for this kind of game and absolutely everything about this game sucked to me. I didn't know shit, but I was good at wrapping my ignorance into nice words. I think most critics are like that. We're as dumb as everybody else, we just use bigger words. Doesn't matter whether you're reviewing games, movies, a fancy bottle of wine or what the fuck ever. So if somebody seriously gave NFS Rivals a rating of 80+ they probably just didn't know any better and they were just told to review it.
4. Writing about great games makes you hate them
Every once in a while I got really lucky and was asked to play the closed beta of some upcoming new MMO. I had free press access to games like SWTOR or TESO, had most of the servers all to myself and could experience these games before average Joe. And that's important, because you'll want to have all your reviews, guides and specials up and available the very second the game goes live for everyone. In order to write a good preview or prepare a class guide, you'll want to play as much of the beta as you can. And in the case of an MMO this usually means several character wipes and starting over several times. You'll be sick and tired of the first 20-30 levels by the time the game has its launch.
In case of one particular MMORPG I had to play to the level cap, finish the story, master three different specs well enough to write about them and be as fast about it as I could. You gotta play your game all day, every day. Which is fine, unless you suddenly come down with the flu, get in trouble with your significant other for never having any time or the game itself simply won't let you play it. A plot-stopping bug prevented me from playing one particularly urgent game for a whole week. Then my account got hacked and I had to finish the rest of the story without most of my gear, because customer support had their hands full with the massive amounts of tickets that go along with the start of any AAA online game. By the time I was done writing about the game and finally had the chance to just play, do what I want and enjoy myself on there, I had lost all interest. I had played the whole thing to death and it just didn't appeal to me anymore.
But even when you get to write about the bigger, more popular titles without having to worry about tight deadlines, bugs and problems, you'll have to put up with the PR guy. Each major publisher has some PR person they'll send after you to make sure you have absolutely everything you need in order to review their game. Free press accounts, free review copies, launch events, premium content - they bury you in stuff! They're the closest thing you can have to a best friend made of tits and bacon. One of them sent me a new GPU once when a game caused severe FPS issues on my system. On the other side of the spectrum you'll find PR bootcamp instructors, who demand to see your work in progress, who tell you which screenshots you may or may not use (or even provide their own) and who will get seriously aggressive when you're being negative about their product.
One publisher asked me for a mock review for one of their games. Basically, that's a pretend review you would print in a magazine, except you send it to the game's publisher, so they can see where they're at. The game in question was awful and that's what I wrote in the mock review. They weren't too happy, but they paid me for my work, then I wrote the exact same stuff in an actual magazine review. The PR guy contacted me the same day, telling me how outraged he was about the article. He told me I was not even allowed to release an actual review, because sending mock reviews means you agree not to actually review the title in question for real. He told me that he'd have to contact my senior editor about it, assuring me he would not be pleased to hear what I did. It all turned out to be bullshit in the end, but sometimes PR will stop at nothing to make you feel guilty or even threaten you. And that's no surprise, because they're supposed to help encourage positive reviews. A negative score can cost them their job. And now imagine how awful you're gonna feel if the PR guy was one of the nice bacon-tit-people and you have to write about how shit their game is.
3. Research and quality don't really matter
Remember how I said it's all about being first with your reviews and guides? And that comes at a price - having to finish a review within a very strict deadline means you don't get a lot of time to play, see and understand all of the content, features and possible flaws and problems. Sometimes a bunch of writers have to team up and create a special issue full of class guides for some brand new MMORPG. And sometimes the deadlines are so tight that some writers don't have the time to figure out every aspect of the game in question. And if the guy who tells you how to play your high elf swashbuckler or whatever has no clue about weapon enchanting, then that information will be missing from the class guide you were stupid enough to buy. And there's another problem with printed guides for MMOs - sometimes they become outdated and invalid from one balance update to the next. It's perfectly normal to answer customer complaints about inaccurate articles, telling them that all the information contained in the guide was correct at the time it was written. Which is true, but unfortunately half of that stuff might be outdated by the time your text is printed and sitting on the shelves.
Another problem is that nobody wants to write in-depth articles about MMORPGs, because they require a lot more time and effort than writing about yet another regurgitated Call of Duty. Think about it - the campaign on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare takes what, five, six hours to complete? Multiplayer is always the same old shit and you can't seriously play that with your pre-release press version, anyway. Quick, easy money. So do you think it's fair that magazines pay their writers the exact same amount of money for reviewing an MMORPG, which comes with 60-100 hours worth of content? Of course not! Neither does any self-respecting freelance writer, so they'll take anyone they can get. They'll ask random progress guilds or some inexperienced kid waiting for their 15 minutes of fame. Nothing a bit of proofreading can't fix, right? Except for factual mistakes, lousy research and a whole lot of rookie mistakes made by someone who doesn't know any better. But at least it was cheap, you get that shit out on release day and everyone else does it, too.
2. Your readers will hate you
I walked into a supermarket one day and a bunch of kids recognized me, they followed me all over the place showering me with questions, asking for my autograph and all that. It was the best fucking moment of the last decade. As a freelancer you don't get the same fan base some of the more popular editors get, but you can see my name and my face in some of the magazines and I guess wearing your favourite magazine's name on your shirt helps. Fuck yeah, I loved my job, I identified with my work and my magazine. I was part of something really epic! Just be prepared to get ten times the amount of hate along with those happy moments.
If you've ever been on any forum on the internet or even the Youtube comments section, then you'll know it's practically impossible to disagree with the average stranger on the internet without them feeling personally insulted. Having a different opinion makes you the enemy. That is particularly true when it comes to things many people feel very passionate about, e.g. videogames. And now imagine you're the guy who is supposed to leave his opinion and a score on a game such as, I dunno, Final Fantasy? You know how crazy those fans can get? Yeah...
People won't just tell you how wrong you are. They'll tell you they hope you get fired, they hope you're not going to get any money for the shit you're writing. You can inspire a flame war of epic proportions for giving Game A 82/100 while the clearly inferiour Game B had a score of 83/100. Yes, people freak out over one fucking percent.
And readers will feel incredibly insulted over just about anything, even if what you write isn't a review. Perhaps you have heard about TESO possibly going Free2Play. Yeah, I had to write an article about that, saying that recent events have caused some speculation about the game possibly changing its payment model. And while most of my readers are sane, healthy individuals, I had people accusing me of bashing and hating on TESO for the sake of clicks. Because I said some people assume Zenimax Online's MMORPG may go Free2Play in the future. Because hey, it ain't WoW and we're all paid off by Blizzard to burn the competition or something.
1. You can write articles worth THOUSANDS and still be unable to buy food
Being a freelance writer means you don't have a regular payday. Clients contact me and tell me what they need or I contact them and offer to write about certain games on a regular basis. We agree on an amount of pages, characters, screenshots, a deadline, my salary - you get the idea. Then I proceed to do my work, hand it in, sometimes it goes back and forth a few times if they want something added or removed, need an extra screenshot or some artwork and when it's all done I get to send an invoice. And then I get paid. Sometimes. Whenever the client feels like it.
Now, don't get me wrong. Most clients get my bill and then they pay up within a week or two and that's great. I also had a client, who conveniently forgot to pay or had accounting problems for three months straight before finally paying up. Another one of my clients has informed me they only process invoices on a single day each month. So let's say you hand in your work for that kind of client on the first of the month, but they only process invoices every 15th of the month. That means you're supposed to wait an entire two weeks before you're even allowed to fucking bill them. And just because they have received your invoice doesn't mean you'll get the money straight away. The transaction may take another two weeks, so it's perfectly normal to do a good job, keep up with all the deadlines and get paid a whole fucking month later.
And there isn't really a lot you can do about it. Sure, you can refuse to write for them until they cough up, but then somebody else will do your work, they'll likely do it for less and they're willing to wait even longer. And you get nothing.
Things get really exciting when you complain about their slow processing and they tell you that you should have put something to the side. Not only is that none of their fucking business, but it's seriously insulting. Being a freelance games critic means you'll never get rich. I get by, but I don't get to pile up much of a rainy day fund. I had a little extra money last year until my father suddenly died and I had to pay for the funeral. Back to square one, broke again. And that's when a client took a whole month to fucking pay me. When I asked what's going on I was told I should have put something on a savings account. That's easy to say when you're a full fleged editor with a regular pay day, who will always know if and when you get paid and how much it's gonna be. But if you depend on clients to pay up on time and they don't, then a huge chunk of your salary will be eaten up by late fees and payment reminders.
I'd love to continue reviewing games. It never paid much, but it was fun and I loved my job. But in a day and age where it's possible to work every day of the week, including sundays and bank holidays and by the end of the month you can't even pay the damn rent, because you have no right to demand payment for your hard work on time, it's time to do something else. Perhaps I'll provide handjobs in some shady pub down in Bulwell. It may not be pretty and it won't pay much better than reviewing games, but at least I'll have my dignity.
Did you ever have one of those friends, who keep sending you gifts and shit, no matter how many times you ask them not to? Haggy is one of those friends. He got us the Game of the Century Edition of Saints Row 4. And, as you can see by the name of my blog, Volition's humor is right up my alley. I liked the previous Saints Row game, but having to remake my character from scratch for the next one, being limited to a depressing, virtual, simulated game world (the story throws you into a simulation), and playing a game, which was originally intended to be DLC or an expansion of sorts simply put me off.
But Saints Row The Third was many moons ago now, we've been done with it for a while and I didn't mind giving the "new" one a go. Watch this space in 2018 for my opinion on Gat out of Hell! The completion thingie says we're about 30% done with the game while I'm writing this and it has been pretty good so far. Claire is playing this weird, sexy porn nun with most of her tits out and she's killing shit with a massive purple dildo. I didn't even know this weapon made a return in this game, as we tripped upon it entirely by accident.
Veins, balls, you gotta give 'em credit for all the ugly detail.
Saints Row 4 makes fun of Mass Effect and the way you can (literally) fuck just about every person on your ship. There are also references to movies like Die Hard, Wargames, Apocalypse Now, Armageddon, The Matrix and tons more. Apparently, there is also a quest which mimics sidescrolling beat 'em ups like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage and I can't wait to play that one! Now all I have to do is get Claire to stop dildoing the shit out of me whenever we try to play co-op and everything should be fine.
You don't deserve to read this blog if you don't get this one.
Do you happen to be the person, who is "good with computers", so everyone in the family just assumes you know how to magically fix them? I'm that guy. I hate it. Not because I don't like to help or anything, but because I really just do exactly the same stuff everyone with a bit of common sense would do. I google that shit. I look for people, who had the exact same problem, which is plaguing the machine at hand, I try and find out whether or not they have found a solution and then I go and reproduce that if it seems safe enough.
The real shit starts when hardware dies, because you'll want to be 100% sure you're not betting on the wrong component. Telling somebody their GPU is fried means you had best be damn sure about it or else they'll throw out a functional piece of hardware and waste money on a replacement because of you. Not the kind of responsibility I want to have. I had to replace and re-order two hard drives for the family last year and doing so fixed the problem in each case. Thank fuck!
It was worse when Claire's mother started experiencing slowdowns and bluescreens and other nasty shit, up to a point where games became practically unplayable. It was relatively easy to figure out that the fan on her video card had died and regular overheating had caused permanent damage to the GPU, but again, that's a triple digit amount of money for a current-gen replacement. Would you want to be wrong when telling somebody they should buy an expensive piece of new hardware? I sure as fuck would not. On the plus side, the factory-overclocked Asus GTX 750 TI is insanely powerful for such a little budget card. I've never seen anything like it. That thing is about half the size of my GTX 770 and runs just fine without a single PCI-E connector. It runs Warframe at rock-solid, stable 60 frames per second on full 1080p and maximum detail settings. Not half bad for a card, which cost a little over a hundred Quid. Not bad at all!
It may not run Warframe in Glorious 4k, but most systems probably don't.
Still, I'm glad I found the culprit and fixed these problems. Imagine telling somebody to buy new parts for their PC and then they don't do shit. Not a happy thought.
We've finished all the new content on Star Trek Online a while ago and just completed the latest event on Warframe, so I decided that now was a good time to check back on Everquest 2. The fact that Claire's mother now has a super fast GPU and the possibility to record gameplay with Shadowplay might have helped a little, as she has posted a video of Everquest on Facebook and I figured, 'yeah, I wanna play that again.' Turns out I was eligible for my ten year veteran reward, so that was pretty cool.
This guy. This guy is my reward.
Everquest 2 has so many cool, innovative features, I wish there were more games like it. Claire's mother has finally reached a level, which allowed her to enter some of the dungeons in the game, so Claire and I matched levels with her through the mentoring system. So, we temporarily lowered our characters' levels from 87 and 45 respectively to 21, so the dungeon would remain a challenge and everyone could receive experience. The dungeon was designed with five players in mind, so the three of us filled our ranks with mercenaries. Each player may hire one mercenary at a time and they'll follow you around like a battle pet of sorts. They come in various classes and roles, so they can deal damage, tank, heal or even revive you if you fall in battle (and they don't).
Depending on your class and gear, it's entirely possible to "solo" a dungeon without overleveling. For instance, I'm playing a relatively beefy warrior class, so I can finish whole heroic instances with a healer mercenary. If you're a damage dealer, you could bring a strong, tanky mercenary and do the same, provided you kill the bad guys before they kill your tank. The game still features ridiculous amounts of massive, difficult raids, but there are so many zones, quests, events and activities out there that it's entirely possible to avoid all the raid content without ever running out of other fun stuff to do. You could just sprout wings and explore the world or play house:
Even if you're not hugely interested in Everquest - just look at those flying animations for a minute. They're just so fucking good! You can ride dragons, pegasi, a skeletal nightmare with ghostly bat wings, but this will always be my favourite way of transportation. Meanwhile, Claire is using a ground-based mount, which moves at insane speed by leaping:
Clever girl!
But if raptors are too scary for you, then you could always get yourself a floppy-eared rabbit:
This isn't photoshopped - that's an actual ingame mount.
Of course you might find this one a little too much on the cuddly side, so there is also a nice battle-clad bunny if you like it just a wee little more hardcore:
Not sure if stupid or badass.
Or add a touch of Caerbannog:
Death has big, nasty teef!
Like WoW, the game is over a decade old and isn't overly demanding, so I can actually run it on 4k resolution and maximum detail settings, but the UI becomes practically invisible, so... well, mabye for screenshots.
I may resubscribe in the near future if I end up missing any of the premium features, but as a (near) day one veteran, I get so many free goodies and bonuses and unlocks, there's really very little reason to spend anything at all. Maybe I'll save my pennies for the new expansion once I reach level 95.
I survived Christmas 2014 and I'm a bit sad it's already over. I used to hate Christmas, because I've experienced it many times in a family with four teenagers and a pair of stressed parents, whose marriage had broken beyond repair many years ago. But things are pretty chilled out in England, there's just lots of good food, everyone's happy and I'm actually getting presents, which is something that hasn't really happened to me anymore since I was about 16. Everything was just... good. You know, like this:
You can't look much happier than this whilst surrounded by family.
We took Hugo Bosc with us when we came over to see the family and he was a little boring at first. He has this annoying habit of hiding under the sofa, a table or anything else that makes him difficult to pick up. He does it at home, too - hide under the sofa and stalk the cats. Because the moment he comes out from under there, chances are somebody might grab him and put him back in his cage and he doesn't like that. He wants to roam. Which is okay, but sometimes I have to work and if I'm the only one at home, he just can't run around outside all the time.
So he sat under the sofa when we sat together for our Christmas dinner until the smell of food lured him out. Big old lizard decided to check out the kitchen, so he got his share of the tons of meat we had and he just ate until he went into a food coma.
He just kept on sleeping in the living room...
...and in the car.
Last night we even had a bit of snow. Some of the biggest snowflakes I have seen in my life, in fact!
Snow makes everyone in Nottingham lose their shit.
Unfortunately, this stuff never stays around for long over here, so I had to be quick. I'm not super satisfied with the result and I hope we'll get some more snow, soon, so I'll get another shot at it. But it's a start...
I need to drink less to make it yellower.
The first two letters turned out okay-ish, but then the wind got so strong that it became impossible to create any legible writing. I think next time I'm gonna try keeping the hat on for more precision.
I'm not one for new year's resolutions, so I won't come up with any. I couldn't be bothered to keep up with them, anyway. Unless... Claire's sister asked if it's possible to survive 40 wanks (long story). I can do around 20 on a good day, so maybe this is something to look into. For science!
Oh and I am now the proud owner of Forza Horizon 2 on the Xbox One.
I've added a custom paintjob - can you tell?
It's easily one of the greatest racing games I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it's also solid proof that I'm starting to outgrow my hobby and I'm too old for next-gen racing games. I can live on with the tacked-on "story" told by a bunch of metrosexual brodudes, one of which represents the player. You can't change his looks or gender and the game strictly addresses the player as male, because there are no female gamers in 2014. Doesn't fucking matter, it's all about the cars anyway.
What does matter to me, however, is how Forza Horizon 2 dangles all these choices and possibilities in front of me only to take it all away whenever it damn well feels like it. I chose a BMW Z4 for my very first car, because I think it's a cool car and I like having the possibility to tune up any vehicle beyond recognition. I turned that thing into a beast, powerful enough to take on any Ferrari. Problem is, no matter how much you power up the Z4's performance, you're only allowed to race other sports cars. What's worse, every sports car championship comes with a so-called cross country race, which takes you off the road and through corn fields and forests and tall grass and other such happy shit. Which sucks immeasurable amounts of ass when you're in a car with rear wheel drive and an ultra-low, stiff suspension and gear ratios set for speed over acceleration, i.e. a car tuned for street-racing.
Eventually I switched to a Lamborghini Countach to avoid all that cross country crap altogether, which worked well until I managed to finish all of the retro supercars championships. That's when I could no longer progress through the game until I switched to a different vehicle class. Which is something I reeeeeeally didn't want to do, because I've put hours into my Lamborghini painting it, tuning it and what have you. In the end I drove around this thing:
...why?
A bunch of championships later I was told that I could no longer progress unless I changed to yet another type of vehicle. BUT I JUST WANT TO DRIVE MY FUCKING LAMBORGHINI, GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!
So I started up multiplayer mode, hoping I could hop on my favourite car there. Instead, the host had decided to use weak, low-ranked cars, so I was forced to pick a shitty car I didn't want to drive, because the game doesn't let you cancel and opt out of multiplayer until you've chosen a car you didn't want to drive in the first place. Then you get teleported to a race, then you gotta wait for the race to start, THEN you can fucking quit multiplayer, drive (or teleport for ingame cash) back to the nearest garage to switch back to the car you want, join another multiplayer session and be forced to switch cars again. I tried three different sessions, I was never allowed to use the car I want, I could never just cancel and bail when the game told me I had to pick a shitty car and I had fucking voice chat forced on me in ever session. You can only mute each player individually by opening up their profile, which is super convenient IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING RACE!
Hey, anyone fucking remember Need for Speed: Porsche BACK IN FUCKING 2000 where you could just pick any fucking car you wanted, join a game and fucking race? And you didn't have to listen to a bunch of teenage douchebags the entire time? Yeah, that was great. 15 years into the future and online gaming is so fucking awful, I just can't be arsed to put up with it. So yeah... thanks for an entertaining 5 or 6 hours there, Forza. If I can ever just drive my favourite car in single- and multiplayer and ON THE FUCKING ROAD at that, I'll be back. Meanwhile I'm just gonna work on that 40 wanks thing or something.
But wait... there is more!
Oh, while I'm already bitching: can we stop making fucking EVERYTHING a goddamn achievement? You manage to drive a couple inches without crashing? BAM! "Clean Driving!" Extra points. You hit something? BAM! "Wreckage!" Points for you. Just about dodge another car? "Near miss" (also available in great near miss, awesome near miss and ultimate near miss, I shit you not). More points for you. Fail to dodge that car? Doesn't matter. "Trading paint" aaaand extra points. Drifting, high speed, fast acceleration, it's impossible to play for more than two or three seconds without bonuses or achievements popping up left, right and center.
This shit right there is why I play Dark Souls. A goddamn boss comes out of nowhere and his favourite thing to eat is your face? You get killed in one hit? TOO FUCKING BAD, go and get good at the fucking game! No, "At least you tried really hard" achievement or some shit. Achievements are for winners. They're for getting shit done. Modern game designers are like whores. They tell you over and over again how damn awesome you are at everything you do. You know they're lying, they know they're lying, but everyone feels a little better about themselves and the customers will come back to spend more money.
2014 has been one of the most... erm... interesting years in my life. Christmas is approaching rapidly and I finally get to sit down and chill out for a while. Which, of course, is a complete lie, because I'm still writing reviews, posting news and doing a few new things with all that creative energy, since being a freelance games critic doesn't really pay the bills anymore. In fact, I've reached a new low where magazines offer one third of the money that I used to get when I first started writing about these games roughly half a decade ago. Of course I don't accept grossly underpaid job offers like that, but by the end of the day that means I still have my dignity and nothing to eat. So instead of just writing about games I now get to help create them by writing quest text and helping out with translations. It requires more or less the same level of wit and creativity but without the math (German review scores are fucking horrible!) and without a bunch of 14 year old shitheads jerking off all over the comments section. If you happen to be one of my German commenters on any of the websites I work for, yes, I just called you a shithead and I hope you die. If you're one of my employers, please don't fire me. :P
I don't claim to know anything about game design or the development of games, but at least in the case of the game I get to write for, the actual mechanics, the stuff you click on, the things you do in the game are already implemented and working. There is just no story for that particular content. You see, the devs just have this spot on a map, which features a certain setting, players go there to quest, loot, same old, but there is no explanation as to why anyone would have to go there or what's going on. And that's where I come in. It's pretty exciting stuff, because you come up with a background story and a fitting quest chain and then the devs put all your text in the game and eventually you get to play all the stuff you wrote about.
It's complicated, too, because everything needs to fit the overall theme and setting of the game, so stuff goes back and forth for a while, things get rewritten, some stuff makes it in there right away and sometimes a series of quest texts goes straight in the bin, because it just doesn't fit. The whole thing is far from being an impressive AAA-production, but it's fun to help create something, even if it's small and not incredibly significant. Good money, too, so I'm happy. And by now I've written paid columns, adverts, manuals, translations, reviews, game text... wow. And it all started with a crappy little blog like this one.
How to ruin your mood in one easy step: 1. Launch Dark Souls.
We're trying to fit in some exciting shit with all the work I get to do these days, so there's still a lot of Warframe going on and we're also back on Dark Souls, because we're fucking masochists. Seriously, after five minutes of Dark Souls, even the toughest challenges on Warframe feel like a vacation. Especially since their community ladies are being so nice with me.
Burrrr-surrrr-kurrrr...
Digital Extremes are hosting some of the best live streams and this moment really made my day.
And since I'm already linking my shit on Youtube - the channel is starting to see more activity and subscribers, so the new mic must be doing something. With that said, I still went down from 250k views to only a little above 150k when I removed one video, which showed the drawing of a naked lady on my psp's wallpaper for about four nanoseconds. It's a bit depressing, really. I can try voice, no voice, music, guides, reviews, gameplay or what the fuck ever, but all it takes for a video to be REALLY successful is a split-second of vagina.
As for Dark Souls, I didn't actually want to get back into it, but with the recent migration from GFWL to Steam I had to fire it up again, then I had to make sure my old savegames still work and then I played around for a bit and one thing lead to another and... yeah.
So much suffering.
And let's be honest here for a minute: Much of the praise this game is getting for being incredibly difficult but never unfair is a load of bullshit. When enemies, traps and other shit that can kill you in one hit lurk around every corner, usually hidden in a way that makes it impossible for you to react until it's too late, there is very little fair play involved. Forcing you to memorize the layout of a level isn't fair, it's actually pretty bad game design.
So coming back to the game after more than a year of inactivity on a New Game++++ is an exercise in frustration. But there is just something about Dark Souls. The gritty, depressing setting, the sad music, the futility of it all, the whole thing is a very melancholic work of art. And finally beating a ridiculously unfair boss fight after getting your ass kicked for god knows how many hours feels much more satisfying than it should. The game also allows for a lot of different play styles and I'm really enjoying the combat system.
You can dual-wield just about anything from cool stuff that makes sense (claws, knives, fencing weapons + parry daggers) to shit that makes no sense at all (dual shields, dual twohanders), use quick and agile builds, which rely on parrying, dodging and backstabbing or power-heavy builds with heavy weapons and armor, clocking in at significantly fewer swings per minute, but making every hit count that much more.
And I can't help it. Though I've already finished the whole thing and all the bosses multiple times and though I'm playing like a complete and utter noob again after my long break, I just can't stop playing it. I'm using this ridiculous combination of gear where I'm swinging a giant two-handed sword in slow motion, blocking most hits with a shield the size of an average dinner table and shooting baddies with my really awesome triple crossbow. The real fun starts when Claire and I play in co-op and people invade us, so I just stun-lock them with lightning bolts while Claire hacks them to bits. And then we usually get a whole lot of hateful messages for fighting 2vs1 and for not bowing and stupid shit like that.
Do I look like I'm gonna give you a respectful bow before I kick your ass?
This is the one thing that seriously bothers me about the Dark Souls community. People can invade other players' sessions and attempt to kill them in pvp. It's part of the game and I can live with that, even though some assholes spend all day collecting all the most powerful items on deliberately underleveled characters in order to kill total newcomers, who wouldn't stand a chance with or without gear, anyway. It's entirely possible that some dickhead will enter your game during your very first hour on Dark Souls and just thrash you with the game's most powerful items while you're still trying to figure out how to jump. Because people will do anything to win and to gain an unfair advantage.
Ironically, these guys don't just enter your game, chop you up and leave again. They use the emote system and fucking bow before they attack. In fact, it's considered common courtesy to return that emote. Because "honor". "Ohai, I suck too hard to fight consenting PvPers in the arena, so I have to invade noobs. Please accept my humble bow." So if you bow to me during an invasion, it's likely the last thing you'll do. And if you're expecting me to take turns with my team mate and attack you one at a time, well, GO FUCK YOURSELF!
I'm still on the fence about Dark Souls 2. On the one hand it's on Steam Sale right now for 11 Quid. Better dual-wielding, more gear, better magic, much larger game world, more stuff to do. On the other hand, I'm still having fun with the first one and while most people agree that Dark Souls 2 is an okay game by itself, it's a disappointing "Souls" game. There is also way too much troll crap going on in pvp and people on the forums complain about "hackers" a lot. Which is no great surprise, seeing how Dark Souls stores save files locally, meaning any idiot can alter them with a simple hex editor or even change files "live" using a memory editor. Oh hey, look at me, I'm such a total hacker!
And they're already working on a "next gen" DX11 version with the DLC already included, so I should probably just wait a little longer.
Claire is back on WoW. It was actually me who said she should just go and get WoD, even though I hate the idea of her hanging around on there all day while I'm playing other shit by myself, but we're taking a few hours each day where we still do stuff together. And the initial hype has already died down a bit. She's still on there a lot, but she's no longer over the top crazy about it. To be fair, I've heard the exact same stuff from my old man, whose sudden death was, in part, related to his WoW addiction. Make no mistake, he was just the kind of guy who was easily addicted, so if it hadn't been WoW it would have been something else and I don't blame the game. But I just can't play it anymore and wouldn't do it, even if it wasn't for all the changes and simplifications which I'm no huge fan of.
Classic AV was fucking tedious. I miss it a lot.
We had this messed up relationship and never really talked or did anything together. For my 9th birthday I didn't ask for any presents or anything and just wanted to spend a day with him, because he was always working or playing video games. Azeroth was the only place where I could really reach him.
I've done some amazing shit on there with him and Claire. The three of us would tackle instances way above our own levels, just the three of us, and we'd win. He was a lousy father, but he was one of the best hunters I've ever known. What a weird thing to say. Walking around Ironforge, flying over Dun Morogh, knowing I won't see the login-spam from his army of characters, who covered just about every profession there is, knowing he won't send me messages on there and we're not playing any dungeons - I just can't do it. Sometimes I wanna log on there and roll a dwarven hunter and name him Redbeard like the first character who became his main, the first one he leveled all the way to 60. There are plenty of memorials in Azeroth dedicated to people who died in real life, so the idea isn't even that far-fetched. WoW was his happy place. The guy had his problems and he ran away from them when he was on there all day, but it's where he chose to be and where I've buried most of my happy memories about him, for as weird and as sad as it might be. It would be nice to have him remembered on there. Oh well.
We were such noobs back then.
I'm still writing the odd game review here and there, but it's mostly news these days. And hopefully more quest text and translations, because that stuff is a lot more fun than news. I wish I had the time to put something useful on my Youtube channel in between all that stuff, but there are only so many hours in a day and the really annoying stuff usually pays the most. Haha, "pays". Working 7 days a week, every week and being able to juuuust pay the rent and buy food isn't fun. I thought that kind of shit would end when I stopped working in call centres and doing retarded data typist crap, but poverty seems to be the way to go, no matter what. On then, to a poor, filthy 2015! At least we're having fun.
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