Pokemon X/Y - What Am I Doing With My Life?

I don't like Pokemon. Look, I don't hate you for loving this stuff, so don't jump down my throat for being a blasphemer. But when Pokemon suddenly became a thing in Germany, it was the dumbest crap I had ever seen. It started when they aired a few episodes of the anime on German telly and I just couldn't stand it. First of all, the Pokemon themselves pissed me off. Maybe it was the shitty German dubbing, but all I heard was grown-up voice actors shouting, squeaking and squawking the names of Pokemon, since apparently that's all these creatures can say. Their own names. You know, like the meow, the moo and the whyareyousmellingmyhair in real life.

The only other thing I remember from the show was some guy who never opened his fucking eyes! How he got around without constantly walking into things I'll never know. Maybe he used the force or something. Did he even have eyeballs? There was also a red-haired chick and a bunch of nurses, which inspired a ton of late 90s rule 34 stuff, long before rule 34 even existed. Internet was slow and expensive back then, you know.

That's her in the North American version.

As far as the games go, I played one of the first two on the Gameboy Classic, but I just didn't see the appeal. I believe I got as far as the first gym, but my army of zubats and rattatas couldn't handle it. And yes, I know, rock-paper-scissors, bring the right type and all that. I just didn't care enough back then and we simply didn't know about that stuff at the time. There was no Google, there were no smartphones, we actually had to figure shit out on our own and couldn't just watch some screaming 14 year old walk us through stuff on Youtube.

I was willing to give Pokemon another chance on the N64 a few years later. I went and got Pokemon Stadium, which looked really impressive for its time. I didn't have any powerful Pokemon I could have transferred over from the Gameboy version, so you can probably imagine how my experience with this game went down. I actually made it through all the easy and medium battles on there using only stock critters, but once you get to the harder stages you're pretty fucked. It was really frustrating, because I started to like the game up to that point, but I wasn't gonna grind a bunch of levels on the Gameboy, just to stand a better chance at the more challenging stuff on the N64.

His name looks French to me.

I have lived a happy, Pokemon-free life since then. I avoided the movies, I didn't touch any of the games that came out. And then Claire moved in.
Not only does she own every Pokemon game in existence - she has also been transferring her entire collection, legendaries and all, from one generation to the next, again and again. Like a fucking hoarder. Which is fine when you're a kid, but modern day Claire has to go to work, she has errands to run and a whole lot of other boring shit to do, which drastically reduces the amount of play time you can put in a day. So when Pokemon X/Y came out for the 3DS, the initial reaction was depressingly reasonable - getting both games seemed a bit expensive and she probably didn't have the time, anyway.

So she went without the new game for a while, but money isn't as much of an issue as it was (for now, thank fuck) and regarding time, I offered to help. I told her that, if it really meant that much to her, she could just pick up Pokemon X and I'd play Pokemon Y at the same time, so I could just send her all the exclusive stuff she couldn't get in her game, effectively catching 'em all, which seems to be a big deal in the Franchise.

This might take a while.

I ended up with Pokemon X, because Claire wanted Y for its cooler legendary or something. The first thing I noticed is how this game looks really good on the 3DS. I like the 3D camera angles, the many different towns and the battles, which are really well-animated. The game also features some of the best lighting I've ever seen on a handheld device. Yeah, I'm a sucker for stuff like that.

With that said, I found it difficult to take the game too seriously. I'm not gonna make any of the irresponsible parent jokes and other obvious stuff which is as old as Pokemon itself. But I named my character 'RAAAAAAAAAAGH!1+*#', so it looked like people were always screaming and swearing at me for no reason. My starter Pokemon was nicknamed Furrrnurrrkin. He was later joined by Purrrkurrchurrr.

Churrrrr....

The plot is as dumb as they come. The game's main villain is worried that the world will run out of ressources due to overpopulation, so he creates an ultimate weapon, hoping to shrink down the amount of living things to a safer size. Pretty dark for a game aimed at kids, but the whole thing is so goofy, it's difficult not to cringe whilst reading through all the game's text.

It didn't bother me too much, though, as the gameplay was genuinely fun, if way too easy. My starter Pokemon turned out to be ridiculously strong, so I just ended up taking down most enemies with a single attack. It only took a few minutes until I had a pretty strong and diverse team, which simply never lost a battle, so there was zero reason to ever change anything. The only time you ever really need to mess around with your setup is when the game forces you to move a boulder or swim through some water, which requires Pokemon with certain special abilities. Most of them aren't super useful in combat, though, so I constantly had to switch out decent fighty Pokemon with those who had the utility moves, which was really annoying. Why can't they just give you two or three extra slots for critters, which stay out of combat, but can be used to smash rocks, climb waterfalls and the like?

Easily one of the best-looking games on the system.

I really don't know much about Pokemon or about the strengths and weaknesses of each type, but I never really had to. I just plowed through the entire game, league, elite 4 and everything else without ever having more than one or two of my guys defeated. This surprised me, as I remembered the classic titles to be hard as balls. Sure, the series is mostly targeted at kids, but the game is bound to attract a bunch of generation 1 fans, which are all old farts by now. And they keep making things more complex with new types, mega evolution and other advanced features, so why is the game such an absolute cakewalk?

I won't rule out that maybe I got lucky with the stats of my pokemon and I did spend some time deliberately raising certain stats even higher through the super training feature. Ironically enough, my team even beats up Claire's Pokemon and she has been playing since gen 1. For the most part, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I have yet to lose a match against her team. You can tell I'm clueless when you look at the video, where I repeatedly try to punch one of her ghost pokemon, which does precisely nothing. I'm probably just winning because I try and max out the speed stat for my guys, so I can get the first turn whenever possible, but I still think it's funny a complete idiot like me can defeat a seasoned veteran on dumb luck and wild guesses.

It feels to me as though this game requires about as much "skill" as Hearthstone. In my matches against Claire I didn't win because I'm some kind of tactical mastermind. I just happened to have the right Pokemon at the correct time. It felt more like luck of the draw than anything else. I'm not saying you absolutely cannot tip the scales in your favour when you're a good player, but it seems that a huge part of the battle is simply out of your hands. If you start with a water type and the enemy player has a faster electric type pokemon, your starter will get oneshot before it even gets to make a turn. Sure, you can change to a ground type from there, but that's not gonna stop your opponent from switching to whatever counters ground type pokemon. I believe there's a whole lot of luck and random chance involved.

One thing I like is how insanely busy this game becomes when you go online. I pass tens of thousands of players in every session, many of which want to battle or trade. I see people from Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia and all over the globe and while I usually hate having to put up with other people in my games, Nintendo actually makes player interaction fun. You can't troll or grief other players as far as I can tell, but you can send them random buffs or just have a quick, friendly battle. It's not super invasive and really adds to the game. Way to go!
I finished the entire game and I didn't hate it, so there's that. Time to move on.

AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

I don't think I'll ever become a fan. I'm not gonna start watching the anime and I won't look up Delphox on rule34.xxx anytime soon. I'm not "gonna catch 'em all". In fact, I don't have to, because I can just download them using homebrew. But you know what? I think I'll join Claire on her playthrough when Sun and Moon come out. And I'm sure the two of us will have more battles and we'll play more Super Multi Team Battles together. Or whatever that stuff was called. Yay for jolly cooperation!

The New Doom Is Alright

If I had to go to a deserted island and I could only pick one game to eat, drink and have sex with, it'd be the original Doom. I probably said the same thing about GTA V at some point, but that was then and fuck past me. It's still a close second, though.
I was 11 years old when Doom came out and it scared the shit out of me. The dark corridors, where flickering lights would only illuminate the shambling monster hordes for very brief moments. The moans and screeches. Even the fucking doors sounded scary!

If you find it hard to believe that Doom was so horrifying, you have to understand that up to that point, most computer games used to look like this:

Commander Keen, also id.

I still have the Doom 1 and 2 cartridges for the Gameboy Advance, I've got Doom running on my PSP, my Nintendo 3DS and probably every other electronic device in the house, including our sandwich toaster. I'm not even kidding, Doom runs on absolutely everything!

And the game still holds up remarkably well, more than two decades later. There are so many different mods, total conversions and enhancements for Doom, it's absolutely insane. Heck, there's a version of Brutal Doom on my PC right now!

And then a brand new Doom was announced. It looked ridiculously over the top, but I'm in no position to complain about shit like glory kills, when I mod the exact same stuff into the original Doom. So I finally gave that a try.
Yeah, I know. I'm 4 months late. Because the Doom multiplayer demo looked shit. The singleplayer footage looked good, but not 60 Euro good. But what do you know, the game was half price this weekend. Yay me and a bit of a fuck you from Bethesda to anyone who bought it sooner, I guess.

I was absolutely blown away at first. The game looks pretty sweet on maximum detail settings, with the odd shitty texture here and there. I don't really understand why this sort of thing still happens in modern games. Optimization? Are they just lazy? It just throws me off a bit when I'm experiencing a realistic-looking landscape with sharp, crisp textures and suddenly I walk into a bunch of rocks looking like this:

"Ultra" graphics.

Still, the overall look and feel was fantastic, I cranked that shit up to 1440p and frame rates were stable, (almost) everything looked glorious and all in all, the game is really well-optimized. You get those insane, massive monster hordes attacking from every single direction and there's never even a stutter. Granted, everything happens inside relatively small, enclosed locations, so it's not like the game was rendering any massive open-world landscapes during fights.

So I was happily blasting my way through hordes of demons and zombies when I noticed something odd: All the big battles only happen in these locked arenas. Remember how in the original Doom every level was filled with monsters, which you'd encounter whilst exploring the halls and corridors? Levels in the new Doom are almost completely empty until you reach one of the four or five arenas in every stage, which spawn a shit-ton of monsters on your ass. What's up with that?

And there was an even bigger problem. The original Doom has no jumping. The new one does. And it has WAY TOO MANY FUCKING PLATFORMING SECTIONS! Yes, the Quake games had sections like that, but I'm not playing fucking Quake, I'm certainly not playing Half-Life and I really thought this was supposed to be Doom. There's this incredibly annoying section where you have to climb up a massive tower, where one wrong jump can instakill you. It's not super difficult, the whole thing is perfectly doable, it's just that I don't fucking want to.

To make the whole thing feel even more "modern", they added a bunch of annoying minigames. Sorry, "trials". There's a trial where you have to shoot some 30 or so baddies in six seconds. Sure, you get an extra second per kill, but enemies spawn all over the place, so you have to fail the trial a few times and memorize the spawn locations before you stand a realistic chance at beating this crap. Not all trials are that awful, but you have to complete them in order to unlock powerful buffs. Most of them are well-hidden, so if you miss too many of them on a playthrough your character will end up seriously gimped at the later levels. Same goes for hidden pickups, which permanently increase your health, armor and ammo.

You'll want all the bonus stats you can get. Trust me.

Doom's biggest flaw is that it massively overstays its welcome. Five or six hours into the game you will have encountered every single type of enemy there is in Doom, save for a few (terrible) boss fights. There isn't much variety here. Unfortunately, the game will drag on for another six hours and the only thing that changes from here is the amount of monsters thrown at you in every arena. The fights get bigger, longer, you get more and more of the ever-same hordes of baddies up to a point, where shit gets frustratingly unfair. I completed the campaign on 'Hurt Me Plenty', but I absolutely hated the final two levels and I was actually glad when it was over.

The game turns from a power fantasy into a run for your life, where you have to cheese your way through major fights with the chainsaw, the BFG and quad damage powerups, because all the ammo upgrades in the world won't give your rocket launcher enough oomph to help you blast your way through the game's final stages on regular weapons alone.

Doom is a good game. The annoying platforming bits, an overstretched campaign with a dumb leap in difficulty towards the end and the utter lack of mod-support or a proper co-op campaign prevent it from being really great. And 40 Euro for a fucking season pass? The first DLC is a bunch of worthless, overpriced crap for a multiplayer mode, which hardly anyone even touches. Because we now live in a day and age where developers charge lots of money for Doom maps.