Starbound takes the Terraria formula and improves upon it in every aspect. It's full of stuff promised by No Man's Sky. It's also a bit of Metroid and a bit of 2D-Skyrim.
My life is happy, becaue I'm a gunslinging space raptor. I'm beaming down to a planet I've just discovered. I'm taking my engineer with me, who happens to be a green, bipedal cockatoo with a giant rocket launcher. I've also brought my argonian medic and a sniper, who happens to be a dragon. Thanks, Steam Workshop!
Space is dangerous. Bring friends.
The game features coop multiplayer, so Claire is with me, as well. She's... I'm not a hundred percent sure what the fuck she is. She's wearing a giant goat skull on top of her head and she's summoning space goats, which she captured on another planet with the help of some freaky techno balls. Yes, you can capture monsters like Pokémon and that's not even a mod!
The world we're exploring is covered in eyeballs. There are giant eyeballs on the trees, tiny eyeball monsters are crawling around and curiously watching us and finally, we come across this mountain of eyeballs, which is too steep to climb. I try to dig into it and create an avalanche. Of eyeballs. I nearly drowned in this game before, got buried in sand, but this is new. We dig into the planet's surface until we reach its core, which is made entirely out of flesh. Ew.
You can harvest the eyes and turn them into furniture.
Every new planet is full of wonders and weirdness. We've discovered huge underground cities made of miniature houses, shops and skyscrapers inhabited by pixel-sized gnomes. One world had a huge medieval fortress, inhabited by a bunch of robots, who attacked us using swords and bows. They're a playable race called the glitch. We've met talking mushrooms, frog people, fishy samurai guys under the sea and wild west towns on desert planets.
There's also a race of space apes, who build depressing towns and even more depressing laboratories. Their Orwellian towns have cameras in every room, there are posters telling the citizens to 'OBEY!' and they all seem a bit paranoid when you speak to them. "Are you allowed to be here?" Meanwhile, the labs have all sorts of caged alien creatures and the place is full of computer terminals and brains in jars.
Not the happiest world we've encountered.
There are mutated, radioactive worlds, planets covered in ice and snow or lava, mushrooms or even giant, sentient vegetables. Yes, I've been attacked by a giant carrot monster. Where Terraria gives you one randomly-generated world with a bunch of varying biomes like deserts, snowy mountains and jungles, Starbound gives you an infinite amount of planets with much greater variety. Granted, you'll ultimately see biomes and architecture repeat, because there are only so many possibilities, but there's a great community-created mod, which adds dozens of new biomes, hundreds of creatures, new quests, dungeons... oh yeah, about those!
Not every alien creature you bump into is friendly. In fact, most of them want to eat you in fun and creative ways. On top of that, many outposts have to deal with criminals, who abduct people and hold them hostage. You can lend a hand, rescue hostages, kill baddies, get rewards like tech upgrades and epic new gear and some NPCs will even ask to join your crew when you help them enough. Help a depressing space ape with a difficult quest and he might just become your new engineer! Use tech upgrades from reward bags to unlock wall jumps, dash moves or the ability to morph into a ball and fit into tight spaces like Samus Aran.
You can always start your own settlement on a planet if your ship gets too crowded.
Combat is nothing special. You equip a weapon and click shit to death, but at least there's a decent variety in weapon types and playstyles. I like to dual-wield pistols and attack baddies from a distance, then finish them off with dual daggers or claws when they get too close. Claire charges in with a sword and shield, tanking most damage for the group. On top of that she swings a huge katana. The blade can be powered up, causing it to hum and light up like a lightsaber. Lightsaber-katana. That's a thing on here. You also get shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers... again, it's a lot like Terraria, but bigger and with more possibilities.
Dungeons can range from small, five minute affairs like the challenge rooms (e.g. you have one attempt to dodge the traps and kill the baddies to get your reward) to huge story-driven arenas full of monsters, hidden treasure and a super tough boss battle at the end. Unlike most other areas, these dungeons are hand-crafted and not random-generated. This hurts replayablility a bit, but gives them a coherent structure, which is often difficult with procedurally-generated stuff.
There's still plenty of dungeon-like open world action like this prison.
Fun side activities include starting your own colony if your starship isn't big enough to make you happy, as well as starting your own band. We found a banjo and an electric base guitar, so we paused our adventure for a moment to play 12 Days of Christmas together. Because yes, that's also a thing on here.
I've seen reviews, which refer to this game as a 'Terraria clone' and talk about Starbound as though it was aping its 'big brother Terraria' and other such nonsense. Yes, of course the similarities are super obvious, but this game doesn't simply copy stuff to cash in on a successful formula. It takes everything you can find in Terraria and adds to it, expands it, adds depth and complexity. This makes the game better and even greater than the already amazing Terraria.
However, there is also a downside, which comes in the form of a much steeper learning curve. Important features such as harvesting rocket fuel, hiring crew members or upgrading your crafting stations aren't exactly self-explanatory and the game does a poor job at explaining its features to new players. This game probably isn't for you if you're not willing to make regular trips to the wiki. But if you're content-clear on Terraria or simply looking for a fun, vast game to keep you busy for dozens of hours, then Starbound is a great choice.
The Crew is a shitty racing game. But it lets you enjoy one hell of a road trip when you're too cheap to go places in real life.
Claire and I are broke as fuck. Now, when most of you guys think 'broke', you imagine having to use regular four-ply toilet paper instead of the gold-plated stuff you normally use. But I'm talking seriously poor here. We don't just re-use our teabags for extra tea. We use the string to sew the holes in the potato bags we stole from Farm Foods to wear them like clothes. We don't even eat all the potatoes! We set them on fire, so they can serve as a source of warmth and light. So imagine how happy we were when Ubisoft gave The Crew away for free, because it sucks so hard, people have long stopped buying it.
When I first tried to get into The Crew, I tried to pretend it's a racing game, which is wrong. The game has you play a young Gordon Freeman, who witnesses the murder of Mr. Clean. Then Colonel Sanders shows up and blames you. Now you have to take revenge on the KFC mascot and his gang by beating random people in street races. It all makes perfect sense and is highly entertaining, well-written and in every way as gripping as a Wednesday episode of Coronation Street.
The driving physics in the game are total ass and your car only stops handling like a brick after you spend several hours raising your vehicle's level. There's also some overpriced new DLC, which apes the police chases from Need for Speed and GTA, without adding any of the stuff that makes them fun. The main feature of said DLC is to remind you that you should totally go buy it every thirty or so seconds.
It ain't fucking free if it costs 25 Bucks to unlock it!
There's also a shitty ingame GPS, which constantly forgets where the fuck you're supposed to go, cutting off in the middle of nowhere. So basically, you get to drive around with zero directions while some lady keeps nagging non-stop. The only way to make the driving experience any more realistic would be if they patched in some children, who complain, get hungry, throw up in the car and need a piss stop every five minutes.
There's one genuinely impressive feature about the Crew - its absolutely massive world. You get to visit miniaturized versions of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, drive through the snow in the Rocky Mountains and enjoy some virtual scorching heat in Death Valley and the Grand Canyon. There's a whole ton of amazing landmarks here, a great deal of visual variety and while the entire game looks a bit dated and fugly, just driving from one coast to another and seeing all the sights can be really exciting.
So that's what we did. Claire and I fired up our favourite MP3 playlist (because the ingame radio is complete garbage), got in our cars, skipped the whole shitty story and most of the racing against the retarded rubberbanding AI and just went from the east coast to the west coast and back. And there's an amazing amount of love and detail in that game world. People with RVs and lawn chairs camping in the middle of nowhere, little lakes and cafes near dense forests you would normally just race through at 180mph and tons of wildlife. Eagles, vultures, bears, deer, fighter jets and stealth bombers happily frolicking about!
Suddenly Vegas
We had lots of random challenges popping up along the way. Sometimes you have to maintain your speed and stay on the road, then you have to zig-zag around targets or smash right through them. Doing so will unlock new car parts and upgrades, so it's perfectly cool to just drive around all day, upgrading your vehicle in the process.
This game doesn't look as great or handle as well as Forza or GTA. The story is a total joke. Most of the generic traffic vehicles look so bland and devoid of any detail, they would have looked crap a decade ago. We've also encountered a whole bunch of bugs and problems. Traffic spawning inside buildings or simply disappearing into thin air, infinite load screens, as well as 38 billion mission popups for races we cannot even access without the DLC. Granted, you can filter those out, but you shouldn't have to. The Crew is genuinely bad. There's one notorious, game-breaking bug, which has been around for two years with no apparent fix. The official forum thread about it is 41 pages long.
Having a dozen menus pop up while I'm
driving at top speed is brilliant game design, you guys!
I've played Forza, Shift, Dirt, Outrun 2006 Coast2Coast and just about every other racing sim and arcade racer that came out since the first Screamer. The racing felt better in pretty much all of them. Driving in The Crew doesn't feel any more solid than it would on Autobahn Racer or Eurotruck Simulator. But, also much like Eurotruck Simulator, it can feel incredibly satisfying when you just pick a random far away location, play some good music and enjoy the dated, but highly varied and still rather beautiful landscapes. And it gets really good when you have somebody to enjoy the ride with. And if you grab the game for free or get it for peanuts at one of the many Russian key stores, there really isn't much to lose. But fuck 'em for trying to force that DLC on to people as aggressively as they do.
I don't remember whether I picked red or blue back in the day. Or what my first starter was. I remember quitting somewhere around the first gym and never taking another look at the game, because I didn't really like it all that much. My brother used to tape every single episode of the anime (yes, tape, that's how long ago it was!) and I just cringed at the voice actors trying to sound like various imaginary animals. Yes, it's that time again where I talk about how I'm not a Pokémon fan.
Claire is almost seven years younger than I am. Look, it's not my fault she's marrying downhill! But when Pokémon first became a thing over here she was exactly the right age to get hooked. She was totally into this stuff, even with them swapping rice balls with sandwiches or referring to them as donus, because oh no, people around the world eat different foods and I can't identify with a kid who eats rice, so I won't purchase any merchandise or something.
Fucking donuts, apparently.
A while ago I blogged about how I played Pokémon X for Claire, since I get to drag her into stuff like Call of Duty, Dark Souls and the like, so it's only fair we play some of 'her' games, as well. And while I didn't obsess over it or do much with it after completing the main story, I did in fact complete that part of Pokémon X and found it to be entirely tolerable. Because at the end of the day, the game still uses oldschool console RPG mechanics and that stuff is playable whether you're controlling sorcerers and knights or a bunch of fucked up cartoon creatures. I don't think I'll ever get used to the lame English names, though. Wanna know what a Snorlax is called in Germany? Fucking Relaxo, bitches. That's how you name Pokémon.
Claire was hyped as fuck when the release of the new Pokemon Sun/Moon ('SuMo') was on the horizon. She avoided all reviews and even most trailers, because she didn't want any spoilers. She picked Moon and decided I had to play Sun, which is okay, because that one has a cool lion thing on the cover. And really, XY was okay, so I expected more of the same with the new one. Which was mostly true, except SuMo might actually be a bit better. I'm genuinely enjoying it and finding it fun, which is pretty impressive, considering I never really liked any of this stuff.
I googled 'edgy' and this is one of the results.
One thing I immediately liked about the new game is how it throws all these oldschool, classic Pokémon at you, which I actually know and remember rolling my eyes at 20 years ago. I think there used to be 150 back then and by now we're at an insane 801, if Google tells me the truth. Now what I like about them is how many of them were changed for the new game. They look different, come with new elements and skills and generally feel very fun to play around with.
Some of the changes are weirder than others. Alolan Meowth is openly gay and very sassy. And that's cool. I'm happy that he has finally found himself.
Good for you, little buddy. Good for you.
Once the boring tutorial crap ends and you actually get to fucking play, there's so much variety in wild Pokémon right outside your house, you'll get a strong, diverse team set up in minutes. There's also some exciting new stuff right at the beginning, like a grub, which evolves into a freaking bus and finally turns into some kind of fighter jet. Some changes are sillier than others and the guys at Gamefreak must be aware of certain memes. Still, I hope regional variants like the new Alolan Pokémon will be a thing from now on. Alola itself, which is apparently based on Hawaii, is okay, too, even if it's a bit cheesy. You still get a decent amount of variety in landscapes and architecture. Some of the Hawaii-remixes are a bit weird, but overall, the soundtrack is catchier than it was in XY.
Mmmbop!
Compared to XY, the early Pokémon in SuMo also get more interesting moves. Yes, there's still a certain amount of biting and tackling, but most of the early moves now come with a chance to paralyze, poison, flinch and other such fun effects, which can make them valid even at higher levels. Mind you, XY is all I know for comparison, but the SuMo critters seem to have more utility to them early-on.
You still unlock hilariously powerful ultimates, which deal massive damage, but also come with a much larger chance to miss completely. If they hit, they'll force your Pokémon to rest and skip its next turn. High risk vs high reward. I'm really quite surprised at how good the balancing feels in a game, which seems to be targeted mostly at kids.
Granted, all of the day one fans are old as fuck now.
Speaking of balancing: If you're the competitive type who cares about shit like perfect IVs, there's now a new hyper training feature, which lets you max out these values without forcing you to waste months of your life trying to breed the perfect Pokémon. You also get to raise your EVs by sticking your 'mons in a bouncy castle, so there is that.
This takes away the unfair advantage which certain people have by injecting 'perfect' Pokémon using homebrew apps, custom firmware or flash carts. On top of that, the servers check if your critters have any moves, stats or abilities they normally couldn't have and if there's any bullshit detected, then that Pokémon simply won't be allowed to battle online. Yep - a handheld game for kids has better anticheat functions than 90% of the stuff I get to play on Steam.
Those wallhacks, tho.
The UI is as close to perfect as you can get in a handheld game. Don't like the order of your moves? Drag, drop and rearrange that shit. Same goes for your Pokémon and even all of the options in your menu - don't like how your save function is right next to your Pokédex? That's a weird thing to be upset about, but just go and move one of them someplace else, if you so desire. It's user-friendly, intuitive and fun to mess around with. Oh and - you now get special riding Pokémon in a separate stash, so you no longer have to keep a slave, who has to know cut, fly, surf and the like. Thank fuck!
With all the praise I have for this game, there's still some stuff that really gets on my nuts. Look, I'm used to the series' traditionally awful, negligent parents and the utterly cringeworthy villains - and the new Team Skull really takes the piss. But can we stop overexplaining everything, with zero possibility to skip shit? I don't need to be shown how to throw a fucking ball at something. I don't need to be told that a potion goes into the medicine bag every goddamn time I pick one up. Some people had had to put up with this for seven generations of these games and I'm already sick of it halfway through my second one.
Being able to pet, feed, brush and blow-dry my team is a bit weird, too.
And even 25 hours into the game I still get to beat up random preschool kids who bring a single Magicrap or some other completely helpless critter. And then take their lunch money. Can we maybe stop with the 10+ so-called 'trainers' in every area, who all just happen to own one or two Pokémon while the player gets six from the very beginning of the game? It's statistically impossible to lose to most of them, even when you just mash buttons and use completely random moves. One of your six guys ought to destory theirs eventually.
Gym battles have been replaced by trials, which I found very enjoyable. They consist of little mazes, quizzes and scavenger hunts, so they're not super different from the previous games' gyms, but they offered even more variety, some fun cutscenes and a good amount of goofy humor. Watching a bunch of Marowak dance atop a volcano is really something! Still, each trial follows only one elemental flavour and the game tells you about it in advance. So when you know you're gonna face nothing but fire Pokémon, just bring a bunch of water types and you're good to go. It's nice to have themes, I guess, but it's just not very difficult that way.
This guy is literally unable to attack. I was attacked by an AI trainer, who brought two of them.
Many modern games are taking this weird direction where the narrative has to suck the player's dick nonstop, constantly telling them how incredible and awesome they are. The main storyline of XY had two, maybe three battles if you count the ultimate four, where you actually faced a full team of six enemy Pokémon. I've spent 25 hours on Sun, I have completed each but the very last grand trial and the largest fight I ever had so far was against five. And that happened exactly once. I don't like how the odds are so blatantly stacked in my favour. And then the story goes on and on and on about how I'm such a natural, a true Pokémon master, blah de blah. Bullshit! I just get twice as many Pokémon as anyone else. I fucking cheat.
SuMo is slightly more challenging than X, but so far I haven't lost a single battle. Not one. I'm sure there's gonna be some really hard post-game content, but I shouldn't have to play 40+ hours just to get a challenge. It's not like I'm carefully planning and building a team. I just use what looks cool. Don't confuse this for a lame attempt at bragging. I'm not competitive, I don't play online, I still don't understand things like hidden abilities and the like. I'm merely trying to point out how it seems almost impossible to lose, even when you have no idea wtf you're doing.
I do understand that my black Charizard is cool, though.
Right, one more whine for good measure: Transfers. I wanna move some of my favourite XY Pokémon to SuMo. There are some crazy people who carried over some of their ancient gen 1 'mons all the way into XY. It's an important feature.
So why in the fuck do I have to register to something called the Pokémon Bank, pay a fee and then wait until January before I can upload my old team from the previous game, then download them into the new game?
I've used a homebrew app to move all of my stuff from the last game into the current one, because there's no way I'm paying extra money and signing up on some website, only to do something that should have been a built-in feature to begin with.
Some of these new guys are too cute for me.
Pokémon Sun/Moon is great. It's entirely too easy and assumes that most of its target audience is no older than ten and needs to be praised for absolutely everything. But the new Alola variants are great to look at and play with, the trials are fun, the game looks absolutely stunning and you get so much play time for your money, this one's a real no-brainer to pick up, even when you're like me and you don't really care about the series all that much.
If you're hoping to transfer your stuff from the previous games, however, then you're out of luck for now. You'll have to wait for the Pokémon Bank to be updated early next year or resort to homebrew. If that's not an issue for you, then there's really no reason not to pick this up. And if you've actually read this whole thing all the way to the end, then you've probably already bought it, anyway.
Like any German, I love nudity. I am completely naked while I'm writing this blog and I'm surrounded by naked animals. Within reason. The cats are as naked as they're comfortable with, though they run at the sight of my electric shaver. Our monitor lizard Hugo is in a state of perpetual shedding. And if you had two penises like our royal python, would you ever wear pants? Of course not! Let that veiny German sausage flop out and dangle freely atop its mighty, leathery pouch. And with that I have lost 90 percent of my readers before the end of the first paragraph.
C'mon now! Stop acting like you don't worship the wang. Humankind has been obsessed with dicks since the stone age, back when videogames still had pixels the size of postage stamps. Don't believe me? Check out the ever so tasteful Custer's Revenge (1982):
This is more difficult to masturbate to than I remember.
We had pixel-dicks in 1997's Rampage World Tour, when the giant monsters you controlled on there reverted back to their human form. Your character's penis size in Rust is directly linked to your SteamID, because the digital dong is a pretty big deal on there. And if you prefer your baby injector to be green and adorable, there's always Looterkings:
"Awweww!"
And after roughly three and a half decades of pork swords in videogames, we have finally achieved true greatness. We have finally reached a point where all the boring gameplay and characters and story and everything else is gone, all the nonsense that only serves as a distraction from what's really important:
Without a doubt, the penis has achieved just about everything one could possibly hope and dream for in videogames. I mean, could you even imagine a blockbuster title like GTA V without a few dicks in there?
Of course not!
And that's alright! Who doesn't enjoy a bit of fresh air down there every now and then? Who doesn't want to break free from the shackles of society, go back to a simpler time, commune with their inner animal and just be a wild dog every once in a while? Women, apparently.
Isn't it funny how the aforementioned GTA V has strip clubs, but all you ever get to see in there is boobs? In fact, this is exactly the only place where you'll ever see any boobs at all, because female player characters can't remove their underwear even when they're taking a shower. The ladies of Los Santos all shower with their bras on. In a game full of murder, drugs, prostitution and a whole camp full of naked old men with their dicks out, there's no female nudity, apart from a pair of sad, pixellated meat pillows in a dark and depressing strip club.
But then one game was meant to change everything, to usher in an age of equality, to bring balance to the genitalia. Watch Dogs 2! One brave player has heroically murdered a lady on there, revealing what most of us have long ceased to believe in: beef curtain textures! He posted a picture of the dead NPC's lady parts and promptly got banned on PSN.
People have been posting videos of pissing male Watch_Dogs
characters since 2014 and nobody gives a fuck.
The ban has been lifted a little while later and Ubisoft apologized, then quickly removed the offending bits in a snatch patch. There's no more female nudity in Watch Dogs 2. Meanwhile, male characters still walk around with their dicks out, because really, we've been okay with this since 1982.
Fucking why, Ubisoft? Why not commit to this? You could have made a difference!
I trusted you!
I find this very confusing and I'm full of questions, most of all this one:
Why the fuck is every news article about this nonsense referring to the offending texture as a vagina? You're looking at a vulva. The vagina is all the creepy shit that's on the inside - I highly doubt female character models are that detailed in any game today, even in 2016.
More importantly, though: why the fuck do we need genitalia in videogames at all? I live right next to a pub and I get to see more dicks and public urination than any sane person could ever care for, even if that person is German. Do I really have to see this stuff in games? Is that supposed to make me feel more immersed? I'm not offended by it, I just fail to see the benefit.
More importantly, though - why is it such a big fucking deal when somebody trips upon a (poorly textured) naked female NPC? Why would anyone at Ubisoft feel the need to release a public statement about this, followed by a patch that gets rid of the offending tuna taco hours later? Why are schlongs so perfectly acceptable, but god forbid if some virtual chick doesn't have her undies tattoed on to her butt?
Using tits to sell videogames is totally cool, though.
Here's the thing that annoys me the most: I still remember when one of the selling points for Age of Conan was in the exposed breasts for female characters. At least in regions where this feature wasn't censored. "Breast physics" and animated tits have been listed as a cool, selling feature in games like Soul Calibur and its predecessor Soul Edge (or Soul Blade, depending where you are). It's perfectly acceptable to say, "Hey you! Our game has tits and they jiggle!" It's alright to have a game full of cocks and just not mention them at all. Add what people seem to think is a "vagina" and everyone loses their collective shit.
Maybe just don't put genitalia in games. Or, if you're oh-so desperate to offend, to be edgy, at least have the balls (ha!) to add the occasional cunt here and there. Use both. Or nothing. You fucking cowards.
It was a while ago now, when I watched a bug lift off from your computer screen as you waved it goodbye. And when I asked you what just happened you said, "He was a good moth." You once picked up a snail, which was crawling right towards the open road, and put it in a flower pot. One night not too long ago you ran after a frog in the pouring rain, catching it with your hands, so it wouldn't get squished by cars. You placed it in the tall grass by a church. And then we had a locust named Franklin, whose status was upgraded from live food to pet after he proved himself in arena combat with our cats and reptiles. You hand-fed him only the freshest and finest vegetables and he lived like a warrior king until he passed away in a tragic shedding accident.
RIP Franklin, 2014-2014
Your world is this bright, happy, rainbow-coloured place, which is silly in all the right ways. We once joked about how your water bottle is tired, because you always keep one of them in the bedroom. You put it on your pillow, pulled the covers over it and kissed it goodnight, because once we've gone there, the joke had to be taken all the way to bizarre levels of stupid. Glorious! You spot and rescue invisible, slippery animals all the time, yet you couldn't open a carton of orange juice if your life depended on it. I think that's why I treasure your Pathfinder tabletop character so much. A tengu rogue, who goes from moments of utter toddler-style clumsiness to sheer brilliance and back, with nothing in between these extremes.
I'm happy to be part of your silly world, because the alternative is grey, dark and very depressing. I used to sit and think about how many of my colleagues I could take if I ever showed up in the office with a battle axe. I used to sit in a dark, tiny room in my shitty apartment, surrounded by moving boxes I had not unpacked for more than a half decade. My tv was always on, even though I rarely paid any attention to it. It was just nice to hear some background noise.
You may think I'm being overly dramatic, but I'd sit there, alone, in my dark room at the night of my birthday and my parents wouldn't even call until the next day, because they simply forgot. I'd sit there all by myself and watch the fireworks through the window on new year's eve. Life was shit.
Many couples have those cheesy, romantic stories about how they first met. But we were intoduced to each other after I tried to aggressively cyber-bone your mother. The first time we had met in person, the first time we ever touched, held hands, fell in love nine years ago, a pigeon took a giant shit on both of us. We watched a jeweller's descent into madness as she desperately tried to find an engagement ring that would fit on one of your tiny, delicate fingers. We suck at being romantic. Your spot in our favourite restaurant is right underneath a pig's asshole.
And now they shut the place down and we have nowhere to eat steak. :(
Looking at Facebook I can see how most of my friends and siblings are starting their own families. The two of us try for a baby like rabbits on one day, only to go, "In this economy? What the fuck were we thinking?" the next, fretting over the result of... look, I lost count, but we've probably increased sales of pregnancy tests a lot.
When we hooked up it wasn't anything like the movies. It wasn't like anything my friends told me. The one story I've been told the most is when one of my friends met 'the one' and it was really big and exciting, as though they were struck by lightning. Spectacular stuff. Their words, not mine. I heard that story a lot. I'm not sure if that's just how they choose to remember it or if people really experience it that way, but apparently there's this BANG, this feeling that something big, life-changing is about to happen. With you it wasn't like that at all. And I don't mean that in a bad way.
Suddenly you were just... there. We talked and there was no awkward 'getting to know you' stage, no 'hey, I've been thinking and I really like you and I was wondering if...' - you know, that sort of thing. It's hard to describe. One moment I didn't know you existed and a couple lines of text later you were part of my life. Simple as that. I flew up there, crashed on your family's sofa and you just went to sleep right on top of me. Which wasn't as kinky as it may sound. And from there, things simply stayed that way. No real transition or anything.
Like this, but uglier and less adorable.
"Whatever you do, don't fuck this up", a friend told me. "Don't question it. Never question a good thing", was another great piece of advice. Because frankly, I find it difficult to understand what you see in me. I'm spending most of my time writing hilariously underpaid articles, which get torn apart by 14 year old trolls in the comments section. We'd love to see the world but the only trip my work has bought us lately was straight to the hospital. I went back to work the same day they let me out.
Oh hey, speaking of shit I write - if you check your bank account statements from the last couple of months till now and read the reference section in every one of my weekly transactions to you from then till now, they tell the story about a pineapple who wants to go to space. Bet you never noticed!
Life is still shit sometimes. In a way, I'm still trapped in my dark room right now, trying to figure out how to finish all of my work before I run out of time (obviously not by writing a fucking blog, duh!), wondering how the fuck we're supposed to afford Christmas and whether you'll still have a job next year. I'm still going back to my shitty apartment when I go to sleep, every night, even six years after we've moved out of there. I have no idea why I keep going back there or why it's impossible to let go.
But it's really not so bad now. Because you're always there. I always dream of that shitty, depressing place, but you're there. And then we just leave, go on trips together, travel the world, go out shopping, do all the stuff we're hoping to do for real someday. You know, if one of us ever starts earning money.
We could probably afford cooler shit if we didn't have so many damn pets.
I love you. I always have done, from the moment we've first met. And I'm grateful for every day that we get to spend with each other. I work for a dying industry, we have no retirement plan or a rainy day fund, the most powerful nation in the world is about to be run by a complete madman and our country is leaving the EU, because the dumbest people in the land believe this will somehow stop immigration from Syria, because apparently all brown people are terrorists or something.
With all the shit that is happening everywhere around us, it's nice to be part of your world. It's nice to chase after random badgers and weasels and foxes, to retreat to our own happy little bubble every once in a while. The world is still fucked, but things are a little more bearable after watching you rescue a frog or bed a water bottle. Please don't ever change. Please always be your calm, gentle, loving self. Always dare to be stupid. And thank you so much for nine amazing, wonderful years. ♥
Warframe is this amazing underdog story, where developer Digital Extremes has approached one publisher after another with their idea for a futuristic game about space ninjas. Nobody showed any interest in that game until DE settled for a compromise, a somewhat military-flavoured cover shooter titled Dark Sector. The game had fairly little to do with their original vision and scored mostly mediocre reviews.
They still couldn't find a publisher for their original idea. It didn't help that DE were involved in the notoriously awfulStar Trek (2013). The studio was small, lacked funding and a publisher and all they had was an idea. So they crowd-funded their game, offering a bunch of founders' packs in various flavours to their small fan base, which helped them release a very unfinished, early version of the game - Warframe.
For a Free2Play title in 2013 it looked rather stunning.
At the very beginning, Warframe only had one 'tileset', one environment which was procedurally generated from a handful of hand-crafted rooms. There was a small selection of playable characters, the Warframes, shooting and slashing their way through a bunch of space marines. There was no story, bosses were placeholders and the selection of weapons was very limited. But Warframe's unique artwork, the mix of 3rd person shooter, hack'n'slay, stealth and parcour gameplay, as well as copious amounts of blood and gore made it unique. There was absolutely nothing like it at the time.
Today, Warframe follows a deep storyline, features dozens of playable frames, the amount of weapons is in the hundreds and there are several unique boss battles, many of which require the mastery of certain tactics and attack patterns rather than simple DPS. People breed and level up their own pets, customize their starships (read: personal hangout), build their own clan dojos and enjoy a community of over 26 million players spread across the PC, Xbox One and PS4. Warframe has turned into a behemoth - one that frustrates newcomers and veterans alike, one seeming too massive for the developers to maintain.
Archwing levels look great, but they're hated by vast parts of the community.
One problem with Warframe's myriad of features is how they completely overwhelm newcomers. I have dragged over a dozen people into this game, most of which have given up on it during the first two weeks. It goes a little like this:
Very early on, Warframe tells you to put modifications in your weapons to make them stronger. Simple enough. However, said mods are fairly weak until you upgrade them. Doing so requires Endo, which you can randomly find as you play the game. Upgrading mods with Endo causes them to cost more mod points. Gear only has limited mod points, which can be doubled by installing an Orokin Catalyst (or Orokin Reactor in some cases). If you still run out of mod points, you may also install a Forma, which will reduce the cost of an installed mod by 50% (rounded up) if the mod matches the Forma's polarity. Forma can only be installed on level 30 gear, causing its level to drop back to 0, meaning you have to level it up all over again. And if you didn't understand any of this, well... that's how people trying to get into Warframe feel.
You can breed space cats in Warframe.
Weapon modifications, upgrades, dojos, syndicates, reputation, mastery, pets - Warframe piles one system on top of the next one, making the game about as easy to get into as rocket surgery. One of my friends grit his teeth, stayed around long enough to get the hang of everything while we helped him through the toughest bits. Then a quest told him to breed his first pet, an adorable space dog, which permanently died when he didn't log in for a few days. Yes, Warframe kills your pets if you neglect the game for too long. He could have saved his puppy by putting it into cryostasis, but again - the game just sicks a million features at you and it's difficult to keep track of them all.
On the other side you get veteran players, who have been starving for content for over a year now. The last huge chunk of content arrived in late 2015 in the shape of a cinematic quest: The Second Dream. It featured fantastic voice acting, incredible cutscenes and blew absolutely every bit of previous story content out of the water. It didn't just raise the bar for Warframe, but for Free2Play games in general. Check out some of the video if you don't mind spoilers:
And then came a whole lot of nothing. Yes, they added a few more playable warframes to the dozens that already existed. Added more weapons to the ridiculously massive arsenal. There was also Lunaro, a pvp mode in the spirit of Rocket League, minus all the fun. An odd choice, considering only a tiny fraction of the player base ever shows up in pvp to begin with. A boss battle received an overhaul and took veteran players all of ten minutes to finish, if that.
Finally, they announced to continue the story with another cinematic quest, titled The War Within. They got people hyped up with teasers, trailers and a new website, aiming for a release in July 2016.
A little while prior to the new quest's planned release, data miners leaked the entire script. DE claimed the leak showed only a very early draft of the quest and the finished version would be bigger, better, all new. They also delayed the release. It is now November and The War Within still isn't here. It's supposed to be released this month, four months later than it should have been, and a whole year after The Second Dream.
My human body is ready.
And then what? People have waited a whole year for this. The War Within could be masterfully crafted from angel labia and it won't live up to the community's impossible expectations. It'll take all of two hours to complete, if that, and then... again, what? Wait another year for the next bit of story?
They have raised the bar impossibly high and the game cannot sustain itself to keep veterans interested in between the story updates, which are already being drip-fed to the players as it is.
There have been no new events this year, pvp is still dead, some new weapon variations can hardly be considered content and The War Within will leave veterans wanting more but deliver nothing.
One big problem with developer DE is that they promise everything to everyone, up to a point where they simply cannot keep up. A whole new type of Warframe, 'Umbra', has been announced last year and is still nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, they already told fans they'd look into Umbra weapons at Tennocon in August. Fixes for certain broken abilities, entire Warframes and the focus system have been promised and proclaimed to be 'on top of the priority list' months ago. The divisive Archwing gameplay, which is completely detached from the rest of the game, was allegedly enhanced with a more realistic flight model, which gives players motion sickness, causing many players to ignore Archwing altogether.
Other features, such as a promised overhaul for the weapon modding and damage system are no longer being mentioned at all, whilst Warframe's frustrating mastery system has been in desperate need of a fix since its introduction to the game. Much of Warframe's content is gated behind a so-called mastery rank, which can only be raised by upgrading as many weapons and warframes to their maximum rank as players can manage. People purchase gear solely for the purpose of raising mastery, immediately discarding their new items once they reach the level cap.
Players exploit the levels and game modes which provide the highest amount of experience for their play time, causing DE to either slow down progress in these levels or straight-up removing said levels entirely, thus fixing the symptoms, without ever touching the actual problem.
Meanwhile, there is no interesting new content, special events only happen every other month and they're all rehashed versions of previous events and there is simply nothing to do for people, who have already maxed out all their favourite gear and warframes.
I'm long past the point where upgrading my damage would still help.
On top of the many outdated, overly complicated features and the promised fixes, which never seem to happen, there's also a bunch of smaller problems, which have been around since day one. There's the incredibly stupid AI, which will get stuck in corridors and doorways during defense missions. You're supposed to defend a target, but you'll really end up searching the entire level for stuck enemies, who are simply too dumb to ever reach you. They don't even understand how doors work.
There's a bug, which randomly causes your melee hotkey to do precisely nothing, making your melee weapon completely useless. This bug has come and gone since early 2013 and is particularly fun when your build of choice prefers melee to guns. Sometimes the servers will become unresponsive, causing you to receive no reward at the end of a mission, which is particularly frustrating after you've spent an hour or more in an endless survival mission.
Warframe is still a fantastic game. It's not simply one of the best Free2Play games out there - it's one of the best games, period. But instead of releasing more and more underwhelming weapons and even more Warframes with four semi-identical abilities each, perhaps it's time to focus on some of the game's core aspects and finish them. How about giving each planet a unique tileset? Or giving all the bosses complex patterns and a story instead of having a mix of detailed boss baddies, bullet sponges and placeholder models? How about fixing broken, borderline unplayable Warframes instead of releasing new ones? How about a new player experience, which doesn't require a college course to understand and enjoy? How about giving Archwing the same amount of love and polish found in regular Warframe? Alternatively - fucking remove it! It simply isn't that good and adds very little to the game in its current state.
And maybe let me invite people to my ship, so I didn't decorate it for nothing?
DE need to get their shit in order. I have no doubt that The War Within will be incredible. But even if it took an entire day to complete, it won't be enough. Infinite game modes no longer provide interesting rewards. The mastery grind is longer and more boring and tedious than ever. Some of the most powerful weapons and warframes are being sealed in 'The Vault' to create artificial scarcity, causing nothing but unnecessary frustration to the player base. These problems need to be addressed.
Some people have ridiculously high expectations for the new story content. That's what you get when you keep them waiting for a year, constantly teasing them and promising nothing but the best content, ever. You better keep them entertained after that final cutscene plays. Because they're not gonna sit and wait another year for the next two hours of content.
I'm the gaming equivalent of a hungry pregnant woman. I get cravings. The other day I had this incredible appetite for party-based RPGs. And since I'd rather fuck a cactus than touch any of Beamdog's "enhanced" shit, and since I consider Pillars of Eternity to be very average and highly overrated, I turned to Bioware and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Again. Figured I'd try a jerk inquisitor this time, maybe a mage, got all sorts of awesome ideas, then stopped playing two hours later, because there's too much soul-crushing boredom in between the good bits. Tons upon tons of fucking filler. There's just no way I'm gonna click on any more elfroot in this life.
In my boredom I clicked my way through Steam's suggestions for "party based RPGs". It recommended a bunch of crap made in RPG Maker, Final Fantasy IX (seriously?) and Avernum, which entertains a small but faithful cult of followers, despite being utter shite since their beginning as the Exile series in 1995. It also recommended classics such as Wizardry 6, which is technically correct, but...
yeah...
And then I tripped upon a game titled Serpent in the Staglands. It's largely unknown and has less than a hundred user reviews on Steam, 24% of which are negative due to the game's insane difficulty and lack of user-friendliness. Larger outlets won't even review it, because there's simply no audience for old, old, OLD school pixelated RPGs, which look like this:
It's bleak, depressing and not that fun to look at. Like England.
Like most games, Serpent starts off with a hooded lady, who asks you a bunch of questions. Why would you save a group of people from certain death, which parting gift do you leave behind for some chick you have seduced and so on and so forth. A little bit like the fortune teller at the beginning of the Ultima games. Then you start your adventure as a god, the Moon Lord, who finds himself trapped in a mortal body and no idea how or why. You get to customize said body by choosing from a whole lot of different races, you get to distribute stats and pick your starting abilities and this is the part where I was really glad that the game comes with an extensive, well-written manual.
You may also roll up to four additional party members, though there are tons of mercenaries and NPCs, who are willing to join you if you can't be bothered to create any more toons. NPC followers have their own personality and banter, but they may choose to leave your group for various reasons. Maybe they're afraid to head in a certain direction or their contract with you simply ends. You can then choose to soulbind these characters, robbing them of their free will and forcing them to stay with you. They'll hate you for it, what with you making them your slaves and all, but heyho. I opted for a custom party, tailored down to my personal preferences and play style. No banter here, but at least they're loyal.
Yep, zoomed-out looks even worse.
The starting area doesn't have any decent blacksmiths. Heck, even if it did, your mortal form isn't exactly drowning in riches, so I equipped my party with frying pans and kitchen knives. They rampaged through the woods and beat the shit out of random goblins and foxes like a bunch of angry Gordon Ramsays. "The fucking bass is fucking RAW!" *BAM*
I actually felt pretty smug at the time, because lots of user reviews and forum threads complained about how this game is oh-so hard and people couldn't even kill the stupid foxes. Meanwhile, I pan-slapped them around like a boss and murdered entire legions of chicken-riding goblins. Yes, that's a thing. Combat happens in realtime and can be paused with the space bar.
Dozens of dead noob-level enemies later, my little troupe of adventurers ran into their first bandit. He had a crossbow, a shield and a real sword. He was basically a god. Frying pans could not penetrate his armor. Meanwhile, his crossbow bolts penetrated the everloving shit out of my guys, so I had to reload over and over again. Dead party members cannot be revived, a dead main character means game over. Serpent also features GTA-level load times, so I had a great many opportunities to think about my life choices.
Level-Ups are painfully slow and do very little.
In the end I used magic to heat up the bandit's weapon, causing him to fumble while my characters beat the crap out of him. He dropped his armor, his helmet, all of his weapons and a bunch of ammo. Now one of my characters could be as strong as a god! Life was good. Then I ran into two bandits.
The first few hours were brutally unfair. My group has two tanks, but there don't seem to be any taunts or provoking abilities. Meanwhile, my main character is a squishy caster. The AI is keen on destroying him, running past the tanks, ignoring the hail of bolts from my rangers and going straight for the squishy one. Ultimately, I had to turn my rangers into nurses, constantly focusing their healing magic on my main character, who runs all over the place like a moron, kiting enemies whilst my tanks try and keep up. It's all a bit messy.
Enough adventuring, let's bone!
Battle is a yoyo. You go up and down, feeling invincible when you finally start beating up the bandits which seemed unkillable a few hours ago, right until the game throws an organized party with tanks, rangers and mages at you, which will make you its bitch and force you to reload another dozen times or two.
For an indie game, the amount of skills, spells, weapons and viable play styles is remarkable. My main character can now polymorph into a wolf, tearing enemies to shreds, whilst one of my tanks swings a magic chain whip, which can disarm enemies. My other tank summons chicken-goblins and buffs the entire group with battlecries, while ranger/nurse #1 litters the place with traps and ranger/nurse #2 melts enemy weapons, causing the bad guys to screw up their attacks and take damage simply from holding their swords.
Abilities and spells can also be helpful outside of battle. My ranger can talk to animals and gathers vital information from rats in exchange for bits of salted meat. My main character can shapeshift into a cat and reach spots, which are too tight for humanoid characters to access. One of my characters can control thieving imps and force them to grant gifts and favours.
You can reach hidden areas by turning into a cat.
Serpent uses a bleak and depressing dark fantasy setting. Seemingly injured kids will beg you to find help and lure you right into the arms of greedy bandits, then sneak up on you from behind and stab you in the back while you fight for your life. A bounty quest sent me out to collect the head of a lady who left her husband and ran off with the family savings, only to have me attacked by a bunch of rival bounty hunters. I discovered a lair of creepy monsters, who possess and eat children. I felt rather proud when I beat the puzzle at the end of that dungeon. I found the clue in an old diary, which I had discovered much earlier in the game, by shapeshifting into a cat.
The most polarising aspect about this game, apart from the ridiculous difficulty, is the story. The world is indifferent to you. You aren't the shining hero or the stereotypical chosen one, the universe doesn't revolve around you and plenty of NPCs simply don't care about you at all. You're a god in a mortal body, pretending to be a spicer, whilst trying to figure out what exactly has happened to you. There are no quest pointers, there isn't even a questlog and the only thing you can do with the game's "journal" is type notes by hand, if you so desire.
It's a big world and I have no idea where to go.
People are working their fingers to the bone to repay a huge debt to a local noble. There's a mysterious disease with no known cure, which only afflicts one of the world's races. Sailors smuggle slaves all over the place. Folks entertain themselves in a secret fight club, hidden in a tavern basement. Everybody has their own problems, their own lives and nobody cares about you and your problems as the player character. They're not waiting for you to show up and save the day. They also don't tell you where to go or what to do next. Dialogue is incredibly well-written and full of swearing, which is always a plus in my book.
There's zero handholding here. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends entirely on you. You might enjoy exploring a big, open world, where you can go just about anywhere, anytime you want. You may uninstall the game in frustration after hours of trying to figure out where to go, only to get destroyed by monsters, which are way above your party's level.
Serpent in the Staglands is 60% off on Steam while I'm writing this. There's also a GoG version if that's how you roll.
The first of the two DLC expansions for Dark Souls 3 has been released on Monday. And it's pretty disappointing, from the Xbox One leakage shitshow to cheaters spreading the DLC weapons all over the PC version nearly a week before release to the DLC itself simply being a bit half-assed. It isn't terrible, but it's at the bottom of the list as far as Souls-DLC goes.
It looks absolutely stunning, though.
I don't even mind that the new area introduced in Ashes of Ariandel is yet another snowy, painted world. Yes, we had one of those in the original Dark Souls, but this can be forgiven if you follow the lore of the series. The game world and its inhabitants are in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. The strongest souls return time and again, sometimes almost exactly as they were in the previous cycle, sometimes drastically changed. Same goes for the world, itself. Lothric feels like it was built atop the ruins of Lordran. Bits and pieces of Anor Londo appear as the next cycle nears its end and everything starts to collapse. If you're okay with that, then you can hardly complain about getting sucked into yet another painting, much like it happened in the first Dark Souls.
What you can criticize, however, is when they're clearly out of ideas, not just rehashing the same old stuff from previous Souls games, but even from Dark Souls 3. Do we really need yet another shaky rope bridge, which can be destroyed and turned into a makeshift ladder? It was an exciting idea in the catacombs of Carthus, but it just feels lazy when you recycle that exact same mechanic in some DLC for the same game. And the recycling doesn't stop there.
You'll be fighting this guy a lot.
The new painted world looks incredible. Sure, we had ice and snow in the main game, but not like this. The snowy mountains look absolutely unlike any other area in the game. Frozen, glacial ravines full of giant, armor-clad enemies with javelins, axes and nasty flame attacks and earthquakes almost make dying fun. There's also a whole bunch of really annoying wolves, who will keep howling for reinforcements if you don't take them out fast enough. Tree monsters will burn you to pieces and grab and strangle you with their branches. Giant fly monsters infest you with maggots, which destroy you much faster than any status effect you've encountered in the main game, apart from curses. There's also a bunch of giant ice crabs I really could have done without.
The first major disappointment is the first boss, some nameless gravetender. I'm sure the lore nuts will find out what this guy is all about, but for now, there's nothing to him, no cutscene, no dialogue, he just drops one of the cool new weapons. What's more, the guy will summon a giant wolf to his side, which can become a problem if you don't kill him fast enough, forcing you to face him and his pet at the same time. The wolf is fun and all, he looks great and is well-animated, but in the end, he's utterly forgettable. Sure, he's a nod at Sif from the original Dark Souls, but the battle against Sif meant something! When we encounter Sif, he watches over the grave of Knight Artorias, who ultimately fell to the abyss. It's one of the most crucial, heart-wrenching and memorable moments in the entire game. Meanwhile, Ashes of Ariandel throws some replacement wolf at us, whilst giving us no (apparent) meaning or context, whatsoever. Again, I'm sure the community will figure out what this is all about and unravel every little bit of hidden lore behind this, but right now it feels cheap, half-assed and like they're just throwing it in there for nostalgia's sake. "Look, here's something to remind you of a battle you used to like!"
I'll take Sif over this asshole any day.
In all fairness, the DLC's main boss is pretty awesome. Sister Elfriede fights using a pair of scythes and she's such a strong nod towards Dark Souls' Priscilla, I could have sworn Elfriede had a dragon tail in the earlier trailers. She's a fairly challenging boss that comes with a whopping three phases, one of which pits you against two bosses at the same time. The whole fight may seem impossible at first, until you realize that Elfriede is yet another boss, who can be staggered, parried and backstabbed. Some may find that a bit cheap, but to me she's clearly the highlight of this DLC.
Another highlight lies within the new weapons, which include the boss' new twin scythes, a pair of claws which doesn't actually suck, a torch, which doubles as a mace and a rapier, which comes with a set of handy throwing-knives, as well as a handy gladiator-style sword & shield combo. There's also a bunch of new miracles such as the frozen weapon enchantment if you enjoy applying the completely useless frostbite debuff. On top of that, there's a new PVP arena, which as of this moment has yet to be completely ruined by cheaters.
Arena matches range from duels with no estus to 4-6 people free for alls and 2vs2/3vs3 team battles with very limited estus. It never took me more than two or three minutes to get a match going even at Soul Level 250, I didn't encounter any of the usual cheats (flying, god-mode, insta-curse, etc.) and it's all good fun. I doubt the PC community will keep this thing alive any longer than they did with the arena in the original Dark Souls, though. Problems already exist, such as only three people spawning into what's supposed to be a 2vs2, which turns the match into a frustrating experience for everybody involved.
Ashes of Ariandel isn't terrible, but it's far from great. It took me about three hours to complete and frankly, I didn't expect it to take much longer, seeing as Dark Souls' Artorias of the Abyss wasn't exactly massive, either. It's okay value for 15 Euros, but you don't miss much if you skip this one, unless you're absolutely dying to fight in the arena. There are no rewards if you win there, either. There is really no reason to ever come back to the painted world once you've fought the bosses and collected all the new weapons and I didn't really enjoy the place enough to include it in future New Game+ sessions. And with people using cheatengine to just magically create the new DLC items out of thin air, there's not even any incentive to buy this thing for the new gear. People have been using the new items in pvp before the DLC was even released and so far, From Software is doing absolutely nothing to stop the blatant cheating, which is plaguing the PC version.
