Okay For an Hour - Warframe: The Sacrifice

Warframe's new story content skips all the padding, gets straight to the point and woooosh! It's over!

Plains of Eidolon drove me away from Warframe. A giant, majestic, sprawling landscape full of ore to dig out of rocks, fish to catch and other stupid resources to farm for days, weeks and months in order to get the most out of a feature I never cared for - Tenno powers. As in, peeling your annoying little space-child out of their warframe to fight the enemy without superpowers or protection, because reasons, I guess.
I farmed Eidolon for two or three days, then got too bored to continue. Look, I get it. Warframe is the grind. Without it, there's no game. It's just that I didn't care for the reward at the end of it this time around. Farming for a cool new gun, an awesome new Warframe, that shit is fun. Farming to get a new pea shooter for my space brat? And I need to catch fish and use a mining laser instead of murdering stuff? Fuck that shit.

Like me, Eidolon is stunning to look at, but ultimately hollow and pointless.

So I took a bit of a break from the game to do other stuff. You know, like racing my bulbasaur car in Forza.

And then they finally released a new story quest. 'The Sacrifice'. To put it bluntly, it's a story the developers had to pull out of their asses to justify the introduction of 'Excalibur Umbra' to the western version of Warframe. This one may require a bit of explaining.
When Warframe was released in China, they offered a special edition of Warframe's posterboy Excalibur. That special version, dubbed Excalibur Umbra, was all black and edgy and came with a flowy scarf, so folks outside of China started wondering when they'd be able to get their hands on him. Originally, it was stated that Excalibur Umbra was really just slightly altered (visually) from regular Excalibur and there was nothing special about him apart from that.

Surprisingly, people in a game about edgy space ninjas still wanted a western release of this guy, so developer Digital Extremes said they didn't just want to throw him in there without explanation. Instead, they promised there would be a bit of lore to introduce him in a way that makes sense. Which is cool, of course, but that was also something they announced so many years ago, that the whole thing turned into a bit of a running gag.

So edgy.

But lo and behold, The Sacrifice is here and it doesn't just allow everyone to grab Excalibur Umbra for free, but it also continues the story of The Second Dream and The War Within. And unlike the previous story missions, The Sacrifice cuts right to the chase and shows you the good stuff without too much annoying padding and repetition. Basically, you're on a quest to chase after Excalibur Umbra to find out why he's such a huge jerk, to learn about his past and to ultimately stop him.

As with previous content of this type, the presentation is absolutely superb, from tons of action-packed cutscenes to fantastic voice acting. Gameplay itself is more of what you'd expect from Warframe. Go someplace, kill some stuff, scan a few things, craft something. What's cool is how there are no artificial time sinks in place in order to encourage people to spend real money. You get to craft your own Excalibur Umbra as part of the storyline and there is no endless grind for resources required, no 24+ hours construction time for you to skip with real cash or any such nonsense. Just play, finish the story, get your free Excalibro all leveled up and with a sexy new katana to boot!

Though my one true love will always be Rhino.

For better or worse, the whole thing won't take you much more than an hour to complete. Previous story quests would often stretch over an agonizing amount of samey bog-standard missions with a bunch of expository monologue by one of the main characters going on for an eternity and a half. The Sacrifice is all about 'show - don't tell', which I appreciate. Even when the game reveals Excalibur Umbra's story, you get to experience it through a character's eyes and there's a bit of interactivity. This makes it easier and a lot more fun to follow the story than in previous quests of this kind.

I much prefer it this way. I'd rather spend an hour playing through fun new content, which is full to the brim with awesome cutscenes and story than spend three or four hours repeating copy-pasted missions where the villain of the month keeps blabbing about his latest project or whatever. That said, there were two (minor) annoyances during my playthrough. First of all, you can only fight Excalibur Umbra as the Tenno. As in, without your warframe. I have no idea how this plays out on a properly upgraded space-kid, but since I never got into Plains of Eidolon, my brat is grossly underleveled and Excalibro kicked the absolute shit out of me.

I need my warframe to compensate for certain deficiencies.

Not only did he basically oneshot me again and again, but in the unlikely event where I actually survived a single attack, he'd just spam follow-ups, making it impossible to get away or retaliate. You can't ever really "die" when your Tenno gets their ass kicked and these missions are set up in a way where you just try again and again, chipping away at your enemy's shields one pixel at a time, which is an exercise in frustration, but I suppose they had to shoehorn a way for people to enjoy their powered-up Tenno weapons in there somehow.

The other problem was that, as with all story quests right after release, the dark side and light side dialogue choices were all over the place. You defeat a main villain and according to the UI, the light side dialogue option is, "Squirm like the maggot you are!" Clearly there's something wrong here.
The whole light vs dark side thing has no known gameplay effect right now and knowing the developer, it's at least gonna take another 3-5 years before that changes. And there will certainly be a patch for this, if there wasn't one already. Still, it felt a little weird to have all the asshole options associated with light side points and all the kind answers with the dark side.

I could really eat a Mars right now.

Finally, I had a look at Khora, the newest addition to the roster of playable Warframes. Her passive ability allows her to bring a battle pet, a (hideous) space cat, to all missions. The cat deals decent amounts of damage and functions pretty much exactly like the kavat and kubrow pets you can breed and use on all Warframes. In fact, Khora can use one of these regular pets on top of her cat, so she's the only warframe to get two active pets at once. She's also incredibly tanky, so I went and played a 1 hour solo survival, where enemies went all the way up to level 100 and higher in the end. Depending on when you're reading this, the video might still be converting to a watchable quaity, because a 1 hour video file in 4k takes a while to convert, apparently.

There's also a new Onslaught mode, which is basically like playing Nephalem Rifts in Diablo 3. You quickly hop from one randomized environment with random enemies to the next and try to make it as far as you can until time runs out or you run out of respawns. It's a fun new way to farm so-called relics, which are required to obtain the powerful primed warframes and primed weapons.
It's my favourite way to play right now, because you really just fight your enemies, the clock and your old record as you try to progress further and further each time. No objectives, no consoles to hack, no NPCs to babysit, no bosses endlessly talking to you - just instant action. And sometimes that's just what I want.

If you want to know why people are leaving Destiny 2 in droves and feeling very little excitement for Anthem right now, you need to look no further than Warframe. Not only can you (realistically!) play the entire game without ever having to spend any money at all - you can earn LOADS of premium currency just by selling off unwanted gear and mods you find while playing the game. Yes, player trading is deliberately awkward, with a chaotic trade chat and shitty face-to-face bazaars, but I'd rather post a bunch of WTS messages and get my premium currency that way, than shell out $100 for some AAA title featuring season passes and paid cosmetic shit on top.

Warframe is free, the content updates are free and you can earn tons of premium currency for free.

Being the lazy bastard that I am, if I want any particular new guns, mods of warframes, I'll shell out some small amount of money on a bit of platinum and insta-buy that stuff, because I can't be bothered to grind for it. Maybe I'll spend five bucks on a fun new skin for my favourite warframe. Because, you know, in a game that costs me absolutely NOTHING, I'm perfectly happy to spend some small amount of money on some cosmetics or a bit of new gear every six or so months. This is how you monetize your shit.

And I'll be happy to play Warframe on Switch when it releases on there later this year. The folks at Panic Button are in charge of the port, so I have no doubt it will be a very blurry experience with (mostly) stable FPS and absolutely all of the content intact. Just like Doom and Wolfenstein 2. They also ported Rocket League, which is absolutely fantastic on Nintendo's hybrid and supports cross platform play. That's not really something we've ever seen in Warframe, but who knows? I certainly wouldn't mind having access to my original account and its progress when playing it on the go.

Forza Motorsport 7, The Male Ego And My Descent Into Madness

For the past week or so, YouTube has been doing this weird thing where it keeps recommending videos of racing games. Probably because I clicked some E3 footage of Forza Horizon 4, which looks stupidly awesome. Then I saw some 4K footage of the PC version of Forza Motorsport 7. Fuck my life. Seeing as the standard edition of that game is currently selling for around $30 if you know where to shop, I figured, hey, why the hell not.

Damn. This game is the most stupidly beautiful title I've ever run on my PC. There's this argument going on about how visuals in games have stopped improving for a while now, because resolution can only go so high and at some point textures are simply "photorealistic" and you can't get much better from there, but I disagree. If you compare everyone's favourite car porno from 2015, Project Cars 2, to Forza Motorsport 7 just in terms of visuals, Forza looks quite a bit better. It's definitely not the fairest comparison and both games have different physics, handling and a different target audience, but I still remember how everyone on my Facebook, myself included, drooled over footage from Project Cars (2) and Forza looks even more incredible. Of course games don't automatically look better every year or two. Heck, The Crew 2 actually has been downgraded visually when compared to its predecessor, which is absolutely nuts.

Also, fuck the soulless piece of junk that is The Crew 2.

Being the old fart that I am, I also believe that our perception of what counts as 'photorealistic' changes as graphics keep on improving. For example, and I'm not making this up, back when Microprose released Grand Prix 2 on PCs, I'd see my dad, his friends, my friends, everyone just gathering in front of the PC with their eyes and mouths open, because we absolutely couldn't believe how the game looked almost exactly like watching a race on tv!

You know, this.

That was back in 1995, where pixels on objects would just grow to the size of an entire house if you came too close to an object. But back then, seeing this game in action was so unbelievable and so utterly breathtaking, we almost couldn't believe what we were seeing at the time. That shit was almost photorealistic! The game was so close to the real thing, I still know the Monaco GP by heart, because I've played it TO DEATH on GP2. We kept playing this game for years, constantly modding and updating the cars and the roster of drivers to reflect the new seasons. Yep, we actually passed around floppy disks containing fan-made seasonal content updates.
Okay, back then, photos, our tv signal, tvs themselves, our eyes, everything was much lower quality than it is today. But at the time, GP2 was the single-most realistic-looking racing game we had ever seen and it stayed that way for quite some time.

Yes, THIS up there!

So for a start, I got Forza 7 because it has amazing visuals and I got it at a reasonably affordable price. And then I started driving, not wanting to go below medium difficulty settings. Basically, I disabled all steering and braking assists, kept the race lines, because I don't know any of the tracks, disabled the rewind-feature, because if feels like cheating to me, and left the AI on its default setting. And raced. Doing my best not to drive like a complete asshole, attempting to stay on the track, not winning by ramming the competition out of the way and being an overall dirty prick. With mixed results, but my first attempts went okay. I was so proud when I won my first post-tutorial race, I actually recorded the replay.

I'm only winning, because the AI drivers suck even harder than I do in that race. But I was happy, because I was still learning, I was successful enough and, while Forza isn't exactly a die-hard simulation, it's a bit more challenging than, say, Need for Speed. And it all ended when the game pointed out I was really just winning because of my AI settings. Long story short, Forza recommended changing AI skill to "above average". And that's when everything went to shit.

Up to this point, I did the best I could to actually race around the track in the exact way you're supposed to race, not taking any shortcuts through the grass or other weird shit, which would get you penalized or disqualified in any serious race. Because even on the higher difficulty settings, the AI is super fair and shows remarkable sportsmanship. They stay on track, they avoid contact, just good, clean racing displayed by all the bots around you. And I tried so hard to play along! Usually with one of two possible results: 1) I fail to take a turn properly, fly off track, crash into a stack of tires and end up so far behind the pack, I may as well just start over. Yes, if I win, it's either without rewinds or no win at all. Or 2) I try my best not to hit anybody, not to end up in a bed of gravel or a stack of tires and just stay stuck in the middle of the pack or worse, resulting in a very dull, frustrating racing experience. That's because I'm a noob, I'm not very good with the tracks or the driving physics right now, I have difficulty keeping up, I get fucked.

Prague is one of my absolute favourite tracks. On a tangential note, excessive bloom can really fuck up a screenshot.

Ultimately, constant failures and restarts will eventually lead to 3) Anger. So if I can squeeze past a car on the inside of a turn, go way too fast and then just lean on the guy on the outside, pushing him off the track and gaining a position in the process like an absolute asshole, it's only a matter of time until I will. Some guy is hitting the brakes before a hairpin turn right in front of me and I've got way too much speed? Who needs brakes when you can ram the guy in front of you off the track? So over the course of every cup I slowly devolve from a highly motivated driver, fully intent on displaying nothing but the finest sportsmanship to an angry troglodyte, who will push you right the fuck off the road for his own advantage.

Funnily enough, what annoys me the most is how the game lets me get away with this. So I end up winning one cup after another by being a ruthless, cheating cunt, while all the AI drivers around me are far more skilled and perfectly fair. So after every race I tell myself, alright, this time we're gonna be good, no more shortcuts, no ramming, no contact, let's pretend this is a serious race and win through superiour skill, not brute force.

Five minutes later...

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
Of course I could just set the AI back to 'average' and win without being a total jizzbag. Nobody will know, no one is gonna judge me, my dick won't fall off, even if it'll feel that way. There's no shame in lowering the difficulty. But I can't. I won't. I'll totally beat the above average drivers fair and square eventually, because I'm so totally good at racing!

The Top Gear sticker makes my car 20% faster. Everybody knows this.

In the end I just went completely insane. I tricked out a 1990 Renault Alpine (for nostalgia, my old man had one IRL) to a point where it could compete with any 1000hp hypercar.  Of course the car was never built for anything like this, it feels impossible to control and shoots all over the place, but it accelerates like a fucking space shuttle. Then I went and raced some "above average" hypercars with it. I basically ended up flying right past the entire field, rocketing all over the place. Again, I genuinely tried to stay on track, tried to avoid contact as much as I could and you can see in the video below, how I'm getting a little better with the race course in every lap until I eventually stop mowing the lawn all the time.

I love this game. I'd love it hell of a lot more if I wasn't too stubborn to lower the stupid difficulty already. But picking any one of the game's 700+ cars, tricking the absolute shit out of it and racing some of the world's most expensive and powerful supercars is as ludicrous and stupid as it is satisfying and fun. The game is called Forza Motorsport 7, so I reckon that at this time, everyone who ever cared about this series is probably a bit tired of it now, while I'm only just starting to discover it. But hey, that's me. Maybe I'll start playing Overwatch by 2020!

And Then There Were Two

So here's a nice surprise - Claire downloaded Quake Champions without even telling me. Played a few rounds and it turns out she's doing a lot better on there than she does on any CoD game. She's even topped the scoreboard a few times. So that's neat. :D

My dick has permanently grown 2 inches after this one.

Getting into Paladins on the Switch some more, as well. I still hate having to control it with an analog stick and I reeeeeeeeeeally hope they're gonna add fucking gyro aiming already. Still, it's nice when things actually go right and the game broadcasts a little bit of your gameplay as the moment of the match to every player at the end of a round. A feature the cunts at Activision Blizzard are trying to patent now, because we can't have nice things.

Watch as I put you in your place!

My thing I'm currently doing and hoping to blog about if it succeeds is going surprisingly well. I'm halfway done. The positive changes are already kicking in. Life is good.

In other news, I'll be attending Gamescom in Cologne this year for the first time in my life. For work. Got a TON of people wanting to meet me in person. Nobody from any of my writing and magazine jobs, none of my German friends, pretty much no one outside of family has ever met me IRL, because I've got zero social skills and all the anxieties. Trying not to think about it too much right now. Yay.

Quake Champions and Paladins - Shooting Like it's 1999

It's official. I'm hooked. After a bit of a shaky start I'm finally getting the hang of Quake Champions and my scores are starting to get a little more decent. I don't think I'll ever bother with any ranked 1vs1 and 2vs2 stuff, because I find (T)DMs so much less stressful. When you look me up on the stat tracker (please don't), you can see I've been steadily and consistently getting better. I can't remember the last time I've had so much fun with an arena shooter. Or any FPS game, for that matter.

The guy kept insisting I wasn't a real kitten for the entire duration of the match.

There's just something immensely satisfying about watching Doomguy and Quake guy and a bunch of other weirdos running all over the place, blowing each other into meaty chunks with rocket launchers. I sincerely hope the game is gonna maintain some of its momentum and won't immediately disappear into oblivion, like certain other shooters, which aren't Overwatch, Fortnite or CoD. It's been far too long since I've played a decent arena shooter! Back in my teens, we'd talk about nothing but Quake and Unreal (Tournament) in school, we'd all meet online after class, shoot each other to pieces, then talk about it back in school the day after. Life was good. And then came Counter-Strike.

The gaming industry is terribly boring and unoriginal. We were all instantly hooked on CS, there was absolutely nothing like it, and CSGO is still one of the biggest, most important shooters out there today. And suddenly every shooter had swat teams and terrorists and realistic weapons and objectives and one life per round and all that over the top silliness with rocket launchers and miniguns wasn't cool anymore. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but arena shooters haven't exactly been relevant since the early 2000s. It was all terrorists or nazis, then zombies or nazi zombies. Just like everything is battle royale today, everything had to be a MOBA at some point and everyone made an MMO, which set out to be the next WoW-killer. Because why innovate, when you can just take something popular and fucking copy it? Which can absolutely work if you add your own ideas and improvements, like Fortnite did over PUBG, but can also hilariously backfire twice if you're Cliff Bleszinsky.

I gitted gud.

In other news, fucking Paladins. Never played it, never looked at it. Same for Overwatch. To me, these games are like MMO-style battlegrounds with guns. You're a tank, healer or damage dealer, people in chat will yell random abuse at you if they disagree with your choice of character or the way you play, everyone is an asshole and you always end a session feeling just a little bit miserable. There are plenty of videos all over YouTube, where people lose every last ounce of their shit in ranked mode voice chat, even (and particularly) when they're all the way at the bottom of the scoreboard, contributing absolutely fucking nothing. Not how I want to spend my precious spare time. And then Nintendo came along and added the magic words, which make EVERY GAME EVER attractive to me. "But you can play it on the go." Not Overwatch, but the next best thing - Paladins.

My damage is best damage.

When I first heard about Paladins' impending Switch release, I just shrugged at it. So what? Fortnite is on Switch now, runs at 30 FPS, looks about as crappy as the Android version. Doom, whilst super fun on the Switch, struggles a bit performance-wise and, no matter how much I genuinely love it, is a blurry, pixellated mess. The fun gameplay, motion controls and the fact IT'S FUCKING DOOM 2016 IN MY POCKET totally make up for all that, but fuck Paladins with a rake!

Yeah well. Paladins runs at 60 FPS on the Switch. And in docked mode it looks more or less like the Xbox One X version, except at a lower resolution. Seriously, check out the comparison tool over on Eurogamer. Yes, the Switch footage is a little less clear and crisp and a bit fuzzy around the edges, but for a portable hybrid console, this is ridiculously impressive. So I went and downloaded a game for my Switch, which I had absolutely zero interest in five minutes earlier.

And did I mention my horse is amazing?

I've been playing the shit out of this game non-stop ever since. I woke up this morning, stayed in bed, fired up the Switch and played a fast-paced 5on5 multiplayer FPS over the internet IN BED! I play a huge-ass dragon with a rocket launcher, I shoot people in the face, push carts full of explosives into enemy base camps, gain levels, unlock cosmetics and I'm having way too much fun with a game I completely suck at. I can't aim for shit with a controller, I'm still waiting for them to finally implement motion/gyro aiming, but for some reason I just can't stop playing this game all day long. It helps that there's cross-platform play with Xbox users, so there's a large pool of players around no matter what time of day I try to get into a match.

Even my MVP footage is garbage, but I'm having too much fun for it to really bother me.

I won't lie. One reason why I'm enjoying the Switch version so much is the complete lack of text and voice chat, apart from a few canned phrases. The moment they add voice support will probably be the day I remove this game and never look back. But right now it's just good fun and the worst thing that ever happens is when somebody on your team gets salty and decides to go AFK for the duration of a match. It doesn't happen a whole lot, but it happens. Again, just like battlegrounds in an MMO.

The only real downside to Paladins on the Switch is how right now the game is in 'Early Access' and you can only play if you shell out $25 on a founder's pack. Sure, you unlock every current and future champion for life when you buy this thing, but it's a steep asking price for a game that's free2play on every other platform out there. On the plus side, it's also going to go F2P on the Switch this summer if you don't feel like ponying up for a founder's pack. And they might even have gyro aiming by then!

Quake Champions - I Don't Think I Can Handle It

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GTA Online - Still The Greatest Thing Ever Made

We re-visited the ultimate asshole simulator to play the Doomsday Heist. It's insanely good - if you can afford to unlock it or have the patience of a saint.

I can honestly say that I know Los Santos better than I know my own town. I don't need my GPS to get to most places these days. There's Del Perro Pier with the ferris wheel and the rollercoaster. Drive up the road a bit from there and you get to Del Perro Heights, where most of my German heist mates live, because it's the cheapest safehouse you can get as a base of operations for heists. They're not really active anymore these days, but back then we completed all of the heists together several times. I remember spamming C4 all over the parking lot to nuke my friends the moment they'd come out with their cars. Sometimes we'd troll each other with attack helicopters and dick around with them right in front of the windows of the Del Perro apartments. Good times.

You kinda had to be there.

Bit 'round the corner from there is Little Seoul, where Claire's mother owns the shittest apartment in all of Los Santos. It's filthy, you can almost smell the cold smoke from hundreds of cigarettes and permanently-closed windows. Her character is some sort of punky murder hobo. Unlike my high-rolling German friends, she usually gets around on a little pushbike or in some ancient car, bumps into random people at the beach to start brawls between them or sits on random rooftops to watch the police AI glitch out. We don't really play any super challenging content together, but entertain ourselves by piling up lots of cars to watch them chain-explode.

Up north from there you'll come to the Eclipse Towers, where I've got my place with its original interior, before they made it all customizable. You can get to Vinewood Hills from there, which is where Claire lives in what's probably the nicest house you can currently get in the game. I'll always be jealous of that, but I'm not buying any other homes unless they suddenly decide to start selling one of those fakey Malibu Beach houses.
Every corner of this virtual city has some happy memories attached to it, whether we were trying to catapult each other onto the rooftops of random buildings, dropped each other's cars in random swimming pools with cargobobs or crash-landed airplanes right on top of each other in the middle of a busy road. GTA Online has this ridiculously massive assortment of tools, which allow you to be an absolute cunt to all of your online friends, enemies and the virtual citizens of Los Santos. I absolutely love it.

Of course the main reason why we're back on there right now isn't the happy memories or even the joyous torture of friends and loved ones. It's the new Doomsday Heist. Well... by 'new' I mean it was added last year, but we haven't touched it until recently, because gaining access is stupidly expensive and getting to the actual heist content requires even more money or forced online play in public lobbies. So unless you're part of a very active heist team that piles up millions and millions of GTA Dollars, chances are, you're gonna be spending so much money on Shark Cards in order to unlock the new content, you might as well be buying a brand new AAA game. It took me a €45 Megalodon Shark Card to get to all of the good stuff (and skip the annoying public shit). So for all the praise Rockstar get for their "free content updates", they really aren't free at all for anyone but the most dedicated players out there. Because with the ~15k you make in an average mission, you'll be spending the rest of your life grinding out the cash required to unlock all this.

Check out my free new airplane from the free hangar update, which only costs about 40 real life Dollars to unlock!

In order to gain access to the Doomsday Heist content, you need to be either a CEO or the president of a Biker Club, meaning you'll have to buy a company building or a clubhouse. Happy spending! You also need a so-called "facility", a supervillain underground lair of sorts, which is going to set you back another 1.2 million if you go for the absolute cheapest variety with no extras attached. Starting each of the three heist scenarios costs hundreds of thousands in GTA cash. And then there's the prep work. You're gonna have to steal a bunch of vehicles and other gadgets before you can even play the setup missions or the actual heist. Which doesn't sound so bad until you realize this can only be done in a public lobby. And on PC that means constant harassment, trolling and cheaters everywhere.

It's frustrating enough when you're supposed to move a vehicle from one location to another when today's version of GTA has explosive sniper and shotgun ammo, which nukes pretty much anything in a single shot. When you get people constantly caging you, dropping airplanes on your character and remote-nuking you with mod menus, a frustrating, brutally unfair prep mission becomes impossible. The good news is that you can skip all the forced public session crap, if you don't want to put up with this nonsense. The bad news is that doing so costs even more money, meaning the setup to any of these heist scenarios can set you back a million GTA Dollars, meaning you'll earn absolutely fuck all at the end of it. I wasn't joking when I said you'd be spending AAA-game money just to have a chance to play this "free" new content.

All right! So far, 100% of the stuff I've done this update is pay for things. Let's see if it's fun to play.

What you get in return, however, is some of the best content in the entire game and some of the best multiplayer gameplay I've enjoyed in any game for a long while. The whole thing kicks off with cutscenes and voice-acting just like the previous heists and you get to see familiar faces like Lester Crest and one of the FIB guys from previous heists, as well as some creepy over the top Elon Musk knockoff, whose hair is totally natural and he's dating a lot, you guys! The presentation is in every way as good as it was with previous content of this nature, so there's that.

Each of the three heist scenarios comes with its own selection of set-up missions and an actual heist finale, so there's an easy ten or so hours of content here for a first playthrough - more, if you're brave enough to attempt the public free mode prep work. The whole thing is also a bit more flexible than the original heists. Rather than locking you into teams of exactly 4 players (or 2 in case of the Fleeca practice heist), each and every Doomsday mission can be played with 2-4 people. Claire and I did the whole thing as a duo at level 160, which was extremely challenging in places, but doable.

Yay for references from James Bond to Back to the Future!

Almost all of the new missions are incredibly fun to play, not just because you get a whole bunch of new toys to play around with, but also the way in which they are introduced. There's the new DeLorean... sorry, DeLuxo, easily the coolest new addition of the Doomsday Heist update. You start a mission driving around in one of these cars while hacking some armored transports around town. Once the hacking is complete, you get to destroy the transports, which is when the game tells you that your new car can fire a bunch of guided missiles.
Once that's done, your next set of targets is on the water. That's where you get to activate the DeLuxo's hover mode and glide across the waves as you chase after your next set of targets. The mission ultimately takes you to Los Santos Airport, where the DeLuxo's flight mode gets activated. Now you're hacking an airliner with your flying car whilst battling attack helicopters. It looks even more insane than it sounds and it's easily some of the coolest shit I've ever done on there.

At this point I'm not even mad I had to pay for this.

You get to play around with tanks, jetpacks, missile launchers and stealth choppers. There's one mission where a bunch of heavily-armored baddies stalk you with miniguns and a cloaking device, so you need to rely on thermal vision to spot them. There is so much absolutely insane, over the top stuff happening in each Doomsday scenario, that I can easily forgive some of the weaker missions, despite their annoying clown-car mechanics and unfair checkpoints (or lack thereof). But yes, there are some frustrating moments.
There's one mission in particular, which requires you to hack four servers in the largest, most maze-like server room I've ever seen in any game, ever. Infinite enemies spawn everywhere around you, which makes things incredibly fun when you attempt this mission with only two players like we did.

Once you're done with this bit, you get to escape the server room. Players start on opposite ends of the room and fight their way through towards a central staircase, which is absolutely crawling with enemies. They're surrounding the stairs, they're ON the stairs, they're doing a circle-jerk around the very top of the stairs, shooting you from every direction the moment you make it up there. Once you make it out there, you're faced with a dozen or so cop-cars, a swat team and a bunch of helicopters attacking from every single direction. You get one spare life shared between the team. Lose it and if anybody dies at any point during the escape bit, you'll be sent all the way back to the server room.

The server room of doom

There's another mission where you're supposed to find and escort an NPC, who is trapped in a building full of enemies. That alone would be stressful enough, but the other team (or player, if you duo it) has to sit in a remote corner of the map and snipe enemies, which will never stop respawning and eventually overwhelm them if the rescue team takes too long to free the NPC. And this is where some of GTA's more bullshit mechanics really start to show. Each enemy can take as much as 28,429 hits to the body if you don't hit them right in the head. What's worse, they just fall over after every other hit or so, meaning they'll just lie on the floor, usually behind cover, and take for ever to finally get up again, so you get another chance at shooting them in the head. It's insanely frustrating and tedious, but trying to rush past these enemies will get you killed almost instantly. Knocking them over too many times instead of killing them will cost you precious time and get your team mates killed.
It doesn't help that enemy spawns have always been crap in this game. Sometimes you will simply trigger a spawn, causing bad guys to appear literally behind you, who will immediately begin to shoot you before you can react. There's nothing more frustrating than almost completing a mission on the 20th attempt, only to get fucked over by some jerkwad, who magically materialized out of thin air right behind you.

Cutscenes in Doomsday are top-notch.

Of course, flying cars with homing missiles and similar new gadgets also mean that public online mode is now more fucked than it ever has been, with or without hacks. Everything these days has a mounted turret, explosive ammo, drops mines, cluster bombs and napalm. Which is great for those, who simply want a bit of mindless fun and cause as much destruction and mayhem as possible in the process. Personally, I prefer closed sessions, which are restricted to friends and crewmembers. Let's hope that at least some future content will be available in this mode, because forcing public play really isn't all that great.

If you still have friends you play GTA with and you've got what it takes to tackle some of the game's toughest content, then the Doomsday Heist is absolutely worth it, even if you'll likely me forced to shell out a whole bunch of cash just to access it. There's also the fact that, if you complete the heist missions as the leader, you'll get massive discounts on all the new vehicles and toys.
Still, remember the good old days where the most expensive thing you could get was a Zentorno for around 700k and where the entrance fee to a heist was a 200k apartment? Having to spend millions and millions for every little bit of new content simply isn't fun. Sure, people pay for it, myself included, which is why Rockstar are still raking in stupid amounts of cash with this game almost a half decade after release. But I remember when staying up to date with an online game required a cheap subscription and the occasional expansion pack. Keeping up in GTA means spending AAA money with every update these days and I don't like that. If only it wasn't so damn fun!

Warring in Hyrule

Why the fuck is this hot to me?

I don't like the Zelda games very much. I thought Ocarina of Time was absolutely breathtaking for a console game back in the day, but I didn't enjoy it enough to play much further than the water temple. Never touched another Zelda game (save for a bit of Twilight Princess on Dolphin) until Breath of the Wild, which is one of my all-time favourite games. I've completed the story in a matter of days, I've uncovered the entire map, cleared a whole lot of shrines and I still dick around with it on occasion. I've got my cool armor sets, my sexy horse armor on a really pimped-out mount, and I'm still going on weird adventures from time to time. I really love this game.

With that in mind, you can't deny that BotW isn't your typical Zelda game. "Dungeons" are bite-sized, apart from the four beasts, it's all open world and exploration and survival and a bit of Skyrim and a touch of Dark Souls and a lot of stupid breaking weapons and fun and mystery and wonder and I wanna fire it up again right now, just from writing about it.
Not that there's anything wrong with classic Zelda games. They're just not for me. I never completed one, they never kept me hooked long enough, it's just not my kind of game, I suppose. So the fact that I play the absolute shit out of BotW, while it's still Claire's only Zelda game she has never come even close to finishing, does suggest it's really unlike any other game of the series. Good for me. Yay!

And then came Hyrule Warriors. Technically, Hyrule Warriors came years ago, but none of the 36 people around the world who bought a WiiU happen to be me, so I didn't play the original release. I did play it on the 3DS for a while and actually quite enjoyed it, but that version is scaled down so much, I never really took it seriously enough to be more than bathroom entertainment. Look, it's a perfectly servicable version of the game if you want to play it on the go and you don't own a Switch, but the Switch version simply looks and plays a lot better for obvious reasons.

Not the prettiest game on the system, but the massively overpowered main characters are a sight to behold.

To be honest, I really just bought this game on the Switch because I have more money than sense. 2018 has been a bit of a shit year for the console, so far. Dark Souls is getting delayed (and I'm starting to wonder whether or not it'll be released at all at this point), there's a bunch of really shit new indie games (FUCK YOU, $30 Moorhuhn!) Donkey Kong is an overpriced re-release and, if we're being honest, so is Hyrule Warriors. But I just finished Telltale's excellent Batman, WWE2K18 was made completely unplayable by a recent firmware update with no fix in sight, so heyho, let's get something new(ish) already!

I went into Hyrule Warriors as a complete newcomer to all things (classic) Zelda and Dynasty Warriors. I had no clue that Sheik is actually Zelda, I only know Midna from the rule34 archives and I still don't know what fucking game Ghirahim or however the fuck you spell him is from. So most of the game's fan-service is clearly lost on me. But damn, am I having fun!
Hyrule Warriors reminds me of massive MMO-style battlegrounds, where countless players battle back and forth over territory, trying to capture keeps and resources. You do the exact same thing, except you're offline, nobody hides to go AFK and there's no chat where one guy with zero kills and 20 deaths complains about how everyone in his faction is a complete retard. Awesome!

I don't even know most of these characters, but they're all super fun to play.

If there's one thing I dislike about the game, it's the excessive amount of padding. Every level contains a bunch of hidden stuff (read: heart containers) for multiple characters, usually requiring you to beat each mission at least twice. And then twice more on hard mode after you complete the story for the first time, because let's put even more bonus crap everywhere.
One thing I do like, however, is jolly cooperation, so I forced Claire to play the split-screen co-op mode with me. The game becomes significantly easier that way, because we can focus on different goals at the same time, whereas it's easy to get overwhelmed by a million things happening all at once when you play solo. The downside is that Claire now keeps nagging me about wanting to buy the game on her Switch, which makes no sense, because she can just level and gear up her favourite characters on my Switch, where we play together, anyway. Ugh. Goodbye, extra 50 Quid for a re-release.

Hyrule Warriors is a great co-op experience. I can raid an enemy keep while Claire defends our base. She can hunt down a bunch of nasty summoners while I go after Gumblegorf or whatever. Combat is a piss-easy, button-mashing affair. You can give a controller to your fat aunt and ask her to sit on it and wiggle around for a bit and she'll fart out the most amazing combo-attacks, literally wiping out hundreds of enemies all at once. But you need to make decisions, come up with tactics on the spot, prioritize, that sort of thing. Basically, if you're an idiot like me, play with a friend to split the workload or you'll probably feel a bit suffocated by your responsibilities.

Beating up the same enemy hero together is rather satisfying, as well.

We haven't even touched the game's adventure mode, yet, where you can unlock 196 or so costumes, 120ish weapons, another dozen or so additional playable characters and customizable fairies, which can be fed and dressed and all sorts of weird creepy shit I'm gonna leave to Claire, because I don't want to do this. So, if you're the kind of person, who likes to sink hundreds, if not a thousand hours into a single game, this one's definitely for you.
I'm having fun. And now I know a whole bunch of characters from all sorts of Zelda games, as well as remixed theme music and other stuff real fans probably appreciate a lot more than I possibly could. Also, fuck Toon Link.

All praise aside, though - pull your finger out, Nintendo! Charging money for your online service, just because everybody else is doing it, sucks. Enabling cloud saves only as a paid feature sucks even harder. I don't care that it's a relatively small amount of money for a yearly subscription. Something as essential as cloud saving on a portable device, which is prone to damage and theft, simply shouldn't be a paid-only service! And no, adding a bunch of shitty old NES games to the package doesn't justify the price tag. And can we please have some quality control, before more broken, unplayable, hideous shit like Firefighters - The Simulation makes its way to the eShop? No virtual console, but ancient NeoGeo and PS2-era games for up to a tenner a pop, what the fuck? And let's not even get into the hardware exploit, which allows people to run all sorts of homebrew and emulators on their consoles right now, which can only be fixed by a hardware revision, just one year after the console was launched.

Funnily enough, one game that keeps me coming back is still Pokkén Tournament DX. It's the Pokémon fighting game, which I assume attracts toddlers more than anything else, judging by how people play online. Here's the thing, though - the netcode is excellent, I rarely get noticeable lag, there is no input lag whatsoever, opponents are found within 10 seconds or less at all times and the amount of rage-quitting is minimal in ranked matches. How the FUCK can a Pokémon-brawler for kids pull this off, while the online experience in Capcom's Street Fighter V is still such a pile of steaming raw turd?

I am god in a world of toddlers, who suck at videogames.

And you know what? Nuking the absolute shit out of people with a squeaky, annoyingly girly character, who shoots hearts and rainbows and crap, is immensely satisfying. Playing this game makes me grin like the total idiot I am ♥