This shit right here is why I love my job. These last few weeks haven't been kind to me when it comes to the quality of the games I chose to review. Take Submerged, for instance. It's little more than an interactive screensaver with zero gameplay, zero fun, a shit story and still there were a whole bunch of critics, who dished out insanely high review scores for that turd, because it's "art" and of course there is always some idiot who falls for that kind of shit. Just look at Dear Esther, Valiant Hearts, Gone Home... they all suck, but they're all "artsy" or they have some kind of "brave message", and somebody always pretends to be impressed, because they totally "get it" and the game is not for critics and yada, yada, yada, FUCK YOU. Pretentious morons.
There were less controversial, more obviously lousy games such as Alone in the Dark: Illumination, a multiplayer shooter, which requires you to stand in the light in order to make monsters vulnerable. Because every Alone in the fucking DARK game should be about cooperative gameplay in well-lit areas.
So thank you, thank you SO FUCKING MUCH, Shiro Games, for Evoland 2. Because it's, without exaggeration, the best damn game I've reviewed all year. By far. It's like a final exam in gaming. It's like all the games I've played in my childhood - Double Dragon, Street Fighter, Secret of Mana, Bomberman, Zelda, Final Fantasy, R-Type, Musha, Shining Force - all this stuff and so much more was just preparation. I've mastered those titles, loved them, breathed them. And Evoland 2 is where everything I've learned about those games is being put to the test. So. Fucking. AWESOME!
Imagine playing what looks and feels like a traditional JRPG, top-down visuals, sword'em up style gameplay you may know from Secret of Mana or the older Zelda games and then you walk into a boss baddie. And suddenly the perspective shifts, you see the characters from the side, there are life bars at the top end of the screen and an announcer goes: "Round 1! FIGHT!" No tutorial, no explanation, you get thrown right the fuck in there. I didn't even think when I tried a quarter circle forward, it just happened. Instinct. Muscle memory. It's what gamers do. Then I hit the punch button and the magic happened. Like, in my pants. Yes, it's that good "HADOKEN!" YES! Fucking hadoken!
But the game didn't leave me much time to celebrate, because suddenly I was in a Musha-style arcade shooter. Again, no explanation, no "use WASD to control your character and don't forget the power-ups" or any of that shit you get in every fucking game today like you're some kind of retard. Just instant action.
Now don't get the wrong impression here. This is still a classic JRPG more than anything else, so you talk to lots of NPCs, gather clues, try and figure out where to go and what to do next. There are some really challenging puzzles here. If you've never completed classic Zelda or Final Fantasy, then you're gonna need a walkthrough for this one. It's just that all the action on here isn't told in boring text boxes or crappy little cutscenes. Action sequences are games of their own.
Or Hearthstone. Sometimes they're just fucking Hearthstone.
And there's nothing quite like chasing down one of Evoland 2's major villains, cornering him, waiting for an epic showdown and the next second you're rocking it out on fucking Guitar Hero! Thpoilerth:
There is, of course, one little downside to this whole concept. At some point, you will inevitably bump into a mode of play you simply hate and/or suck at. In my case that was fucking Bejeweled. Fucking. Beweweled. I mastered the tactics stage, beat the platforming bits, completed all the beat'em up sections with ease, but goddamn Bejeweled broke me. I failed again and again, for a whole hour straight until Claire helped me. I had to ask my girlfriend for help. She crushed the bejeweled boss in a landslide victory. I don't have a fucking clue how people manage to figure out all these chain reactions and shit. I can't handle it.
Evoland 2 doesn't simply mimic those games. It doesn't rip off or imitate popular classics for a cheap laugh or to draw attention with screenshots and trailers. This stuff is deep. You want to pull a shoryuken in the Street Fighter segment, you pull a fucking shoryuken. It's in the fucking game! This is a love letter to some of the greatest games of all times. And at the same time, Evoland 2 tells an exciting, surprisingly serious story, which gives it an identity of its own. Evoland 2 isn't "that game, which imitates a million other games", it's just fucking Evoland 2. And that's genius.
Also WoW, Giger-Aliens, Mewtwo, Metroid, Mario, Sonic...
If you care about JRPGs only one bit, if you consider yourself a veteran gamer, if you feel any love for the games that come back to life in there, go do yourself a favour and fucking get it.
You might even run into some old friends.
In other news, Claire's stepdad is playing GTA on my old Xbox and apparently he's getting fucking good at it. I won't lie - I didn't see it coming, though I fucking love it.
He used to play the old Mario games many moons ago and I've seen him throwing cats on some crappy little flash games on the 'net. But he's never held a modern controller before. He has never played a 3D game. And when I plugged in the Xbox and showed him the tutorial it was all a bit much at first. Controlling a character AND the camera at the same time. Taking cover, switching characters, aiming, shooting, driving, triggers, so much new stuff!
I was fully expecting to come over there on the weekends to do things like rescue Jimmy off Michael's abducted yacht. But what do you know - he's doing it all by himself! So fucking cool. The guy is old enough to be my dad, he has zero experience with this kind of thing, but he's actually getting the hang of it and I'm sure he'll complete the whole thing. That whole thing about old dogs and new tricks? Bullshit. You're never too old.
I'm starting to go full Oprah on GTA V. I've completely skipped GTA IV and San Andreas, but this game was a day one must-have for me on PC. I talked friends into buying the PC version, some of which ended up joining me on heists. When Haggy didn't buy it I went and got it for him. Claire seemed sorta, kinda interested in her typical "I'd probably play it if I had it, but I've got so much other shit to play" kind of way. So I bought it for her, as well.
Claire and I always arrange for a couple hours each day where we play something together. And we usually arrange for her mother and/or sister to hang with us, if they so desire. And since we've begun spending more on more time on GTA rather than Everquest 2 or even Warframe, I went and bought GTA V for Claire's mum. I'll admit I wasn't particularly sure about how that would go down. She spends way too much time with stuff like SecondLife. And GTA Online is kind of a life simulator, as well. Except, it's fun, stuff actually works and doesn't look like total ass.
"Excuse me, officer..."
Turns out I had nothing to worry about. GTA V is the kind of game that looks a bit overwhelming and confusing at first, especially when you're not a hardcore gamer. But play around with it for five minutes and magic happens. I mean, look at these fine, elderly people here:
Claire's mum is in no way a "senior" and she's actually into gaming, unlike the folks in the video up there. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. Look at that video. These fine people aren't gamers and many of them don't really approve of what's happening at first. But a few minutes later most of them are starting to have fun. And this is precisely what makes this game so great. You just wanna pick it up and interact with it. I was worried at first that her mother would get bored and run out of stuff to do, since she probably isn't into hardcore heists or anything. Now she's got her own apartment, garages full of stolen vehicles, all sorts of outfits for different occasions, tattoos... we usually find her on there when she's not responding on Facebook.
Funny thing is, Claire's stepdad has shown some interest in GTA, as well. He said he's getting bored of all the crap on TV and he needs something to help him wind down after work. He doesn't have a PC and I need the Xbox One for the job, so I went and ordered the game for the old Xbox 360. Resolution is a bit lower on there, of course, there's no proper 1st person view and you don't get fancy details like blades of grass and actual foliage. But he's not gonna care and he'll get to play it on the big TV screen, so it should still be fun when I bring the Xbox over.
No other game has ever received so many perfect review scores and I still believe it's the greatest game ever made. Also, I can watch Claire bathe in the pool behind her new bungalow when I look outside the window in my apartment. You can hang around inside buildings and watch the world go by in realtime - it's no staged, instanced make-believe bullcrap. If people decide to duke it out in military helicopters right outside my house, then I get to watch the show. That is, if I decide to stop watching the stuff that's on the actual, working tv inside the house.
Meanwhile, I've reached the highest difficulty on Path of Exile - "Merciless", with only the final two chapters to finish. The game is still immensely fun, though I'm a bit annoyed at how I constantly have to upgrade my character around GGG's balancing. I completely eradicate all the monsters in one area, only to get killed in the next one in one or two hits. So I stack resistances and extra life like crazy. And then my survivability is alright, but enemies become tougher and tougher, so it's time to slot yet another offensive buff, another warcry, some other method to boost damage output.
There are certain passives I'd love to put points into, but can't, because the more boring stuff such as life/armor/resistances must never be neglected. I'd be happier if gear and armor took care of all that, so I could focus on the real fun stuff in the passive skill tree. "All your damage is now fire", simply sounds a lot more exciting than "you gain 5% max hp". Besides, if survivability depended mostly on gear and skill gems, we could trim down that monstrosity of a skill tree by roughly 50% and make it a little less threatening. Instead, I'm currently ignoring all the bonus weapon damage I crave in favour of 15% more resistance to elements. Laaaame! Still loving it, though. Sometimes it's just hard to understand WTF is happening, especially in a full group of six people.
I like Diablo 3. I can't remember my exact paragon level off the top of my head, but it was something over 250. That's nowhere near as high as some of the more dedicated players get, but I've spent more than a few hours on there. I like how certain items can completely change the way characters' abilities and and skills work and open up whole new ways to play. What I don't like is how each playable class usually sports only one or two really viable builds per season - check out the leaderboards and you'll see mostly identical gear and setups across the board. Laaaaame!
Sure, you can be a renegade and deviate from the popular cookie cutter setups, but if you want to get as far as everyone around you, it's always "farm item set X", "pick skill Y", do the exact same thing everyone else is doing. The game just isn't super complex. It doesn't have to be in order to be fun, of course. The very first Diablo is the very opposite of complex and is still a ton of fun to play today, especially when you up the visuals a notch:
Lots of people play Diablo 3 all night and day and they don't mind how Blizzard's way of "balancing" characters basically means making them so samey. Remember when agile characters still received higher evasion instead of armor? I don't like how they scrapped all that. Sure, it's easier to balance stuff when every class uses the same mechanics, but it's also lazy. I'm not saying that playing a Demon Hunter feels exactly like playing as a Barbarian, but at the end of the day I still just collect packs of monsters, spam some AoE, rinse, repeat. And the overall look and atmosphere... well, the expansion is alright, but I'm not a huge fan of that typical modern Blizzard look. Everything is soft and cartoony and stuff simply doesn't look anything like the previous games.
They went from gritty, tits out gore...
...to soft, candy-coloured and fluffy.
And since you've probably read this entry's headline, you'll already know that this is where I'll move swiftly on to Path of Exile (PoE), which is just as nice, gritty and complex as I wanted Diablo 3 to be:
Tits, giant eyeballs, rivers of blood - home at last!
PoE's new expansion, The Awakening, went live fairly recently and added the final chapter to the Free2Play ARPG's story. It adds tons upon tons of gore, tentacles, giant, floaty eyeballs and other such fun organs and a whole lot of horror to the game. I haven't touched the game for a while, so there were a few other additions to the game, which were new to me, such as player hideouts. Being able to choose and decorate my personal home is pretty sweet. Right now I'm working towards unlocking my own fortress of sorts, but hanging out on a graveyard will do for the time being.
Each class has a different affinity towards one or two of the three attributes.
What makes this game so fun to me (and will ultimately turn off those, who love Diablo 3 for its relative simplicity), is how insanely deep the customization system for characters and their abilities is on PoE. While each class starts with a certain affinity towards one playstyle or another (i.e. the Witch starting closer to intelligence and magic-based passives on the skill chart, while the brawny Marauder leans towards strength and melee), it's entirely possible to specialize them in weird and unusual ways or turn them into hybrid characters, who get to be so much more than simple spellcasters or warriors.
I don't usually play casty types. I tend to choose a sword over a staff, some heavy plate armor over a robe. But when I saw PoE's class system, I considered it a challenge. I didn't go for the Duelist or the Marauder and just started clubbing things. I chose the Witch. Ha!
My original plan was to steer her growth towards dexterity, hoping to ultimately unlock claws and some bonuses for dual-wielding them. I figured there probably weren't an awful lot of Witches out there going full wolverine.
Then I looted a skill gem, which turned my slain enemies into zombies. This changed everything. You see, you don't unlock new spells and skills by leveling up - you loot them. Skills are coloured gems, which go into slots on your weapons and armor. Found a fireball gem? Go put it in a matching socket on one of your worn items and now you get to throw fireballs! Whether you're any good at it depends on the passive skills you choose to unlock as you level up. Skills also require certain base stats - if your hero is dumber than a brick, his intelligence stat may prohibit him from using the fireball gem at all. A smart character may not be able to use that sneaky backstab skill gem aimed towards dextrous heroes. You get the idea.
It all began with a single zombie. Now look what I did!
So I started turning dead baddies into undead servants. And then I looted another gem - 'summon skeleton'. Yeah, I think it took the game about 30 minutes to change my plans from playing a hacky, slashy character to going full necromancer. By now I get to reanimate fallen bad guys as ghosts, I have a pet golem and I can animate random weapons and armor and have them fight for me - which is awesome! Even shitty, non-enchanted loot becomes useful, because I can turn it into a pet! On top of all my skeletons and zombies. I usually just sit back and enjoy the show when my pets go to work.
Of course it's always more fun to do some of the killing in person, so I slotted a spell, which rains fire on my enemies for as long as I channel it. Which is nice and everything, but it also drains mana like fuck and forces you to stand still, channel your magic and do absolutely nothing else in the meanwhile. That's where support gems come in! These little bad boys change the way certain spells and skills work. So I went and turned my rain of fire into a totem. I just fart it out and it'll burn all my enemies for me, so I can move around, concentrate on other abilities and stop wasting mana.
But no matter how many pets you have - sometimes an enemy will get through them and hit you. And I really didn't want to be one of those fragile, robed spellcasters, who swing a little pixie stick for self-defense. So I branched out into strength, got myself some decent armor, a nice melee weapon and a shield. You can get pretty strong with melee weapons if you focus on the right passives. It helps when you find skill gems like 'lightning strike', which add elemental damage to your melee attack. Helps even more if you find a support gem, which causes the ability to strike three times with every attack. So now I was running around punching things alongside my army of pets and my toasty totem.
And I so love punching things with lightning!
And this lead me to my next problem - I was now great at summoning and punching stuff, but I was also rather fragile. Most of my future points would go into extra health, armor and resistances, but until then, attacking enemies head-on wasn't always the most desirable option. And I wasn't exactly specced into dexterity, so bows weren't really the way to go, either. So I did the next best thing and slotted 'spectral throw'. Basically, this ability turns your equipped melee weapon into a ranged weapon - you just throw dat shit and it comes flying back to you. Doesn't matter if you suck at ranged combat, because this ability uses most of your melee stats as you throw your weapon at the bad guys. Add a support gem for added projectiles and suddenly you're throwing five weapons instead of one. Sweet!
PoE offers an insane amount of flexibility when it comes to spells and skills. Don't like having to interrupt fighting in order to use a curse spell on an enemy? Put a 'Curse on Hit' on your spectral throw, fire a whole barrage of cursed weapons at the enemy hordes and mass-curse them whilst attacking them at the same time! Ran outta corpses to zombify during a boss battle? There's a spell that summons a bunch of dead bodies, I shit you not. Is your army of bone-boys too weak? Slap a melee bonus damage gem on them!
One of these players has been to the cash shop. Can you guess who?
My character has so many crazy abilities, I don't even know what she is. She's a necromancer, but she's also a warrior, headed for a tanky direction. She's a fire-based spellcaster. She's also a ranged-DPS curse machine. Meanwhile, my Barbarian on Diablo 3 spins around a lot. Sometimes he jumps.
PoE also has the best, fairest, most satisfying Free2Play-model of any game, ever. You absolutely cannot spend money on anything other than decorative fluff. You can buy a cat. You can buy an alternative spell effect for your favourite ability. Buy a dance, a fiery particle effect for your weapon or even a whole set of decorative armor. None of that stuff makes you any stronger, better or otherwise more powerful. It just looks cool. The one tiny exception here is stash expansions, in case being able to store roughly half a million items isn't good enough for you and you need more space. Everything else in the shop is purely cosmetic. Though you can totally pay to win, if you so desire. Behold:
I love this game. I love joining random parties, watching people with their "Olol!1 MLG full crit pro builds" die over and over while my unorthodox build just gets shit done. It's cool how you have to put some actual thought into how to specialize your character and it's even better to watch it all come together and work out in the end. I do, however, have two complaints with this game. The first one is this:
"Skill tree"
Seriously, what the fuck? I'm all for deep and complex game mechanics if they add to the overall experience, but don't make shit complex just for the sake of it. I had not touched this game in over a year and then I came back to a level 50 character, who had to re-spend every single skill point due to a global reset, brought on by the latest expansion and its skill tree overhaul. Imagine spending 50something points on that monstrosity up there.
I know there are free character planners out there and you only get so many viable options per class, but come on. This is not user friendly. This isn't fun. I don't want this game to be as primitive and dumbed down as certain mainstream titles tend to get nowadays, but I don't need my video games to require special college courses, either.
My other complaint lies with some lousy boss battles in the two final acts of the game. Look, I get it. Path of Exile is hard. It's not meant to be casual-friendly. It's supposed to appeal to core gamers and that's a good thing. But bosses, which fill up the entire screen with comically oversized, super-fast AoE attacks, turning the entire battle into some kind of bullet hell, aren't fun. That's not clever game design, this isn't challenging and it doesn't require any sort of skill. It's just cheap. My screen fills up with a ton of shit, which cannot possibly be dodged half of the time and kills me in one or two hits. People usually group up for these fights and hope they're not one of the poor suckers who end up dying. Because doing so removes 5 or even 10 percent of your experience towards the next level-up on the higher difficulty settings. If you can't find people to team up with, you may as well kiss all your experience points goodbye and cheese it by respawning and throwing yourself at the boss over and over again. And that sucks.
Oh, look! A portal full of tentacles! Glowy red things! A giant, moving circle of death! And everything can insta-kill me! Yaaaay!
On the plus side, you don't really have to go back there and ever fight them again once they're dead, unless you're after their loot drops. There are treasure maps, daily quests and other such fun activities to keep you entertained, so it's not like you're forced to suffer through some of these battles again and again if you don't want to.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a graveyard to decorate. Oh and here's how my witch plays:
Sometimes we cling on to an abusive, loveless relationship for far too long, because we keep telling ourselves that things really aren't all that bad. Sometimes we're afraid that nobody else wants us. Sometimes we're just too used to our abusive partner to let go, even if they've long lost all respect for us and simply take us for granted. In the end, we only hurt ourselves by letting it drag on for far too long. And sometimes you only realize all that after you've severed all ties and found yourself a better, fairer employer.
Over the course of the last month I've easily made three times the salary I used to get at the old publisher. Not only that - I get a ton of work to do, I get to pick my articles depending on what kind of game and genre suits me best, I get to send an invoice for my work the day I hand it in and the money usually gets here within a week. Sometimes there are some tweaks and corrections to be made after handing in the raw text, but that's as stressful as it gets. No "you may only charge us for your work on a single, specific day each month" bullshit. No waiting a whole month to get paid, then getting insulted for asking where the money is when they make me wait an extra week without warning. No more random jobs and deadlines assigned to me without asking or informing me first.
I'm a fucking games critic again. I get paid to play. No more news articles for the intellectually challenged, constantly offended masses. I made a joke once about combat pets on diablo 3 and how they're about as likely to survive a fight as a chocolate cake would survive a visit to a camp for fat kids. Before they got buffed, mind, so it was totally valid. Turns out we had more angry fat kids in the comments section than I anticipated. I wrote an article about how a Sims game got banned in Russia because it allowed gay relationships, mentioning how same sex relationships are finally accepted as normal in many other parts of the world and I got a bunch of homophobes telling me off for referring to it as "normal". I called the idiots, who ruin WoW by selling bots to even bigger idiots exactly that and all hell broke loose in the comments section. I was afraid to quit, but it turned out it was the best damn thing I could have done.
Of course people are still feeling offended for the heck of it. I've just finished a review on Submerged, an interactive screensaver, currently sold on Steam as a "game" for 20 Euros. It's one of those shitty, "artsy" indie games without any real gameplay or the possibility to fail. And there are usually some assholes who fall for this kind of nonsense and write hilariously positive reviews about how brave, touching, moving or artistically brilliant that piece of indie garbage really is. Gaming's equivalent of a biopic.
And of course there's always that one guy who tells me that games don't have to contain combat, action, time limits or any form of pressure in order to be good. And you know what? Of course they don't! You don't kill anyone and there's no story in Tetris and it's one of the best games ever made. Games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus tell a story entirely without words and they've moved countless gamers to tears. And then there's Submerged, which has players scaling the walls of ten buildings whilst listening to sad piano music. That's all the gameplay there is.
"Not every game has to be Dark Souls", he tells me. "This game is great for kids, because it introduces them to PC gaming without any form of danger." Wanna know how I introduced my kid to gaming? We played Mario World, Mario Kart and Secret of Mana on the original hardware. Not fucking submerged. Because I don't fucking hate my kid. You can lose in each of the games I just mentioned. Doesn't make them Dark fucking Souls. Turns out there are winners and losers in most games. It's part of the fun. It's what gives you a sense of reward and achievement when you get better and finally beat it. Handing out participation medals to everyone kills all that.
Oh hey, the Warframe family is growing! Claire's sister joined the fun in the form of Hydroid, a water-based frame with the magic of tentacles. I'm avoiding all the obvious jokes here.
His face is decorated by a whole bunch of dangly appendages. He's basically Zoidberg:
WOOPWOOPWOOPWOOP!
I usually play this game by myself or in a duo with Claire. Playing in a full group with voice chat feels weird, but I'm not hating it. I think I could get used to it.
We've also introduced Claire's mother to GTA. With mixed results.
