SWTOR - I Love Zakuul (But it's Stupid)

WARNING: Spoilers!

I have spent the past month completing every single class storyline in SWTOR. Most of them are good, the smuggler storyline is hilarious, the bounty hunter is super badass and the Imperial agent's personal quest is a work of art. I have lied to a target's wife, pretended to be an old friend of the family, cooked dinner with her, then held her hostage and threatened to kill her when my mark came back home. I got married to an alien lady to earn the trust of her people, then abandoned my new family as soon as the job was done. The Imperial agent has no face, no name, no life apart from the roles he assumes for each mission and BioWare have done an incredible job making me feel like a cold-blooded professional in a game, which basically boils down to 'click three things' and 'murder twelve guys' in pretty much every single mission.

He's basically this guy is what I'm saying.

Playing all the class stories before jumping into the latest two expansions is by no means necessary, but you get rewarded with a bunch of cool skills and you get to know each class' companions, some of which play a relatively big part in Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne. It's a lot more awesome to see Vette popping out of a nuclear warhead if you know who the fuck Vette is. It's easier to care about characters you actually know.
So I finished all the classes, completed all the older expansions, while the one thing I really wanted to play, the main reason I decided to give this game another try after a half decade was this:

Awesome though it may be, this new setting is a bit problematic. Aesthetically, the Fallen Empire and its inhabitants look too good. Up to this point, SWTOR used this stylized, almost cartoony look for landscapes and characters throughout the entire game. Characters don't quite look 'Clone Wars', but they have this timeless, comic-esque look about them, much like characters in World of Warcraft.

Looks perfectly alright, but not exactly photorealistic.

SWTOR's hairstyles look like they're made of Play-Doh, beards look drawn-on and many pieces of body armor are simply pixellated textures, tattooed onto the body of your character, because this is a five year old MMO, where people are happy to sacrifice visual quality for the sake of performance. Fast-forward to the game's latest two expansions and the new NPCs are so detailed, you can actually see the pores on their skin, little pimples and imperfections, as well as bump-mapping on clothes, making them look like real fabric and leather.

Skin pores, bumps, freckles - those new NPCs make everyone else look shit, including player characters.

It's not a deal breaker, but it sure feels weird hanging out near all those ridiculously realistic people while my character is this skinny blue alien, who looks like she was molded out of cheap plastic.
Another problem is how they've upped the quality of some character models, but they're still using the same old facial animations to convey emotion. And while that's alright for the cartoony default models, watching the new guys smile or frown takes you right to the uncanny valley, making them look ungodly and terrifying and something that entirely should not be. Awesome!

The other problem lies within the setting itself. In a nutshell, the Emperor, ruler of the Sith Empire, ultimate badguy you had to destroy in the jedi knight's class story, is alive and well. Turns out he has built a whole second empire, married, settled down, made some creepy-ass children and now he's ready to conquer the entire galaxy. In fact, the guy tells you that he hasn't been keen on this whole Sith Empire thing for a while now and he's much more into that whole Eternal Empire gig he's running for the sake of the expansion. Imagine that. The Emperor had two lives, two identities, two empires and he considered this whole sith thing to be little more than a side project. That's a bit shitty all in itself, but it also cheapens just about everything you've worked for if you've played a jedi knight. You're basically going from defeating the Emperor and dealing a crippling blow to one of the most evil factions in Sci-Fi history to 'eh, that was just my alter ego and you've never really done anything, because here's my real empire and we're so much more badass over here'. Gee thanks, BioWare!

Let's not even get into how, by their logic, the Emperor could be running dozens of other secret empires and identities.

So to the surprise of absolutely nobody, there's this whole 'hurrdurr, BioWare ruined Star Wars' thing going on, because the setting was drastically changed, suspension of disbelief is a strong requirement and then there's the fact that the game does what every BioWare game does at some point and that's taking shit away from you.

You get frozen. You get stuck in carbonite for five years. That's a lot of time. All those companions you thought were friends for life are gone, your ship is gone and you're a fugitive in a galaxy where nobody gives a shit about your past heroic deeds. In a way it's pretty clever, because lots of people, myself included, completed their class story when SWTOR came out, then quit the game and stayed away from it for five years, which is when these ridiculously awesome trailers brought people back.

To make things more fun you get the Emperor's ghost stuck in your head, so the guy gets to see and comment on everything you do, constantly trying to influence you. Some of your new companions are loyal to the Emperor, others hate him, so they don't trust each other and most of all, they don't trust you. Those loyal to the Emperor hate you for turning him into a ghost in the first place and those who hate the Emperor, don't trust you, because he's probably manipulating you. And then you find this ridiculously overpowered battleship to replace your old starship.

Let's summarize: all your former allies are gone and assume you're dead, your new companions can't stand you or even each other. Meanwhile, you're aboard your new, super-powerful warship, searching for allies, trying to save the galaxy while the Illusive Man is constantly trying to manip... oops, wrong BioWare franchise! But that's an honest mistake, seeing how the setting of Fallen Empire is essentially Mass Effect 2.
Fortunately for me, I love Mass Effect 2, so I felt right at home. I mean, c'mon! A cool new ship, sexy new allies with real depth and personality and finally a bit of girl on girl action!

We'll bang, okay?

So my character is this righteous jedi knight, who loves to blab about the jedi code in order to take the moral high ground, only to abandon all of that nonsense whenever there's the chance to bone someone. The 'relationships' feel weirder and more forced than in any other BioWare game I've played so far. There's this super-serious sith lady who sends me on a mission and one dialogue option is, "How about a kiss for good luck?"
What follows is this really hot, passionate lesbian kiss from an NPC, who never gave two fucks about my character (figuratively or literally). The scene ends with the NPC telling me 'this is neither the time, nor the place.' Really? Then why were you eating my face just a minute ago and completely out of nowhere?

To be fair, the story sucked me right in from the very beginning and kept me wanting to play non-stop until I had finished the whole thing. There are some really awesome, surprising twists, some of which involve former companions from various classes in the game. So when Scorpio makes her utterly brilliant comeback, the effect becomes that much stronger if you've met her when playing the Imperial agent before.

She's secretly EDI, because all BioWare games are really Mass Effect.

In fact, the story is so good, I played it despite the completely broken difficulty. On the default 'story mode' setting, everything dies in one or two hits, apart from bosses, who have ridiculous amounts of health whilst requiring no strategy and dealing absolutely zero damage to the player.
There is also a 'veteran mode', which makes baddies considerably tougher. So tough, in fact, that apparently many players simply cannot beat certain chapters at all. So you really get to choose from 'too hard' and 'too easy' with absolutely nothing in between these extremes. Great job!

Personally, it didn't bother me much, because I was having too much fun with the plot and I didn't mind just eradicating everything like some kind of super-powerful god, but I can see how some players were frustrated with the awkward balancing. Still, the story ticks all checkboxes you'll expect in a BioWare plot. Twists and turns, sex, betrayal... oh yeah, almost forgot one!

So. Much. Posing.

There's also the inevitable moment where the game brutally murders one of your companions with abolutely zero chance to save him. To add context: at some point the story reunites you with Vette and Torian. And then comes the point where both of them come dangerously close to losing their lives and you can only save one of them.

Vette is a Twi'lek female. She has a vagina. She's got exotic blue skin, a vagina, a quirky sense of humor, a vagina, she's really witty, she's got a vagina and she's this fun, lovable, roguish prankster, who also happens to have a vagina. Then there's Torian, a male. Also a bounty hunter or something. Who cares? Nobody has ever fucking saved him and BioWare put him in what's possibly the most unfair popularity contest in gaming history. It doesn't help that he's simply one of the blandest companions in the entire game. He spouts random gibberish in a made-up language and he likes to cook. Yay. See you at your funeral!

Now type 'Torian' into that search bar and you'll get nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Other checkboxes I would have liked to avoid are 'you cannot defeat the boss yet because we say so' and 'here's a talkie mission where you dress up and don't murder anybody for a half hour'. The former checkbox appears multiple times, putting you into fights with some of the ultimate baddies. You can completely dominate their asses thanks to the broken difficulty, only to be interrupted by a cutscene where the bad guy rams his lightsaber up your gut and/or you get saved by somebody from what appears to be a desperate fight you cannot possibly hope to win in the cutscene.

And the whole 'dress up like a generic soldier to infiltrate the enemy castle' mission wasn't fun or believable when this idea was still new and it certainly isn't in SWTOR. Random guard blocks your way because this room is for guard captains only. So you aimlessly wander about the place, pick up a guard captain's hield and - BOOM! Free passage, because obviously you're a captain now and they don't need proof, identification or anything apart from some random shield, which is just randomly sitting about, waiting to be picked up by anyone. Is this how security works in the so-called Eternal Empire?

"Haha! I'm making Arcann look like a total puss... oh."

Speaking of ultimate baddies. Look, I can totally get behind this whole 'nobody is beyond redemption' jedi philosophy. You know, defeat a main villain, take them to the jedi temple and brainw... err, teach them about love, forgiveness and tolerance until they repent, see the errors of their ways and become good guys. At least until the bad guys take them back and make them evil again. But can I just say that sparing Arcann is dumb?

When Arcann takes over as the new emperor, he attacks five of the core worlds, levels entire cities and murders countless millions. The game also never shows or specifies which planets are under attack or which cities are getting destroyed, because whoa, budget! Whatever happened to 'show, don't tell', BioWare?
This guy commits mass-genocide on a level that would make Hitler say, 'whoa, calm down there, buddy' and when you finally bring him to his knees, his mother gets all, "Nooo, spare him, I know he can change, he is actually a really good kid" and you actually have the option to say, "Eh, what the heck" and let him go.

I bet somewhere down the line, she's gonna turn out to be super friendly, as well.

When you beat up Hitler in an ultimate showdown and he suddenly goes, "Wait! Timeout! I changed my mind! I wanna be on your team now!" You don't just shake his hand, forgive and forget, water under the bridge, he eradicated millions, but he's feeling really sorry about it right now. I forgave my brother when he sold the super-expensive 1st gen boxed edition of World of Warcraft I bought him for Christmas to spend the money on pot. I forgave my cat when she hopped on me while I was watching TV the other night, took a massive piss in my lap and went to sleep like it was nothing. I forgave Claire when she tossed off the pizza guy because we didn't have money for a tip. But you don't invite a guy who murders entire planets into your team, saying, "Yeah, I believe this guy has the potential to become a really good person." At some point you've simply crossed the line, you're an irredeemably bad person and there's no coming back from it. I think you can safely draw that line at a body count in the hundreds of millions.

You gotta slaughter several million innocent eggs to make an omelette.

All my bitching aside, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne tell the most exciting story I have ever experienced in an MMO. The whole thing is so action-packed, full of ridiculously good cutscenes, masterful voice acting and surprise plot twists, I simply couldn't stop playing. Not even the completely broken difficulty balancing or a few overused or plain idiotic story elements could ruin an otherwise breathtaking experience. There's the charismatic Emperor, a guy you so want to trust and have on your side, even though you know he's full of shit and lying to you whenever he speaks. There's the tragic mother, who has to face the fact that she gave birth to the most horrifying space-brats in the known galaxy. There's yet another genocidal assassin droid, who derives such intense, child-like happiness from killing stuff, you just can't get yourself to tell him to stop murdering people.

And then he dies permanently if you aren't a veteran susbcriber.

Sure, you no longer get 8 completely different storylines, based on which class and faction you've picked. And the game is even less of an MMO now than it ever was. I don't care. They've already announced the next chapter of the story, slated to be released this spring. In the meanwhile, I'll be raising galactic command levels by playing any content I want, unlocking raid-quality set gear without being forced to raid. Why can't more MMOs be like that?

Warframe - I'm Breaking Up

Dear Warframe,

stuff like this is never easy, so I'll be blunt and come right out with it: I'm leaving you. I know our 4th anniversary is around the corner and we've been through a lot of stuff together. But over the years you've cared less and less about our relationship and I feel the only thing you are ever really after these days is my money. I should have seen this coming when I saw you hanging out with your weird new friends. I knew Perfect World would be a bad influence on you, but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Big mistake.

You've taken a lot from me during our last year and given very little in return. You've been teasing me with The War Within since July, only to release it months later, at the end of the year. And sure, it was good, but the whole thing lasted less than 90 minutes and introduced questionable new mechanics like Kuva farming and Riven mods, where a bit of rebalancing would have been so much more effective and less frustrating. But you didn't want to tweak your underused, underappreciated weapons. Instead, you've added hundreds of new mods, one per weapon. You can only obtain said mods by completing three challenging endgame missions. The chance for a drop is about 15 percent. It's much more likely you'll give me completely useless rewards instead, insulting me for my time and effort.

-80% damage dealt by my weapon. Now that's a nice endgame upgrade! Thanks!

Let me repeat this: hundreds of weapons. The chance I'll obtain a Riven mod for the weapon I want is 300something to one. After the initial 15% chance to obtain a Riven mod in the first place. One chance per day, if I can beat the three daily Sortie missions. And in the incredibly unlikely event I'll actually get a mod that is relevant to me, it's entirely possible said mod will reduce my weapon damage by up to 120%, effectively healing my enemy when I shoot them!

But what else am I gonna do, apart from farming worthless new mods? It's not like you had any interesting new events or content for me. Your new quest, The Glast Gambit, forced me to play the exact same "pvp with the AI" type of mission six times in a row. You're so painfully aware of your broken, stupid AI, the final mission actually required me to beat the AI by a margin of 10 points or less. Defeating them with any more points than that fails the mission. This is laughably awful game design! The mission objective was literally 'beat the AI, but go easy on them' instead of raising difficulty and giving me competent opponents.

Speaking of forced, faux pvp - remember how you used to say you'd never want to become a pvp game? How you added it anyway and then said you never want pvp to become invasive, be forced on the players who don't care about it? As a direct result, your pvp lobbies are empty, dead, deserted pretty much all the time and we're okay with it. So why did you think it was a good idea to make the tactical Xmas alert pvp only? Sure, murdering one another is totally in the spirit of Christmas, but come on now, what were you thinking?

The warframe on this image is walking away, because symbolism or some shit.

You refer to me as a loser. And you're probably right, because you're charging me up to ten freaking Dollars for a fucking skin or a new cape. Your current Prime Access Package costs 70 Dollars. If I want Nidus, your newest Warframe, the cheapest variant costs me a whopping 13 Dollars. You know what else I can get with 13 Dollars? A whole month of World of Warcraft, SWTOR or any other MMO that doesn't charge me an arm and a leg on top of that monthly fee.

I used to defend you, speak up for you, tell people you're one of the fairest Free2Play games out there in my reviews. Because you used to be. If I wanted a new warframe, all I had to do is farm a certain boss for a little while, wait 72 hours to craft my reward and I was good to go. I could skip these steps by throwing a bit of cash at you if I wanted to. But you've lowered the drop rates, made it ever more difficult to even reach the missions where new warframe parts drop, raised the crafting resource cost to levels where it's simply impossible for most players to ever get their hands on the new stuff unless they buy it with real money.

Making all your favourite MMOs shit.

I used to like Free2Play. There were some black sheep, sure, but this model used to be an affordable alternative to subscription-based games. Today, getting all the new content on Warframe requires me to spend AAA-money every other month. Add a new skin, a bit of premium currency for boosters and I've spent so much, the same amount of money would have bought me Battlefield and Titanfall 2. My friends are playing these games right now. And I can't join them, because of you. Because I'm playing Warframe. Alone. And you've taken all of my money.

I'm done. As a matter of fact, I'm already seeing someone else. For the past couple of weeks I've been with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Sure, SWTOR ain't as pretty as she used to be and even her flashy new trailers aren't enough to turn many heads these days. But you know what? SWTOR lets me do what I want. SWTOR gives me endgame, gives me all the content, all the story, everything there is for 13 Dollars a month. Heck, I can still go there even if I can't pay up and do most of the stuff I like. With you, 13 Dollars are merely enough to buy me a booster or two, which I desperately need, because you think it's great game design when I'm forced to level up every single weapon up to eight freaking times!

SWTOR doesn't hide the action underneath an ever-increasing amount of particle effects, either.

Speaking of endgame: SWTOR lets me get powerful gear when I complete its story and clear the content. It rewards me and gives me a chance to obtain the best stuff in the game. It doesn't care whether I play solo instances, raid content or space battles. I do what I want and get neat items as a reward.

Meanwhile, your brand new endgame mission type, Infested Salvage, grants me the exact same mods, resources and rewards I've been getting in level 10 missions all over the game for the past four years. I have to complete every single story mission, clear every space junction, be content-clear in order to even start an Infested Salvage and you throw worthless, meaningless rewards at me, which I can obtain just about everywhere else in the game. Sure, I just might luck out and get one crafting component for a new Warframe (14% chance) if I stay for 20 minutes. But I need three different ones of those. Plus a massive amount of rare resources. This isn't fun. This isn't entertaining. I'm doing my fucking taxes here, Warframe.

Will I spend my next four years with SWTOR now? Of course not. It's just a fun little fling, we're not ready for a commitment. But I'll be seeing lots of other games. Play with my friends. Try new stuff. Because I'm done throwing all my money at you and pretending you're really not taking that much from me. Over the past year you've added almost zero content, but you've steadily raised prices, offered more premium packages than ever before and created artificial scarcity by arbitrarily putting items in the 'Prime Vault', making it entirely impossible to get certain weapons and frames, unless you pay for them. This isn't fair, it's not fun and it sure as fuck isn't Free2Play. Now, if you'll excue me... I've got a galaxy to save. Far, far away.

Tolerating SWTOR

I hate MMORPGs. I quit WoW once and for all the moment the community shifted from spamming cringeworthy Chuck Norris jokes to simply posting 'anal' followed by the name of an item or a skill. Anal [Raging Blow]. Fucking hilarious. And followed by dozens of people trying to be even more inventive and disgusting than the last. It's a pretty stupid thing to get annoyed at, but between that, a naked weirdo named Pwnerizer dancing naked on a mailbox and a bunch of level-capped guys in full raid gear camping around your corpse to gank you over and over again, I have found that other players tend to harm my immersion more than help it.

Then there's this whole forced 'endgame' nonsense. Repeat the same content dozens of times in order to obtain gear, which will become useless as soon as the next content update goes live. Mostly in order to impress a bunch of people you hate, who will inspect you, judge you and know every tiny detail about your character, whether you like it or not. The item treadmill, the carrot on the stick, the big motivator to keep a bunch of idiots attached to a game for as long as possible. And yes, I believe you have to be a bit of an idiot if you manage to spend all of your spare time in a single game for several years, always doing the same thing without getting bored of it, never trying anything new.

Azeroth. Where the community's greatest morons are celebrated as legends.

The reason why I hated Star Wars: The old Republic in particular is my job. I had to play this game 12+ hours a day, reach the level cap within a few days, then write up 30something pages about how and why you should play a Sith Warrior. Back then the game was basically WoW with lightsabers and a lot more talking. People who wanted a good BioWare RPG hated it for its MMO aspects, people who wanted a good MMO hated it for all the forced solo stuff and the inflated stories around every boring fetch quest. It was the perfect compromise - combine the worst of both worlds and annoy the shit out of the entire playerbase.

We were about a dozen people back then, one for each of the eight classes, as well as a bunch of extra guys tagging along, because heyho. The deadline was brutal, the server queues took several hours every day before we could even log on and after a while we all hated each other. My boss threw several massive bitchfits at me until we ended up on opposite teams in pvp and I murdered the fuck out of him again and again. My team lost by a mile, because killing people wasn't the main objective and of course he called me out on it, but it felt good at the time. We've always been cool around each other, but ridiculous amounts of pressure can make people go psycho.

"What dark side corruption? It's a skin condition and I'd appreciate if you could stop bringing it up!"

By the time my first character was done and the guides were written, I couldn't even look at the game anymore. Which was weird, because being able to 'just play' was my motivation. Just finish the damn guide, get this over with, then I can finally enjoy the game, take my time and just do what I want. But I simply couldn't stand another 10 minute conversation before every simple kill or fetch quest. Not another corridor full of awkwardly-placed baddies, which always attacked in groups of three at a time. I was done.

That was half a decade ago. Then I had to get my first smartphone ever, because of work. Yes, in 2017! And that damn thing plays Knights of the Old Republic! My last mobile phone played fucking Snake! So I dicked around on KotOR for a bit, enjoyed the nostalgia, whilst hating how poorly that game and its sequel have aged. Containers play a five second animation before they open, forcing open a lock forces me to watch my character attack a door for 30 seconds and missing most of the time, main protagonist is the only character without a voice, yada, yada, yada. Meanwhile, SWTOR had reminded me that it's still a thing with some badass trailers. I mean, just look at this shit:

In German, SWTOR KOTET literally means 'SWTOR is pooping'.

So I downloaded the game again and the first thing I had to do was rename every single one of my characters. I think it's okay to take away the names of inactive users, but you try and find a unique new name in a five year old MMO, which had undergone a ton of server consolidations. 

To be fair, the Star Wars universe probably doesn't even know what a wolf is.

Each of my characters also had about 16 messages in their mailbox. Anniversary presents, free pets, fireworks and other tat. I also received a bunch of generic companion clothing. The attached letter said there had been a problem with that. And what do you know, I found most of my companions without pants on, so now I could spend an hour playing dress-up with the lot of them. I also had a ton of free outfits and other stuff for Galactic Starfighter, a new pvp mode, which had been added and left to rot in my absence. I genuinely queued up for it and waited a half hour or so, but nothing ever happened.

In fact, the entire game felt a bit dead. I bumped into three other players in the Republic's main hub, two of which were lowbie characters, the third guy was labelled a 'legendary player' who was just posing with his lightsaber out like he was in Ironforge and there were any players around to actually see him. Inspecting people reveals their achievements, so you can still laugh at them for not completing any raids, but you can't see their gear, which I like. 

You don't have to be epic. Just hot.

So after a frustrating hour or two of sifting through tons of shit in my inventory, obligatory respecs and figuring out how stuff works, I decided to finally go and complete my Jedi Knight's story. As a subscriber you can now just play one story mission after another and receive enough experience to keep on leveling up without having to play all of the boring MMO filler crap in between the good bits. How weird is that? You skip 90% of each planet, hours upon hours of dialogue, monsters and mini dungeons somebody had to create for this game to have content and you can ignore all of it. Somebody at BioWare actually must have said, "Our shit is so boring, people don't want to touch it. So let's allow them to skip it."

I went from level 37 to 50 and a completed class storyline in a day. And that was okay, because the story was actually really, seriously good. Sure, all of the fighting was still incredibly repetitive, boring, outdated MMO-combat, especially since SWTOR suffers from ability cancer. I just don't like it when a game slowly but surely fills an entire three or more hotbars with shit. Here, have two interrupt attacks with a long cooldown instead of a single quick one. Have two different AoEs, one strong and with a long cooldown and a weak one with a short cooldown. Have a quick resource builder that generates a low amount of power and a slow one, which generates more power. Why do game designers still put multiple different attacks with the exact same effect in their MMOs? Combat doesn't get any more strategic or complex that way. You just get more buttons and shit gets tedious.

Not fun.

Despite being a goodie-goodie Jedi Knight, my character could force-choke bad guys to death, thanks to the game's legacy system and my completed Sith Warrior storyline. Completing the story of any class will grant a heroic ability to all your other characters on the same server. That's pretty cool and really motivates me to complete the stories of some of the other classes, allowing me to unlock more and more heroic abilities. And now that I can just enjoy the story missions and skip all of the filler crap, I don't even have to force myself to do it.

As for the new content - no idea, haven't even tried it. From what I've heard, the current new story expansion is in every way as epic and exciting as any BioWare RPG, but story mode difficulty is laughably easy, yet Veteran difficulty is downright impossible to most players. And that's a step up from the previous story expansion, where total joke difficulty was the only option. I'm still gonna play it eventually to experience the story, but right now I just want to catch up on the class stories I had missed out on since launch.

I'm having fun. I never run into other players outside of the main hubs, which are also ghost towns most of the time. I can't tell whether it's just my server or whether the game is simply deserted. General chat is dead, save for the incessant gold spam you get in every poorly-moderated MMO. I turned it off. Companions are now ridiculously OP and most Flashpoints (read: dungeons) have a solo mode now, so fuck all the other players, if they really exist.

Ironically, my favourite thing about SWTOR is its low subscription fee of 9 Quid (or 13 USD or whatever). I used to hate shit like that, but when I see how Warframe releases new premium packages every month, ranging from 20 to 130 Quid, as well as all the overpriced skins, costumes and premium tokens you get in all those other 'free' games out there, 9 Quid for everything seems pretty damn reasonable all of a sudden. Yes, apparently there are paid lockboxes, which randomly contain ultra rare shit like crossbar lightsabers. You can't obtain those any other way and that's a bit awful. But it's only fluff, while you can get all of the character story content for free if you're willing to live with a few restrictions. 

Starbound is the better Terraria

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.

Vacation Simulator

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.

Pokémoron

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.

Watch_Dongs

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.