Divinity is really Ultima VII for couples

Divinity: Original Sin is a strange animal. It's so loaded with dialogue, quests and secrets that I'm pretty sure it would have scared me off if I had played it all by myself. When a game throws 20something quests at me only two hours in, I tend to get overwhelmed. To be fair, Divinity is really meant to be played cooperatively with a friend, though I didn't trust that feature a whole lot. I like to be in full control over what happens in my RPGs and if you introduce another human player, there's bound to be a certain amount of unpredictability. Long story short, I tried the Alpha with Claire and was fully expecting us to hate either each other or the game or both by the end of our first session. Instead, we ended up playing till the sun came up.

Our first murder case

Divinity features two customizable main characters, meaning you get to choose their starting class, looks, names and gender. So I did what I always do and picked a warrior. Claire made her character a rogue. These choices really just affect your starting abilities. I was free to raise my character's intelligence upon level ups and teach him how to use magic whilst Claire's rogue could learn how to whack stuff with two-handed weapons if she so desired. We didn't, but the possibility was there. The protagonists have fixed background stories, so we started our journey as Source Hunters, sent on a murder investigation.

The game starts on a beach near the town where the murder happened. And I got paranoid the second Claire decided to walk off and explore while I was still trying to figure out how to interact with the shell I had just picked up. What if she gets killed? What if she talks to an NPC and I miss something important? Instead, we ended up uncovering opposite sides of the map, looting some loose change out of random broken crates, picking up more shells and finally running into a bunch of angry crabs. Our first battle!

Divinity switched into a turn-based combat mode when I got attacked, while Claire was still running around in real time until she caught up with me and joined the fight. Playing my warrior was pretty much the way I expected it to be - I had my turn, I hit a baddie, ran out of action points, ended my turn, rinse, repeat. Claire's first move was to charm one of the crabs, which now fought on our side. She also silenced one of them, all in the same turn. During her next turn she basically stabbed the shit out of everything with what felt like half a dozen attacks or so. Meanwhile, I had enough action points to punch one crab per round. Which was usually enough to score a kill, but my abilities didn't go beyond the usuall stuff such as the "Punch harder but hit less" stance and what have you. Hmm.

Batman & Buckethead

A little further into the game I was stopped by a couple of drunk guards, who tried to order me around, so I bitched at them, which resulted in a fight. And again, my warrior felt a bit weak. Claire was charming, stabbing and silencing stuff left, right and center while I did my usual one punch per round routine. Of course she got all the aggro. Of course she died. Either there's no taunt ability or I'm too stupid to find it or I just haven't unlocked it yet, but I couldn't stop those suckers from attacking her. I gave her a battle-rez with a magic scroll I had in my inventory and we kicked their asses.

Something interesting happend immediately after the fight: Exclamation points appeared above our avatars and Claire's character chewed me out for attacking innocent guards. I agreed, saying they didn't really have to die. Which is true, I just wanted to moan at them, not start a fight to the death. We both got a +1 to "compassion". Weird.
Also: Interactive items! Fucking awesome! Turns out you can move all the barrels, crates and just about every other random object you find in the world. And since my character is strong like an ox, I could even move the really heavy shit, whilst Claire could not. I've also put some points into my intimidate skill, so now I had three things I was good at: Punching, moving stuff and threatening people. Yay!

Meanwhile, Claire picked locks, snuck around stealing everything from spoons to portraits to stinky panties. Her rogue is basically awesome at everything while my character, well... Let's just say there was this burning boat and I wanted to help put out the fire, so I picked up a bucket and this happened:

Fucking buckets! How do they work?

Sleuthing like the pros

We came to this town, which basically plays the soundtrack to Doc Martin. And while I was originally paranoid about the whole splitting up thing, this is exactly what Claire and I ended up doing in order to cover more ground. We both went for tasks that matched our particular set of skills. Or something. Basically, I threw a water barrel onto the burning boat, Claire shot it and sadly, nothing happened. Also tried an oil barrel, just to see if we could blow the thing up. In the end, we settled for Claire's rain spell, because my shit never works.

I then proceeded to spend our gold on some new gear, threatened the living shit out of some guy who tried to steal a fish and interrogated the locals about the murder whilst Claire broke into houses, basements and attics, digging up important clues and evidence. Whenever one of us made some progress, both our characters would receive some experience points and both of us received updates in our journals, so nobody had to miss out on anything.

Three hours into the game we had only seen a total of three fights. We've earned most of our experience points talking, exploring, role-playing. I've spent a skill point to upgrade my awesome sword-swinging abilities and Claire learned how to talk to Animals, because of course she did. And five minutes later we've received a quest from a random cat, who fell in love with another kitty and just couldn't understand why she didn't love him back. I'm not making this up.

Name, Job, Rumors

Divinity has this undeniable Ultima-awesomeness about it. I can walk into any house and start fucking around with people's belongings. Claire picked a lock and ended up interrupting a very angry lady's bath. I like ripping random portraits off the walls to see if there's anything hidden behind them. You can move around, steal, destroy, interact with just about every piece of furniture, every container in every house. Claire is carrying around wheat, cups of water and tomatoes and I just know she'll end up making a pizza at some point if the game allows it.

Even the dialogue is basically Ultima. You can ask random NPCs to tell you about themselves, inquire about events relevant to your quest and some of them can be asked to join your party. Many of them are a little more fleshed-out than that, though. We walked in on a cook, who was just about to butcher a chicken, when Claire insisted we help save the stupid bird's life. I was looking forward to having the damn thing cooked, but I got overruled and had to go hungry.
I want a cat to join us. We can communicate with animals now, so a berserking cat is a must.

We had to interrupt our first "let's fire it up real quick and test if multiplayer works" session when the sun came up this morning. We're both eagerly waiting for Claire to come home from work so we can play some more. The main reason why we're enjoying Divinity so much is because it's so incredibly close to a Pen&Paper role-playing experience. The game lets you act and talk in character. Before every major decision, our characters talk and we both get to state our opinions. We also get to choose whether we want to be angry, charming or reasonable about the topic at hand. This is an incredibly fun, powerful feature, which gives life to the protagonists.

Another important factor is how combat is not the single-most important thing in Divinity. We've spent hours looking for secrets, talking to NPCs, finding work for a bunch of shipwrecked sailors, unlocking secret doors and so forth. "You go dig up the guy's corpse at the graveyard, and I'll talk to the rooster, who is having his portrait painted. Maybe he knows something." Cooperative gameplay made our experience a million times better, not despite, but because of our entirely different personalities and play styles. I have never played an RPG in this manner before, but the idea of playing a game like Divinity solo seems infinitely less rewarding.

If you have a friend or a loved one, who is ready to sit through a massive, complex RPG in jolly cooperation, you may already grab the game via Steam Early Access. I have also recorded footage of most of the events I'm describing in this blog, which can be found here.

-Cat

Steaksteaksteak

Today I celebrate being a man. Well, actually I'm celebrating being a total disgusting pig, but that's essentially the same thing. That thing up there is the Flaming Grill Steak "Challenge". Because eating steak is apparently supposed to be difficult now. Life has been good to us, we've made a bit of money, our internet connection is back and it's time to have some fun.

Well, fun... I'll ask them for the challenge steak minus all the fuss about it. I don't want my fucking picture taken, I don't want to be in their "hall of fame", I just want the damn meat. I don't enjoy being out in public and having a bunch of weirdos decorating me with buttons and badges isn't exactly what I had in mind for tonight. It was annoying and awkward enough when I finished their burger in under 15 minutes. I don't need to repeat that kind of experience.

Our internet connection has finally come back after four days of downtime. Apparently, it had a "blocker" installed for causing "noise" that interferes with police radio or some shit. Queue the conspiracy theories! Seriously though, there's this tiny voice at the back of my head going, "WTF?!"
Oh well, offline time is Skyrim time, so I've had some more fun with that. Yay for interactive bards!

For our multiplayer needs, Claire and I went back to good old Patapon. I love the old PSP. I took a nice hot bath, Claire was in the living room and we still had some fun multiplayer matches together. The joy of wireless coop.

Patapon 3 is one of those games I keep coming back to. It's this weird mix of RPG and rhythm game, which makes absolutely no sense when you look at gameplay footage.
Instead of directly controlling a character, you issue commands with the four drum buttons. There are commands for attacking, defending, advancing and so forth. So rather than doing all the work yourself, you drum along with the rhythm and tell your Patapon what to do and watch as they act out your commands. I might also be the most amazing Patapon player on earth, as demonstrated in the video below:

Four days without internet may not sound all that bad, but I have webcomics to catch up on, contact lenses to order, banking to do, invoices to send, there's the whole booking of face and youtube thing going on, a paypal issue to look into and a dozen other things I could not do while I was offline, many of which are job-related. Oh well. Just another two hours till steak time.

-Cat

The Offline Diaries

Shit. Stupid, boring, frustrating shit. Had no working internet connection for 20 hours now. And look at me - I'm fucking blogging. If you can read this, it should mean that my connection had been fixed eventually, but as of this moment I'm offline and hating it.

It's hilarious how completely useless a computer is when there's no internet access. I file my tax returns online. All my banking is sorted online and I do all my work and earn all my money online. Heck, I order my fucking groceries online and then I pay over the internet. Right now I'm offline. Been told it would all be fixed by the end of yesterday. Then they said sometime this morning. Then they said it'll be fixed at noon. We're approaching 1pm right now. Still nothing.

We might have to do analog grocery shopping for the weekend, which isn't a big deal. Not being able to work, however, is a fucking problem. This is costing me money, right now, every hour and, godzilla forbid, every fucking extra day they fail to fix this mess. We also live in a day and age where certain stupid singleplayer games require you to be online in order to play all by yourself. For whatever fucking reason.

Hey, ever had one of those days where you look at your socks and you can't decide whether to put them on or whether you wanna start whacking it? Well, I don't have that problem anymore, because NO FUCKING INTERNET!
I've reached a level of desperation and boredom where I've actually turned on the TV. For some reason we're now getting a whole lot of American channels, which seem to show nothing but "reality" tv. As in, incredibly stupid, badly-staged garbage, which comes in 38 different flavours, yet, in essence, it's always the same fucking show. A bunch of fat, noisy dickheads build motorcycles. A couple insufferable, moronical twats build custom-made fish tanks. A family of obese retards teach the audience everything about the miracles of running a repo business. And there is so much incredibly bad acting, staged drama and bullshit, it's no wonder people outside the US harbour a certain amount of disrespect towards Americans.

I don't wanna jump on the hate bandwagon. But if you read this and you happen to live in America and you're fed up with all the 'Murica jokes, well... Look. They show Honey Booboo over here. American Idol, American Chopper, Man vs. Food, The Biggest Loser, Hoarders - you get the idea. Half of these shows have "America" right in the title. I'm not gonna say another word about the content and quality of these shows (or lack thereof), because I don't believe I have to. It's not fair to judge a nation based on their tv shows, but life ain't fair and this is the impression lots of people get of the US. And that's just basic cable.

Oh well, since I'm already going there: There's this neverending debate going on re: gun control. The amazing Sarah Silverman posted something on Facebook about a kid who got shot for egging somebody's car (!) and people called her all kinds of nasty things for being *against* guns. And there are some incredibly stupid pro-gun arguments out there. Crap like, "So if somebody gets killed by a car, do you want to ban cars?" The big difference is, they're constantly working on making cars safer, not deadlier. Cars weren't build for the purpose of killing people. I know what you're going to say now, guns are for self-defense and they're not made for killing people, either. And when I say that most school massacres didn't happen because somebody drove a car through several classrooms, people tell me, "If I had been there with my gun, I would have shot the fucker." Right. That actually comes up a lot.

Everybody likes to picture themselves a hero. It's a fun thing to do, isn't it? Wouldn't it be cool if some guy tried to rob a bank or a store and you're around to save the day, you're the only one not shitting yourself in terror? Makes you wonder why there's still any crime out there if everyone is such a fucking hero, doesn't it? Just saying.
I don't think this is about self-defense. I don't think it's about fear of terror or crime or fuck knows what. I think lots of people want to hold on to their guns because they're cool. There, I said it.

Guns are cool. There are entire Mythbusters episodes devoted to guns, how they work, what they can do. And they're not exactly hating what they're doing in these episodes. I don't exactly hate watching them. And when we play Battlefield or Call of Duty, regardless whether we're in the US, Europe or god knows where, we demand realistic guns in those games. It's all about the guns. We get to personalize them with cool camo, scopes, silencers, special ammo and what not. We all have a favourite gun on there, favourite attachments, it's all about making them more awesome.
I have a huge sword at home. Because swords are cool. I don't believe in the impending zombie apocalypse and I don't think my home will be raided by medieval knights anytime soon. Chances are, I might not be a skilled swordsman, either, though I'm giving myself the benefit of the doubt for the sake of preserving my ego.

So, do I need a sword? Of course not. I have one, anyway. And of course I think there's no need or reason for people to own a gun. And I think it's idiotic to say they're not dangerous when lots of innocent people get shot all the damn time. That said, I wonder how I would feel about the whole thing if guns were legal over here. If I had been born and raised in a society, where pretty much everyone owns a gun, where it's perfectly normal to have one and where guns are, well, cool. I'd like to say I'd still be 100 percent against them, but it's easy to say that when I don't have to part with my hypothetical gun and when I don't feel insulted as a "responsible gun owner." When nobody wants to take my constitutional right away from me.
I'm still against them. I'm just saying, I cannot possibly tell how I would feel about the whole thing if I were on the other side of the fence.

1.30pm now. I've just been told the problem can't be fixed locally, it's something bigger and it might take all the way until monday. That means I can't take care of my weekend news posts. I can't do my job so I won't get paid. And I can't phone the office in Germany, because the damn phone line ain't working properly, either. I'm having so much fun right now.
I've reached a point where I'm screaming the answers at the stupid gameshow candidates on tv.

I've installed this really impressive Skyrim modification titled "Interesting NPCs". It does pretty much what it says on the package and adds 225 interesting characters to interact with. It's been around for a while and I've ignored it until recently, because it seemed a bit much. Literally a couple hundred new NPCs, written and voice-acted by the community, that can't be good and it can't fit into the game too well, right?
Man.

First of all, this mod takes care of a few things which have always bothered me about the game. For instance, I've joined the bard's college, people address me as "bard", yet I never get to do any bardy stuff in the game. The mod changes that. Not only does it add a few more bards and tons of new songs to their repertoire, but you can join them and play the flute while they sing. It's nothing incredibly sophisticated, but it adds to the immersion and it simply makes sense.
There's just something cool about a game that lets you sit in a tavern on a cold, rainy night, you can hear the thunderstorm outside and you're gathered around the fire with your companions and there's a bit of singing and music going on. During quests, certain NPCs might sing or play a tune before battle or to mourn the loss of a beloved companion. It's simple, yet powerful.

My main concern prior to installing Interesting NPCs was the writing. User-generated content rarely goes beyond badly-written fan-fiction when it comes to storytelling. The dialogue in this mod, however, is of a much higher quality than anything offered in the vanilla game. Dialogue choices in Skyrim generally don't offer much other than yes, no, go on - the basic stuff. Your character doesn't get much of a possibility to develop a character of their own, at least not through diaogue. Interesting NPCs changes that. You can be a no-nonsense, straight to the point kind of guy, but you can also be a real jerk, a total smartass or anything in between. In a conversation about tact, I could say things such as, "I've never cared about tact. Hate your robe, by the way." It was part of a conversation with some dead-serious, scary dark mage. The whole thing had a touch of BioWare to it.

In fact, that's exactly what applies to the new companions you can find with this mod. They all have fascinating and well-crafted background stories, which they will share with you if you ask the right questions. They might even ask you to join them on a personal quest and it's easy to grow as attached to them as one would to characters like Garrus or Morrigan in their respective games. Okay, there are some small limitations, of course. First of all, there's not really a system for trust or affection here, no friendship level. You don't have to spend a large amount time with your companions, get to know them better, get them to open up. All of the dialogue is pretty much right there, if you're willing to listen. So you don't always get the illusion that you make friends with somebody over time, as they become more and more willing to reveal themselves to you.

The mod tries to fix that to a certain extent by tying certain dialogues, events and character-specific quests to locations and little timers. I had this sweet Argonian heroine in my group, the Swamp Knight, who would tell me about the band of warriors she used to travel with, but she'd only continue her story upon reaching a certain location in the game. Once I was done with that part of her personal quest, a courier would hand me a letter, sent by some mysterious stranger, who was eager to meet us both. Again, you'll pass some time between all the dialogue and receiving the letter and then you might have other things to do before agreeing to meet the guy who sent you the letter, so you don't go from complete strangers to best friends for life within five minutes of chatting. But it's probably not quite as sophisticated as, say, Mass Effect. You also don't get to shag your companions, as far as I'm aware. Not that I'd want to have sex with an anthropomorphic lizard knight or anything.

The problem with these characters is that they're so likable, fascinating and alive, that they make most default NPCs look a little bland in comparison. Companions from Interesting NPCs will comment on certain situations, the bad guys they're fighting or the city you're about to enter. Default companions don't say anything of value, unless you wanna count, "Oh look, a cave!" or "Please stop stabbing me in the face."
Some of them lead you to quests, which are *so* good, I had to double-check in order to find out whether those quests were made by Bethesda or whether they were part of the mod. There is this incredibly cool Khajiit swordswoman, a right nasty cunt, who tells this fascinating tale about how she killed her master in battle. Investigating her story will lead you on a pilgrimage where you have to choose a side, fight to the death in an epic showdown, dramatic blizzard and kickass new music, made just for this quest, included. It's really great stuff, part of me felt sorry for the antagonist, who was a great character and I'll me remembering the whole thing for a while. When's the last time you could say that about a side-quest in vanilla Skyrim?

Mind you, the whole thing is still a work in progress and it's far from perfect. There are a few typos, the subtitles don't always match what the characters are saying and while the vast majority of voice actors is talented and convincing, there's the odd cringeworthy performance. Sometimes it's a horrible, fake accent, sometimes an NPC sounds like the voice actor was using a cheap, crappy microphone and certain NPCs are a bit shy and mumble a lot, making it almost impossible to understand them unless you turn down the ingame music.

2.30pm and still no internet. I think I'm gonna take a bath and read a comic book or something. Alas, it's 2014 and my new comics aren't on paper - they're .cbr files. And once I'm done reading that stuff, well... let's just say I won't get any new material while the internet's down. Great.

-Cat

Climax

Yeah. That cover-story? Mine. The column with the cool cartoon cat over there? Mine. In fact, that entire section of the magazine is mine. For somebody who debuted with a humble one-pager about La Tale, this is a pretty big deal.

Please don't misunderstand. The message here isn't, "HEY, CHECK OUT HOW FUCKING INCREDIBLE I AM!1one" It's more among the lines of "OMFGWTFISHAPPENING?!"
Being allowed to write about TESO is a privilege. A friend and fellow freelancer of mine asked for the job. I didn't. In fact, I refused when they offered it to me, because I knew nothing about the game and I didn't think I could do a good job. They wanted me, anyway. I won't lie to you, I'm pretty damn sure I only got it because the fulltime-editor, who was originally supposed to do it, had to cancel, god bless him. But someone at the magazine must have wanted me to do it - or why would they give the job to me instead of the guy who asked to do it in the first place? Again, big deal!
Somebody must have thought I could do it, even though I wasn't really sure I could. This is so fucking cool!

The whole thing seems unreal. I don't wanna bore you with the whole having to refuse extra work instead of having to beg for it, free Xbox One, free hardware, being worried I might have to go back to an office job one day crap all over again. Let's enjoy it while it lasts, every day is a gift and all that. See where it will go. I'm also gonna start over with my novel, which I'm going to put up on here in irregular updates. On here. I'll open up an extra blog section right here when I'm ready.
It's something I just wanna do before I die. I'm not dying at the moment (as far as I'm aware), no worries. But I wanna publish a novel. Just one. Doesn't matter if it's the shittiest book on the planet, if nobody is gonna fucking read it, but I wanna get started while I'm on a high. I have a basic idea of what I want and I'll let the whole thing write itself as I get started. Pretty much how I do with all of my work. And if you wanna rip me off and write a better, cooler, more popular version of what I want to do before I get a chance to finish mine, here's the basic idea of what I want to do:

The whole thing is set in what's your generic, overused high fantasy world. I want to use every fucking cliché we're all sick and tired of. Good versus evil, a hero from an ancient prophecy, the chosen one, all of that stupid old crap. Here's the twist: The main character is a gaming nerd. He can't cast any spells, he doesn't know how to swing a fucking sword, he doesn't know how to move around in heavy armor - and honestly, he couldn't give two shits about that generic fantasy world he's destined to save. But he knows his D&D lore. He's beaten every RPG from Bard's Tale to Skyrim. He knows his MMOs, his 8bit console JRPGs and everything in between. He survives his journey through gamer-knowledge alone.

His rag-tag group of fellow adventurers might contain a large-breasted cat girl with a stupid Japanese name. She might turn out to sport a penis, because lost of people playing cat girls in fantasy games do. Ultimately, all characters should be deep and interesting and not just one-dimensional clichés of themselves, but fantasy clichés will be one of the major themes in the book. And, well, the basic idea is "what if...?"
Come on now. We're all gamers here. Which one of you has never sat down and wondered what life would be like if you were inside one of those games? If you were the Dragonborn, Shepard, the Bhaalspawn? And then most of us probably picture ourselves wielding that awesome power our virtual alter egos have got, being all indestructible and super tough and gifted with the power of a quicksave-hotkey.

But if we're being honest, most of us aren't very skilled swordsmen or wizards. We're fat, old couch-potatoes. But do we pick up any skills when we play games? Any knowledge at all? And could that be enough to survive for more than twenty minutes in your average high fantasy world? I think it's an interesting subject and I wanna see what I can do with it.

In unrelated news, I keep having strange dreams about my family. I had this dream where my grandparents have been raised as zombies. They were conscious and mostly functional, they were okay with it and happier to be alive in their weird state than, well, not. They still bumped into walls and failed basic coordination a lot, but at least they were there. Some might perceive this as cynical and fucked up, but I genuinely miss them. My brain just has a very special way of showing it.
I also had a weird dream where my parents were back together and - Jeezus - lived in my old apartment. Tiny, crappy little thing, but affordable. And they were happy! Made the best of the little place and were just happy to have each other. Funny. They were miserable when they lived in a palace and still wanted more. Makes me wonder where that dream is coming from. Perhaps they could have been happier if money had not played the most important role in their lives. Hmm.

Also, Skyrim. Again. Still. All the time. I've turned my game into an art project of sorts, which barely resembles the game it was once based upon. Behold!

Videos hardly do the real thing justice. I'm currently converting and uploading a brand new one, which shows all the latest updates and improvements I've added, but in the meanwhile, this clip is relatively recent one, which comes close to what my game does right now - I might update this entry tonight or tomorrow with more up to date footage.
By now I'm probably somewhere past the 300 mod mark (counting graphical improvements, scripts and modifications, which don't consist of .esm files).

-Cat

PS

We have a new neighbour...

Valentine's Day with Donald

Had a few incredibly busy weeks and today we finally got to reap the reward: A balanced-out bank account. And with all the bills and debt out of the way, we had a little bit extra on top, so we went to town. Literally. Well, by our meagre standards, anyway. We didn't have a chance to do anything on Friday, so today was our belated Valentine's Day out.

Nottingham is awesome, because people around here simply don't give a fuck. In a good way. I've spent most of my teens in the richer places around Germany. Königstein, Kronberg, just google that shit. It's where people buy a BMW as a tertiary car, so their maids and butlers won't have to do the shopping on foot. Our house had two fully functional kitchens, industrial refrigerators and everything. For six people. Disgusting stuff.

My point is, I'm used to people getting dressed up for grocery shopping like they're going to some kind of beauty contest. I'm used to my parents wanting to force me into dancing lessons so I could be "presentable" in public. Fine dining in a five star restaurant with so much cutlery on the table, you won't know where to begin without proper training. Proper etiquette. When you kiss the back of a lady's hand, your lips never actually touch the hand and you're not supposed to make any kissing noises, either. Yes, I had to learn that kinda shit. You don't wanna know. I did mention I've been schooled by nuns, right?

Nottingham is a bit filthy. It's grey, it's too crowded, traffic is insane and it's been in the top ten of the UK's ugliest cities for as long as I've lived here. And I love it. Today I saw a kid in town, no older than five years old, who carried around a massive battle axe. I assume it was made of plastic, but who can really tell with these things? Basically, you could have put a beard on the little guy and he would have been a perfect dwarf. What a fucking cool kid! What a fucking cool parent! Grab your axe, son, we're going out to buy potatoes! Hell yeah!

There was another guy, tall, in his early twenties, all by himself, with the most massive Lego boxes under his arms. I think one had a castle and dragons and knights on it, the other one was pirate-themed. I like to believe he bought that stuff for himself. He didn't look like a dad to me, seemed a bit young to have a kid who is into the more advanced Lego stuff. Did he hide his trophies away in a plastic bag? Did he care what anyone might think? Fuck no! He was out there, in public, carrying what's arguably one of the most awesome toy products and that shit was his. He bought it all for himself. Good for him. It made me happy.

And you know what? I love toys. I love having a bit of money and being able to go to any shop I want and buy all the cool shit I wasn't allowed to have as a kid. So we went to Forbidden Planet. A bit like an RL version of the Android Dungeon. It's a fascinating place. See, we looked at it from the outside and were absolutely sure it was closed. Dim lights, not a soul inside. But I pulled the door handle and what do you know, the place was open! And the moment we set a foot inside the store, the staff just materialised around us. Crawled out from under the shelves, trickled into the room like black clouds of magic dust, which slowly took the shapes of unkempt emo kids with little staff tags. Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't mean to sound disrespectful at all. They're my favourite kind of people, because they understand.

Claire wore her N7 hoodie. They knew. We were kindred spirits. Nobody approached us, stared at us, talked to us, did all the shit we all fucking hate when we go to a shop. "Can I help you find something? Are you being served?" That kinda stuff. Nothing. We knew our franchises, we can tell our Enterprises from our Millenium Falcons and they knew that we knew. No communication necessary. That shop sells things from within our wettest dreams. We bought some cheap Street Fighter tat, because Street Fighter. I was hoping to find some decent P&P RPG adaptions, but they only had novelty Monopoly boards, which was disappointing - and good for my bank account. They had Minecraft action figures, which seemed a bit weird, but not remotely as fucked up as their Minecraft swords and pick axes. Fortunately for us, all their Mass Effect merch was sold out, save for a couple Ashley action figures.

Seriously, who the fuck let Ash live in ME1? The only reason people used her in the sequels was because they sexed her up! She was a horrible, annoying bigot. I'm glad they didn't have Garrus, Wrex, Liara or Femshep. I'm running out of space on my desk as it is. Which is, in part, related to our new friend here:

The paintjob looks a lot better when not highlighted by a bright flash.

Of course Claire had to go hardcore. You know, she could have gone for the incredibly realistic Seven of Nine action figure. The model Enterprise. The life-size Predator (which I still kinda want). Or the Arnie action figure from the same movie. She's a girl, she has needs, I can appreciate that I'm getting older, we're all adults here.

But no. Not a chance. She wouldn't settle for an action figure. Or a ship, a comic book, shirt, poster, plushie, bobblehead... it had to be him, of all things:

I call him Donald, because he looks like Donald Trump's hair.

I like it. She could have gone for something out of Gear of War. Halo. Even Call of Duty- yes, they have an official CoD line of toys now. She went for an authentic Tribble. Fucking cool. I still kinda want a Garrus and a FemShep. Hmm...

-Cat

No Guts No Glory

This entry might come across as arrogant or a huge brag. This is not my intention, but if internet comment sections have taught me one thing, it's that people don't give a crap about what you're trying to say - they'll blow up on everything they think you are saying. Obviously. "I don't see anything satirical here, you hate [insert game here] and you deserve to be fired."

Long story short, I'm not gonna announce this particular post on Facebook. If you're a regular reader and you're tripping upon this thing, good for you. But if I start linking this entry everywhere, it's only gonna look like I'm trying to show off. So what the fuck am I referring to, anyway? Well, I'm proud of what I do and I love my job. And the past few days have shown me that I must be doing something right.

You see, back when I was a kid, I would spend lots of time reading videogame magazines. Stuff about the old C64, but also the Gameboy, Master System, PC Engine, you get the idea. Of course I didn't really care about the dry, dead-serious reviews and articles. I just wanted to know what awesome new games were being released and I also liked reading funny reviews, which weren't all analytical and by the books. Video games are fun, so articles about them should be fun. Simple, right? And the guys who wrote those funny articles were my personal heroes. To me, they had the coolest job in the world. Play games all day, then write funny stories about it - what could be better?

I started writing silly little reviews long before it became my job. I was part of several online gaming communities and whenever I got my hands on a new game I would review it on the internet. Just for my friends, to show them what I think, as a fun thing to do, nothing serious. Meanwhile, gaming magazines around Germany have changed as gaming became ever more socially accepted and mainstream. They became serious. Not every single one of them, but the really funny ones started to disappear more and more.

When I got started on the job, there was a certain ruleset to every kind of article. Which is good and correct and provides important guidelines for inexperienced writers such as my past self. And if you've known me for a while, then you also know that the one thing I absolutely loathe is rules. Authority. I'm an arrogant fuck and when I believe I know better, I just start doing what I want. And that's exactly what happened as I started to get better at my job. Over the years I went from "Oh god, how can I possibly write two whole pages about this game?" to writing a dozen about something I've never actually played because it isn't ready yet. The latter is an extreme example, of course, and it's not something I particularly enjoy or end up doing a lot, but these things do happen.

When I was new to the whole thing, whenever I wrote an article, they'd send it back to me with lots of comments and questions. What do you mean by that? You can't say it like that. Awkward phrasing, please try again. You get the idea. You can't feel offended about all these pointers. You don't just start writing and immediately know everything, mistakes are inevitable and it's good to have experienced writers who point them out to you and explain how you could improve your work. If you're the kind of person who feels hurt or insulted by these things (and believe me, lots of people do), then this is probably not the right line of work for you.

I no longer get those pointers. Corrections today are more about adding or removing a paragraph to make it all fit on a magazine page. I've been doing this for a few years now and either you learn and improve or you're hopeless. I've reviewed small articles made by our interns. Nothing major, but I had to assign them tasks, review their work, give out pointers and corrections where necessary. It made me nervous, to say the least.
It's difficult to explain. I guess adding certain comments made me feel like a dick. "You can't say it like that. How about..." you know, I'm saying that what you're doing is wrong and I know better. Which, in all fairness, is probably right, but it's hard not to feel like a jerk about it. Or maybe I'm worried I might be perceived as one. Stupid asshole never likes my stuff and tells me to rewrite everything.

The situation has reversed in other ways, as well. I've made a bit of a name for myself. My best articles stick out like the balls on a bulldog, I have a bit of a fan base and... I'm feeling incredibly weird as I'm writing this, but some young writers feel inspired by me. Their words, not mine. You know how I mentioned I've always looked up to certain critics for their work, their style, how they were personal heroes of sorts? Yeah...
And yes, awesome as it may be, it's also a bit scary.

You see, I'm at a point where big articles about even bigger games don't intimidate me (as much), so I can stop screaming "OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!111#@" on the inside and focus on my writing. And I like to go a little crazy. Bend and break the rules a bit. I've started my preview on TESO by moaning about having to play it, calling the boss a sadist and talking about how much I don't care about the game. Over the next eight pages I'm describing how I played the game, what I hated, what I liked, I'm getting a bit filthy (I say boner and poop) and basically I'm doing the exact opposite of what you should do in a preview. My article was released along with previews from every other major magazine. The press embargo was lifted and everyone published their stuff at the same time.

Now, I'm not saying that I compared or anything, but my preview had more hits, comments, likes, facebook-recommendations, tweets and fuck knows what else, than all the other German previews out there. It's my best article to date and things can only go downhill from here, because I've raised expectations. Shit. But let's focus on the happy stuff for now. I'm getting so much to do, I shouldn't even be writing this, because I need to finish all this work. But it needs out, I gotta get it outta my system or I'll go insane. I'm getting a free Xbox One ("Sorry, we're fresh out of Playstations right now!"), so I can review console games. I'm being asked to write articles about TESO for magazines, which already had their own previews, but they want me to write more.

I'm a bit overwhelmed right now. I'm not sure I'll be as good as some seem to expect me to be. You see, I'm used to being the underdog. I get the god-awful Free2Play crap nobody else wants to write about. But this is big. I had to earn this. And I won't lie to you - it's scary as fuck. If I start overthinking this, I'll get nervous and I'll make stupid mistakes. This may well be the proverbial 15 minutes of fame, my moment in the spotlight and I'll fuck up and go back to being the underdog. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. I'll enjoy it while it lasts. Though I'll give it my best shot, of course.

Look, I know this is really just a job like every other job. I review games. And now I'm getting some bigger, more prestigious projects. Common procedure. You get more experienced, you get bigger tasks, that kinda thing. But it's all new and exciting to me. I love this job. I couldn't see myself doing anything else. This is a really big deal to me. It may or may not lead to something bigger - who knows? But for now, I'm at my peak. Biggest amount of work, money and recognition thus far. And it feels great. I'm not used to that. I used to have jobs that made me want to kill myself. And I'm not being sarcastic here. Life is good.

-Cat

TESO, UltraHD and all things Tamriel

Screenshot wot I done for the preview. I'll be so thrilled if I end up finding it all over the web! 

Fuck me, I really, seriously wanted to hate The Elder Scrolls Online. I was fully expecting yet another crappy MMO with absolutely nothing new or interesting in it, which would still sell because of the slapped-on Elder Scrolls license. You know, a bit like SWTOR, which isn't horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but at the end of the day, it's mostly WoW with lightsabres. The Star Wars license didn't do much to help this game. And Star Wars has this really huge fan base. The Elder Scrolls... well, probably, but Tamriel alone can't possibly be as powerful a franchise as a certain galaxy far, far away, right?

Now, before you rush to the comments section and remind me of the NDA: I've written an official preview, my name is out there, it's all legit and the good folks at Bethesda know. So if you understand German or you're one of those weirdos, who honestly believe that Google translate does an accurate job, feel free to read the whole thing and behold all my glorious screenshots. If you can't be bothered, let me just say that I've actually quite enjoyed playing the Beta and I'm going to preorder two copies.

"But didn't you just say you were expecting it to be shit?" I pretend to hear you ask. Well... I was. I didn't wanna touch it. When they asked me to preview it, I flat-out refused, told them I don't want any other players to mess up my game experience and all the other stuff you've probably heard countless other people say. Because really, most of us wouldn't mind a multiplayer mode for their Elder Scrolls experience, but an MMO? Nah!

And no matter how much I like this game, I can't help but feel they're only going the MMO route to cash in on monthly subscription fees, ridiculously overpriced special editions and the stupid Imperials, which you may only play if you buy said ridiculously overpriced special edition to begin with. That's just plain evil. TESO goes out of its way to look and feel like a singleplayer RPG. Every quest changes the world around you through the magic of phasing. Players don't have floaty names above their heads and they blend in with the NPCs so well, you can't even tell them apart most of the time. They use crafting facilities, rummage through their backpacks when the respective player opens their inventory, they quasi-RP without even knowing.

And for what? So we can have some kind of end-game at the level cap, go on raids or play the dreadfully dull, highly derivative WvW... er... RvR in Cyrodiil? It looks exactly like Guild Wars 2, basic gameplay is practically identical and I never asked for any of this to enhance my Elder Scrolls experience, thank you very much.
On the plus side, I can ignore all of that shit and just enjoy the amazing game world. And that's what completely changed my mind about this game and made me preorder it.

I was expecting Elder Scrolls Light. Some crappy Elder Scrolls for kids. Then I've been to Morrowind. Spent some time in Nord territory. Met a Khajiit farmer and his pet tigers, who were all high on moon sugar. It all drew me in. It was subtle at first. The game was more fun than I expected, but I didn't really know why. Because the world made sense, it was believable and it was so good, it just worked without me noticing it. I've not experienced characters, races, lore and culture so interesting since World of Warcraft.

And before you start bitching at me for bringing up WoW, because it's for noobs, has dated, cartoony visuals and pandas and pokemon and shit, let me ask you something: Remember how Cairne Bloodhoof died? How it made you feel? Of course you fucking do! And whether or not you killed the Lich King back in the day - you've followed his damn story. You know about Thrall, about Illidan, you've checked out the video that introduced the Horde's new warchief, whether you're still playing or not. And we're all going to watch the Warcraft movie with our grandchildren someday. Because we fucking care. I haven't touched the game since Cataclysm, I'm not coming back, but if I've ever cared for an MMO's fictional world and its heroes and villains, it has to be Azeroth. Now imagine ArenaNet decided to kill off Rytlock Brimstone. Would you give a fuck? Exactly.

Don't get me wrong, GW2 has some fun, lovable, freaky races and characters, but they're all very one-dimensional. Walking clichés of themselves. The Asura are brilliant, arrogant fucks and accidents not just waiting to happen, but happening all the goddam time. Sylvari are made of broccoli and they kinda like boning each other across all genders. You can sum up every single race in just a few key notes. How about a drunk, whore-mongering Asura hero for a change? Or a scaredy Charr, who wants to be an opera singer and hates to fight? But nooo, they're all the same. The one really fun character is Tybalt Leftpaw. Shame he dies somewhere halfway into the story, if you meet him at all.

When I played TESO, tamriel drew me in. It was so immersive, the inhabitants so believable and lovable, I'd love to babble on and on about the Argonians treating their guar (little pack dinos) like family and respecting the harsh, creepy nature of Morrowind. About that creepy orc lady and her red toad Bloodthirster, who helped me win a frog racing contest. About how all the different places around the game world come with their own unique achitecture for towns, outposts and dungeons and their own unique animals and plants.

I still don't need the whole MMO part. And I doubt that any big MMO fan, who doesn't give two shits about Tamriel and its lore, will absolutely have to play TESO. The quirky interface, missing features such as the mini-map and the complete lack of any groundbreaking new gameplay - I don't think it's gonna blow anyone away. That said, the game oozes quality, everything works as it should, some minor beta issues aside and I can't wait for its release now. Because I've spent hundreds of hours playing the entire series since Daggerfall. And I'm genuinely excited.

In other news, I've modded the shit out of Skyrim some more. Let's see how this blog compresses UltraHD screenshots with an original file size of 20 MByte and up. Enjoy. :P

-Cat