Lurker > Evillordexdeath

Bump, haven't been in the best state the last little while. I'll try and get back to this soon.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

BetrayedTangy posted...

I think it's because the first time you fight them you get destroyed, but as you continue and understand the strategy, it's really easy to gain respect and admiration of the boss design. Plus things like their appearance, setting and music are all phenomenal.

I think the reason they're so memorable is both this and their role in the story. They're the last challenge you face to prove you're worthy of the Lordvessel, which opens up the game so much, so they stick in people's minds because they feel like a tough roadblock at a defining moment in your journey.

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My next step was to head back into the Darkroot Basin and then the Valley of the Drakes. It's true - there's not much to the place except a few shortcuts to other areas and a giant undead dragon who breathes poison at you. He drops a short sword that scales with faith, which might make a nice secondary weapon because I've been levelling faith so I can throw lightning bolts, and after a couple failed attempts at fighting the dragon close up that's exactly how I brought him down - I did just enough damage to kill him from afar by using all of my charges of Lightning Spear.

Back in Darkroot, I cleaned up a few side objectives I was too low level for earlier, taking down the Hydra and the undead Havel, and then I forked over 20,000 souls for the Crest of Artorias to unlock the rest of the area. Darkroot has an expansive back-yard full of bandits based on the player's starting classes, ents, and roly-poly Chesire Cats, but you don't need to wander around too much - the only mandatory goal is the gate leading to the grave of Sir Artorias. Incidentally, one of those Chesire Cats can talk, and offered me to join her covenant. I said no out of loyalty to the Warriors of Sunlight, and she called me (and I don't think I'll ever forget these words,) a pernicious caitiff.

The grave is guarded by Sif, the Great Grey Wolf, who was Artorias' travelling companion when he was alive. She's not called "great" for nothing - she's around twice your character's height on all fours and wields a giant sword in her mouth. It's easy to feel bad about having to kill Sif - she's just protecting the memory of her master at the end of the day - but there's no avoiding it, and I take her down on the first try. Once she's gone, I can pick up Artorias' Ring from the grave, opening up the way to the Abyss.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

Sorry about the inactivity for the last couple weeks. I've been in one of those strange moods I get into every now and again where I become preoccupied with the inevitability of death and wonder if I'm making the most of my life. I felt it was important to acknowledge that mood and ride it out naturally, which made me a little too morose for much gaming.

ctesjbuvf posted...

My playtime took a solid hit when the blueray reader of my PS3 stopped working properly. I have borrowed a friend's PS3 while I look to fix the issue.

Ouch, that's rough. If you haven't started your new file yet, or you're early enough that you don't mind restarting, one thing that will help you get back faster is to pick the Master Key as your gift at the start of the game. It lets you go through the elevator in New Londo (down the stairs at Firelink Shrine) and take a shortcut through Blighttown that essentially skips the majority of that area.

pezzicle posted...

i still remember beating Ornstein and Smough on my first try and just putting the control down and being like

wat

it was hard as heck and i almost died like 10 times but i somehow did it first try and i was very happy with myself.

Yeah, that's definitely one Hell of an achievement as far as Dark Souls goes. I've only heard of a couple people taking them out on the very first try. It makes me feel a little inadequate considering I still almost always have to summon against them.

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Once you're through the window and inside the palace of Anor Londo itself, you're past the hard part of exploring the area. You're not at risk of falling off narrow ledges any more, you just have to wander around indoors and fight a Silver Knight here and there - another enemy type I have no effective recourse against except parrying, which still makes me feel like the Iaito isn't that great. There are also a surprising number of mimics in this area. There's a hidden basement where I pick up Havel's armor and the Dragon Tooth, which is the speedrunner's weapon of choice. Taking on one Silver Knight at a time is no big deal, but there's a room with three of them in close proximity that you have to clear out to give Siegmeyer a hand. I've had a lot of trouble beating that part in the past, but this time around I managed to aggro them one at a time and beat it on the first go. There's one knight right in front of the door who attacked me on his own, and then I tossed a throwing knife at one of the two remaining knights to make him mad without alerting his friend. There's a Titanite Demon in the castle's church with high stats who's also tough to deal with because he's in a small room where there's not much space to get around him. It took a few tries to deal with this guy.

When I came back to Firelink Shrine after taking out Quelaag, the Fire Keeper there was dead. Examining her body yields the Black Eye Orb, which lets you invade a guilty player's world. The Black Eye orb finally reacts in the giant entry hall of Anor Londo, and takes you to the world of Knight Lautrec of Carim - the guy I let out of his prison cell back in Undead Parish. He makes a hard opponent mainly because he has two friends:a knight with a shield and spear, and a long-range caster. I manage to take out the caster straight away and then run around the area trying to separate Lautrec and the knight until I can take the latter down. Just to make things even harder, you can't use Estus Flask while you're invading. I have the heal miracle, but its animation is so long that it's almost impossible to use in a fight. Once Lautrec goes down you recover the Fire Keeper's Soul. It can be used like any other to enhance your Estus Flask or you can actually revive the Firelink keeper, which is handy because the bonfire there goes out without her around.

Anyway, with all that squared away there's not much left to do here except take on the boss. I don't know if this boss is the best one in the game, but if some very strange man put a gun to my head and demanded that I name a Dark Souls boss, the next words out of my mouth would almost definitely be "Ornstein and Smough." These guys are a nightmare, mainly because you have to fight them both at once. They're definitely the hardest boss in the game, and can represent a major roadblock to a lot of people's playthroughs. They're both designed with a gap-closer type of attack that they'll use if they're far away from you, which makes it hard to isolate just one and fight him alone. You have to watch both of their attack telegraphs at once, they can cover each other's moments of vulnerability, and they can even combo you with if one guy knocks you into hit-stun just as the other is winding up to attack. On my first few attempts this playthrough I didn't land more than two hits on either character, but after a few tries I managed to get Ornstein most of the way down before they finished me off. After that, I popped a twin humanities, kindled the bonfire, and summoned Solaire.

Now, the problem with summoning Solaire for Ornstein and Smough is that his AI can get caught up fighting the cleric knight statues outside of the boss room. A player will know to just run past these guys, but for Solaire's safety I had to clear them out before I summoned him. They have lots of health, giant shields that block all damage, hard-hitting attacks, are hard to aggro one at a time, and they can use Miracles. They have a high-damage version of Force (an AOE proximity attack) and if you're not careful they can heal. I came frighteningly close to dying to these two and losing my chance to summon, and I had to spend all my Heal casts and a couple Estus flasks before even engaging the boss.

But after that things actually went quite smoothly. I managed to get Smough to fight Solaire while I took on Ornstein, who was no big deal on his own. The fight turned into more of a race where I had to defeat Ornstein before Smough knocked out Solaire, which I managed with enough wiggle room that Solaire also survived the ensuing fight against Super Smough.

Whichever of the two you take out first, the surviving boss absorbs his strength and powers up. Tactically, it's best to kill Ornstein first because he becomes giant on his own, and since he's already the faster and more agile boss he's hard to deal with when he has a lot of extra oomph to his attacks. Smough remains more or less the same except he gets a really dangerous lightning jump attack. I was lucky enough that he just didn't use that in my attempt, so Solaire's cooperation turned an insanely tough boss into a relatively easy battle.

What Ornstein and Smough were guarding was the throne room where Guinevere, who self-describes as the daughter of Lord Gwyn and therefore the Queen of Sunlight, is waiting. She gives you the Lordvessel and consequently the ability to teleport between select bonfires and urges you to succeed her father, just like Frampt asked. This is the point where the game really opens up in terms of exploration. For my part, I teleported back to the Sunlight Shrine at Undead Parish and talked to Solaire there. He let my join the Warriors of Sunlight, a co-op focused Covenant that I won't be able to make much use of since I'm playing offline, but at least it lets me toss lightning bolts at people.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Tried the Spanish out, not one of the factions I liked playing as the most. BTW I'm playing the Definitive Edition.

Yes, I tried the Turks and didn't really like the "feel" of the Gunpowder units, so I imagine I'd have similar issues with the Spanish.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Blighttown is easily my least favorite place of the game so far, but it's honestly mostly because for some reason it runs at less FPS than any other place, which adds an unintended level of difficulty that is not really offset by anything.

Yeah, I don't really know why it has those FPS issues, but it's definitely one of a couple areas you just want to get out of. I completely forgot about Griggs until I read your post, lol - luckily I could still go back and find him, which was the first thing I did when I played last night.

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Sen's Fortress is another one of those areas you kind of just want to get through. I remember having a Hell of a time with it the first time around, then managing a lot better on all my subsequent playthroughs because I had a good idea of where the traps were and how to navigate it. This time around, though, I had forgotten enough of the specifics to lose a few frustrating lives to arrow traps and getting knocked off narrow bridges. One of the trickiest parts comes early on when you have to cross a bridge lined with whirling axes while a snake woman fires lightning bolts at you. The first time I tried this part, I blocked one spell with my shield, which knocked me backward into an axe and then off the bridge to my death. If you can survive the fall damage, there's a tar-filled floor in this area with a titanite demon and some items, but I chose not to explore that section of the castle myself.

For my build, even the enemies in this area were far from trivial. The man-snake enemies could kill me in 2-3 hits and my wimpy katana couldn't stagger or kill them all that effectively. I ended up having to rely extensively on parrying to take them out, especially the ones in narrow hallways or on bridges where I didn't have room to maneuver around and backstab them.

There's also a device that shoots boulders throughout the castle that can cause you a lot of trouble. It's just about mandatory to sprint at the right timing to get between these on two occasions. You probably have to undress if you're in the "fat roll" level of equipment weight for this part. The first time in an open area is not that bad, but the second time is in a very constrained hallway with no alcoves or anything to hide from the rocks in. I found the best way to approach this was to wait for a boulder to pass, run down to the bottom of the room, and take the elevator up there to the top - though the elevator is also trapped and can raise you into a ceiling full of spikes if you take too long stepping off. In the same room as this elevator is the game's first mimic, which in line with Dark Souls' tendency for cruelty will just about instant-kill you if you try to open it. You can check if any chest is a mimic just by attacking it, but they're also distinguishable by the chains attached to the chest. A real chest will have a chain neatly curved into a near-circle while a mimic's takes more of a squiggly-line shape. Either way, at the top of the elevator is a crank you can turn to manipulate where the boulders go - you can also reach this room by running up toward where the boulders come from, but I would always get crushed if I tried that. You can move it so the rocks fire into empty space, which is necessary to progress Siegmeyer's NPC questline, and you can also redirect them to break down one of the fortress walls, which opens up an area where you can rescue Big Hat Logan from a cage once you have a key from later on in the dungeon (or the master key.) You will definitely want to rescue the guy if you're leveling intelligence, since he teaches most of the best sorceries.

There's a semi-hidden bonfire on top of the castle that you have to drop off the wall in the right place to reach, and you can jump across a broken bridge to find an NPC vendor and the path to the cage key. I bought the onion helmet from the guy and wore it for the next little while.

The boss here is the Iron Golem, a giant living suit of armor. He's more or less your prototypical giant boss - he hits hard but he's really sluggish, so he's easy to dodge and wail on between his attacks. I only died once against him, by accidentally falling off the cliffs in his arena - and incidentally you can knock him off too! I didn't take that route though, I just very slowly scratched him down with my sword, which unsurprisingly did very little damage. There are actually different physical damage types in this game, so you'll take down the Golem faster with a hammer or club than with a sword even if the stats are similar.

With the Golem down, some helpful demons pick you up and fly you over the walls to Anor Londo. My goal for the night was to make it to the bonfire with Solaire around halfway through this area. To get there, I had to fight through the Gargoyles from the Undead Parish boss fight (I cut one of their tails off this time,) the same demons that carried me there in the first place, the agile painting guardians on the narrow rooftops (which sometimes just fall off and die before they bother you. I parried against the others to be safe.) and one of the roughest sequences in the whole game, where you have to run along the rafters, at risk of falling off, while two silver knights fire on you with huge arrows that knock you back by miles. This part of the game caused a lot of gamer rage when I first played it, but I managed it on my first try this time, so not all my skills have atrophied over the years. You mostly just run for it without stopping for a second and then parry the silver knight to the right, who is blocking your way to the bonfire. I don't even kill him in a single parry with the Iaito, but he fell off the ledge after he stood back up when I parried him, so I was home free for a relieving bonfire and a rendezvous with Solaire.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

The daughters of chaos make a decent place to start talking about the lore in this game and how it's conveyed. After you take out Quelaag, you get her soul as an inventory item, and the description tells you that she's one of the daughters of the Witch of Izalith from the intro, one of the four great lords of old, but that she has now transformed into a Chaos Demon. If you do happen upon the secret room where the Fair Lady is hidden, and you have the Old Witch's Ring, you get her dialog that indicates Quelaag was taking care of her. You can also join her covenant and become a Servant of Chaos, whose ranks you can move up through by feeding humanity to the Fair Lady, which in turn implies the reason Quelaag attacks you - like the red spirits of other players that invade you, she's trying to attack undead to take their Humanity, but she's doing that to help her sister. You as the player can't get through the game without killing Quelaag, but you can replace that part of her role if you want.

Going further ahead, I made my way to the Demon Ruins, which is so flooded with lava that it's impossible to proceed - however you can go through a fog door and find another boss, who goes by the euphemistic-sounding name of Ceaseless Discharge. He's a giant, sad-looking lava demon. He won't attack you unless you hit him first - he will just stand by an altar and pay you no mind. If you loot the corpse on that altar, though, then Ceaseless Discharge will attack, and he'll be permanently aggressive any time you come back. The corpse is carrying the Gold-Hemmed Black set, and the description for that says it belonged to Quelana, the inventor of pyromancy and another daughter of the Witch of Izalith. Obviously that strongly implies that she was important to Ceaseless Discharge in some way - but that's as much as you can find out right now. I didn't take out CD. It's not necessary until later and I was doing just as little damage to him as I was to Quelaag, so I just high-tailed it out of Blighttown, through the exit to the Valley of Drakes and then New Londo and back to Firelink Shrine.

The pool of water at the shrine itself was now drained away because the floor had opened forward like a stone door, and a giant goat-headed snake was reaching up through the space. He introduced himself as the Primordial Serpent, Kingseeker Frampt, and told my character that because he had rang the Bell of Awakening, it was his destiny to succeed Gwyn, which would require him to go through Sen's Fortress to get something called the Lordvessel. That sounds like a sweet deal, so that was where I went next - stopping on the way to visit the blacksmith and buy a repairbox this time.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

ctesjbuvf posted...

Thinking about how the hub is a weird area I wander around a bit exploring. This ends up getting me back to the tutorial area. Theres a new boss here and its without a doubt the least fun boss in the game so far. It just seems cheap. I mightve gone here early, but due to the stun and damage from the fall it seems like theres a small chance that I just dont get to try for real depending on what attack it chooses to use first, which just sucks.

Yeah, I'd say you went there a little early - the item you get for taking down that boss doesn't come in handy until almost the end of the game - but either way I agree it's a poorly-designed boss anyway, and it doesn't really help that it reuses the model of an earlier boss.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Also, this was my first time using an Eastern European civ and the building art is magnificent! I'll have Exdeath know that according to a leak, Age of Empires IV has the Rus as one of the eight playable factions instead of grouping a bunch of Eastern Europeans together as "Slavs".

Cool, I'll have my main. One of the only campaigns I started in Crusader Kings II was as the Kievan Rus'. Actually I did finally get around to playing a couple games in AoEII the other day. I didn't have the DLC that unlocks the Slavs (since it turns out their units do at least speak Russian,) so I settled on the Teutons. I found out that the AI will never really seriously attack your base on the lowest two difficulties so you can just do whatever you want, whether it's spamming villagers early on and not bothering to build army or defenses or just playing really lazily like I did by getting to the castle age, putting out a huge army of Teutonic Knights, and then just selecting them all at once and right-clicking in the direction of the enemy base. I was trying to get to grips with what all the different buildings do and what the general build path should be, so I needed a really simple undemanding strategy. Whenever I play next I'll do a few more games like that for practice and then bump up the difficulty.

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I played so late last night that I wound up passing out without being able to do a write-up, though I made comparatively little progress in all that time. When I started I was about to head into Blighttown, which both for the characters in this game and the players is one of the most dreaded areas in the game. In lore even the people who live in The Depths, which again is basically a sewer, built a massive gate to avoid any contact with Blighttown. The place a dark poison chasm that leads down for miles. You have to deal with giant mutants, rickety architecture where it's easy to slip off and fall to your death, low visibility, and blowgun-wielding little men who stick you with the toxic status from long range, which is an extremely fast-acting poison that you need a rare/expensive type of purple moss to cure, though thankfully those guys don't respawn. It's also one of the most confusingly laid out areas in the game where it's hard to get your bearings, and waiting at the bottom of it is a massive open bog that you can only trudge through very slowly and that poisons you if you stay inside for more than a few seconds. The bonfire here can be almost impossible to find unless you know exactly where to look, since it's hidden in a little corner of a huge area with no real landmarks, and I died a few times by running lost through the swamp slowly dying of poison until some enemy or other finished me off.

I managed to get myself in a really rough situation because I had neglected to buy the weapon repairbox that lets you restore weapon durability at bonfires. Normally weapon durability is an almost irrelevant mechanic that only really serves as an ammo system for a few unique weapons that have magic attacks, but the Uchigatana also has really low durability and was running low by the time I got into blighttown. I didn't want to walk all the way back through the depths to repair it, so I picked up the unupgraded Iaito that you can find by doing a slightly-tricky jump near the start of the area and used that for the whole of blighttown. The Iaito is identical to the Uchigatana in stats and scaling, but since it was brand new while my Uchi was +5 that meant taking a big hit to my damage output already. The difference between the two swords is entirely down to their R2 attacks. The Uchi has a slow stab while the Iaito has a slow charge. I almost never used the stab but found a few times where the charge was handy, so I'll be favouring the Iaito from now on. Either way, by the time I reached the bottom of blighttown, with a good few deaths under my belt, the Iaito was almost worn down too and I had to switch to the Falchion, which was the weapon I used in endgame in my very first playthrough. I had been saving my Uchigatana durability for the boss, Quelaag (a half-human, half-spider woman) - but when I reached her I found out that even that weapon took away 49 of her 3000+ HP per swing. Meanwhile she could practically blow me up with one shot, and I would always start the fight poisoned to boot because of the aforementioned swamp which I had used up all my purple moss wandering through looking for the bonfire. I used to know how to locate it relative to the Boss' Domain, but I can't remember any more. It's to the immediate right when you come off the scaffold structure of blighttown and into the bog.

So that was all pretty disheartening. Blighttown is designed to be a tough area to get out of, so I didn't want to go back to fix my weapons or level, or buy new moss, but the stat disparity made the boss seem way too daunting. I even thought about restarting a completely new character to come back to blighttown better prepared, but in the end I persevered and managed to slowly chip Quelaag down in a Monster Hunter-length boss encounter. My one saving grace is that overall Quelaag's attacks aren't too hard to dodge. If you're standing in front of her, her human half will use some slow sword moves on you, and her spider half will often sit still to bellow magma around the area, which gives you a long opportunity to attack, though it leaves the magma on the ground for a long time. The main thing you have to watch out for is her AOE magic burst attack, which does a ton of damage - if you're backed up against a wall or trapped by the lava it can be tough to get away in time. It was this attack that caused most of my deaths since it could usually finish me off after a small amount of poison damage.

But I did finally win in the end, and I rang the second Bell of Awakening, which in the far distance opened up the gate past Undead Parish. I went down further into Quelaag's Domain and took down an illusory wall, where one of the spider-egg covered mutants that lie around the demon's nest was guarding a hall. I talked to him and told him I was the new servant and he let me pass and speak to "The Fair Lady," a pale-haired spider-girl like Quelaag, but too sick to move. Since I was still wearing the Old Witch's Ring, I could speak to the Fair Lady, who, blind and delirious from illness, assumed my character was her sister.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

Played a little further tonight - the main thing that's been keeping me away from the game is that circumstances are such that I can only really play it at night, but I've been feeling really tired by the time it's late enough.

I stopped working through the tougher optional areas and went down to lower Undead Burg - although I did stop to kill the Black Knight in Undead Burg and pick up the Blue Tearstone Ring that's behind him, which boosts your defense a little when you're low on health. It's not the strongest accessory in the game, but I did save my life at one point when I survived getting grabbed by one of the ceiling-huggers in the depths with a tiny sliver of health.

Lower Undead Burg is the rough part of the neighborhood, swarming with thieves and vicious dogs. The dogs can run around rather fast which can make them tough to lock down. I had a longer duel with one where we both spent a while trying to attack without managing to hit the other. The thieves set a particularly devious trap where they hide in closed buildings until you're in the middle of them and then rush out the doors and surround you - that killed me the first time I played this, so I never forgot it. That's not the only trick they have either. They also pull the classic "hide behind a corner and jump you when you walk by" trick.

Capra Demon is the boss of lower Undead Burg and you need to take him down to get the key to the next area. He's not too scary on his own, being only a little taller than the player character and having a small health bar and attacks you can potentially block, but he starts the fight with two dogs. It's easy to get overwhelmed and taken down in just a few seconds, but the trick to the fight is just to take out the dogs ASAP and then focus on the now-isolated boss.

Next up are the depths, which are essentially the sewer level of this game and probably one of the areas I like the least. There are still lots of dogs here, along with giant rats, brutish butchers (one of which is planning on making a snack out of the Pyromancer NPC, Laurentius of the Great Swamp,) and these goo monsters that stick to the ceilings and drop down on you if you aren't careful. They're really non-threatening once they're on the ground, but they take a while to kill so I sometimes just walk past them. There's one ultra-giant rat which I killed by finding the path to the area above it and then dropping onto it with a plunging attack. I also ran into Domhall of Zena, a collector of oddities that I've always found a little annoying, and bought his helmet despite the exorbitant price because it looks kind of funny.

Now the boss of The Depths is Gaping Dragon, who has a really excellent creature design but doesn't play all that well. Thanks to some lucky humanity drops I summoned Solaire for my first attempt, but he got taken down pretty quickly leaving me along to deal with a version of the boss with padded HP, and then it took me down with one surprisingly-strong swing of its tail. The second time I went it alone and focused on cutting off its tail for revenge, which also got me the Dragon King's Greataxe - a weapon I will never be able to use because it requires 50 strength. With its tail gone, it becomes quite safe to stand behind the dragon, but its attack patterns just tend to be awkward and not that threatening in general. If you lock on to Gaping Dragon, the camera will fixate on his middle instead of the areas you actually need to watch because of his very long body, so he's the one boss that I recommend fighting without the camera lock-on. Once he was down I got a ton of souls, so I went and leveled up and then called it a night.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

After you meet Solaire, there's a long ominous bridge guarded by the Hellkite Wyvern which is one of the most powerful monsters in the entire game. He will douse the entire bridge in flame every few seconds which makes it hard to cross. You can take the path underneath the bridge to get around him, but it is actually possible to run past him if you bait him into flying over to you and then making a break for it right as he does, and I always do it this way because it lets you access a bonfire you couldn't reach otherwise. I was still human at this point so I kindled this bonfire too. Just past that point there's a giant metal pig which is one of the few enemies in the game who does not respawn, although that's kind of a shame because he has a low chance to drop his head as a helmet, which is a funny looking item, especially if your character isn't wearing anything else except the pig helmet. I wasn't lucky enough to get it this time around. The pig is pretty much invincible to everything except the backstab, but there's also an item in this area called the alluring skull that attracts certain enemies to it, and it's possible to cheese him by throwing that item into a fire to make the pig cook himself.

The Undead Parish is where you run into the first serious enemies in the form of rapier-wielding knights who can block your attacks and will sometimes even parry you for an instant kill. They're quite vulnerable to parrying themselves though. To the right of the church is a staircase leading down to a bonfire and a blacksmith, which I used to upgrade my sword to +4. I also walked toward Sen's Fortress to chat with Siegmeyer of Catarina, another one of the rare cheerful characters.

The Parish is where you fight the Bell Gargoyles, which represent a really big difficulty spike because you end up fighting two bosses at once. I had been playing really carefully up to this point so I was still human which meant I could summon Solaire to make the fight a fair 2v2 which we won surprisingly quickly. I also let Lautrec of Carim out of his cell. Everything was going really smoothly up to then, but I started dying quite a lot after I kindled the hidden bonfire in Darkroot Garden. I ended up dying quite a few times to the Moonlight Butterfly, which was kind of embarrassing because she's considered one of the easiest bosses. She just flies and launches projectiles at you and then occasionally comes to land and gives you a chance to attack. You can speed up the battle if you had a good projectile attack, but my soul arrows barely did any damage.

Once I beat the butterfly I walked down into the Darkroot Basin and fought the Black Knight that's blocking the way down to the Valley of Drakes, since I'd said it was my goal to explore there. The first blue drake at the very start of the area killed me multiple times over and I decided I had better wait until I've leveled up to come back. I also tried fighting Havel but my backstabs did like than 10% of his health and he flattened me in one hit when it landed so I decided to avoid that fight as well for now. I did take out the Titanite Demon at the entrance to Darkroot though. Then I finished upgrading my Katana to what is essentially the current limit of +5 and went to the Fire Keeper at Firelink to upgrade my Estus Flask with the Fire Keeper Soul before calling it a night.

Most of the time when I think of Dark Souls these days I focus more on its themes and method of storytelling, so coming back to the game was a nice reaffirmation of how fun it is too. One thing worth focusing on is how the game conveys gameplay information to the player. When you first bump into the Asylum Demon and have to hightail it out of there, that establishes that it's sometimes best to look for alternate solutions and even just run from tougher threats, which is useful later on - for example you can just run past the Titanite Demon to get to Darkroot Garden if he's giving you trouble. What really strikes me so far is the sheer breadth of freedom in terms of the order you do everything in, at least if you know the secrets. There are so many different things I could be doing in the game right now - I could keep trying to fight Havel or press on through the Valley of Drakes, I could try and take out the Hydra, I could go back and fight the Black Knights I skipped earlier, I could return to Undead Asylum, and it's even possible to buy the gate key for Darkroot Garden and go on to fight two bosses that are supposed to come much later right now. I could also try and run through the catacombs to fight Pinwheel if I really wanted to. But I'll probably leave all of that stuff for later and progress the main quest by going through everyone's favorite area when I pick up the game tomorrow.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

ctesjbuvf posted...

This will be the first of hopefully a fine number of games that Ill finally play after owning it for quite some time now because this project reached that point.

Well, for what it's worth, it would make me very happy if my doing this project inspired other people to try more games. Bloodborne gives you a decent idea of what to expect from Dark Souls, because although there are some mechanical changes they have a lot in common gameplay-wise. I think you're definitely right that the game's difficulty gets overstated because it came out at a time when most AAA games were super easy - I definitely think it would be an exaggeration to call it one of the hardest games ever. I'd say it's not that it's super hard so much as that it doesn't fuck around - that's to say, none of the enemy attack patterns are exceptionally hard to figure out, but you can never really just tank your way through enemies and letting your guard down tends to lead to a quick death.

I started up the game and played for a few hours. Here was my character's starting information:

Name: Leon
Class: Deprived
Gift: Old Witch's Ring

I wanted to cut down on the role-playing for this game in comparison to how I handled Pokemon or New Vegas, so I wanted to recreate a pre-existing video game character, and after playing around with the character creator for a minute I found out that one of the haircuts looks pretty damn close to Leon Kennedy's 'do, so I rolled with that.

The game begins with a creation myth - in an age long past, the first men discovered the four Lord's Souls, which wound up in the hands of Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, the Witch of Izalith, Nito, the first of the Dead, and the Furtive Pygmy. These four waged a war against the Everlasting Dragons, which came before, and killed them all except for Seath the Scaleless, who betrayed his own kind to fight with Gwyn. All that was followed by The Age of Fire, which is currently in its last days before it fades away - and that itself is heralded by a plague of undeath, whose victims are locked up in an asylum.

Leon is one of those victims. He's sitting hunched up in his cell when a man drops a corpse through the skylight, with the key to his cell on its person. He unlocks the door and the player takes control, and I don't think I ever noticed before how you can just turn the camera to the right and see the Stray Demon at the very start of the game. Leon makes his way through the asylum and has to run away from its guardian demon until he can recover his club and meet up with the man who sprung him from his cell, who says that he's about to die and go insane - in that order. He asks Leon to take up his quest - to escape the asylum and ring the "bell of awakening" and gives him the keys to the asylum and some estus flask, which the undead use to heal, before he kicks the bucket. Leon fights up to the asylum balcony to get a leaping head-start in the fight against the Asylum Demon, takes it out, and leaves the asylum - on a giant bird that carries him to the Firelink Shrine in Lordran.

Like the name implies, the Deprived class that I picked starts with nothing - you're naked with a club and the weakest shield in the game. This is probably the hardest start of any class, but the club it gets does have certain merits, particularly high strength scaling, which is nice because when you wield a weapon two-handed in this game it treats the damage calculation as if your strength is doubled, so it does some hefty damage when used that way and let me take out the Demon really quickly. It's intended to be the most customizable class with completely balanced starting stats but they messed that up a little by giving it a high starting level, so what you should really do is pick one of the classes that has a lower starting stat in those stats you won't use compared to the Deprived's 11. For example, if you want a build that doesn't use faith the sorcerer would be good. I just like the Deprived because it helps create a sense of progression when you go from having nothing to being one of the most powerful people left in the world. The Old Witch's Ring has a specific story purpose but another really good choice for the gift is the Master Key, which makes the game a bit more open-ended from the very start.

In Firelink Shrine, there's a ton of stuff you can do before you go on to your first goal. I started by taking the elevator down to the ruins of New Londo to grab the Estoc in a jar there and buy a sorcerer's catalyst and the Soul Arrow spell from Rickert of Vinheim, who has locked himself in a cell for his own safety, because he's too afraid of turning hollow in the outside world. The Deprived can use Soul Arrow with no stat investment and it makes a good reusable long range attack for the first few hours - it takes out the weakest enemies in one hit. Then I go into the graveyard area and pick up the winged spear and the Zweihander (my favorite weapon in the game) because it's tradition, although I died twice in the process. I also talked to Petrus of Thorolund and joined his covenant, even though it didn't do anything for me just yet - it's a requirement if you want him to sell you miracles, which are the spells that use the faith stat, including heal which is handy to let you restore health a few more times on any given attempt of an area. Before I leave Firelink, I turn myself back into a human.

The Undead Burg is the basic first area that's designed to help you get used to the game. Most of the enemies are weak, but there are a few traps or larger groups that can take you out if you aren't careful, and I remember having my fair share of deaths here when I first played the game. This time around I got through it in one go, though. There's a somewhat curmudgeonly shopkeeper in the lower part of this area who sells basic equipment and a few other odds and ends. I buy the Residence Key from him for 1,000 souls and then I kill him and take his sword, the Uchigatana, which is an excellent dexterity-based weapon for this point in the game with a fast light attack (and a surprisingly slow heavy attack) and I'll use it at least until I get its brother weapon the Iaito. Since I was already human, I kindled the bonfire in Undead Burg for +5 Estus when resting there and then went on to fight the first real boss, the Tauros Demon. I didn't have the strength to actually use the Uchigatana in one hand at this point so I fought him while two-handing it and sometimes standing way back to blast him with soul arrows which was cheap but effective. He's your typical slow-but-strong giant boss and makes a good introduction to the dodge mechanics if you got through most of the Berg by blocking, which is really strong there.

Once he's out of the way, you get to meet the fan-favorite character of this game, Solaire of Astora. I love this guy. He's a devotee of the Warriors of Sunlight, which is appropriate because he is the ray of sunshine in this game's otherwise-depressing world. He gives you the white sign soapstone which lets you get some jolly cooperation going with other players if you want.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

I'd rather not dwell on negativity, so let's go straight onto the next game:

Dark Souls
Release Date: September 22, 2011
Playing on: Playstation 3
Previous Experience With Dark Souls: Played it through several times.
Expectations for Dark Souls: The Game of the Decade.

So yes, before I started this project my personal choice for Game of the Decade was Dark Souls. I've fallen in love with a few new games so far, but nothing has quite come along that knocks it off that pedastal. I've done multiple playthroughs of this game one right after another. I pulled an all-nighter to play the entire game in one sitting on my Dad's roommate's XBOX when I was 20. I get a little jolt of serotonin whenever I see a picture of Solaire. I love Dark Souls all the way down to my depressive little core.

I don't want to go into all the reasons for that too exhaustively at the very start, because there should be time for that later on, so I'll try to sum it up: Dark Souls has awesome combat mechanics, a huge amount of depth in terms of build options and weapon choices, immaculate visual design, an awe-inspiring sense of scope, tons of secrets and alternate paths, and a hauntingly beautiful story about entropy that makes great use of its medium and the unique narrative devices that come with it. It's a work of art through and through, and at risk of showing tunnel vision my goal with this project for the next little while won't be re-evaluating the game so much as it will be to prove that.

Although that being said, there are actually a few things I've never really done in Dark Souls, in all the time I've played it, so I want to take the chance to get out of a few habits I have around the game and try new things:

- I have never fully explored the Valley of the Drakes
- I have never completed the DLC (I bought it late)
- I almost always go for a strength build and use the Zweihander, so I'm thinking of scaling dex this time around and maining the Uchigatana.

It's been too long since I've played this game, so I'm excited to be back.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

Most AAA games have some mechanics that feel like busywork, these days, because they're always striving to be so expansive. For Deus Ex, the hacking minigame can get that way. I thought it was totally mindless at first but realized it did use some strategy as I came to understand it better, and then got back around to disliking it by the end of the game just because I spent so much time doing it - sometimes you'll hack three doors or computers in a row without doing anything else. Likewise, the game gives you very limited inventory space, and although that's clearly a conscious aspect of the design, I'm not sure how well it combines with a stealth game, because you wind up carrying around a lot of guns and ammo that you don't end up using since you're sneaking past the threats, so they then clog up your inventory which in turn defeats the purpose of fully exploring the areas and looting.

The level-up system and the player-choice in the story are both disappointing. Of course this game should be compared to New Vegas before it should be compared to Disney movies, and although some of the core mechanics are more refined NV this ain't. There are almost no quests where you can choose different characters to side with or change outcomes, and therefore you can't really role-play with Adam beyond your choice of ending, and (to steal a line from Zero Punctuation) it's really not an action-rpg but rather an action game with RPG elements. That's to say that the level-up system doesn't really constrain what your character can do - he can do just about everything right off the bat - but provides little bonuses to make the game easier. There are a couple exceptions, since you have to upgrade your hacking and the abilities to carry heavy objects and ignore fall damage both open up some options, but on the whole it just seems both shallow and poorly balanced, with some perks being either so situational or so underwhelming that I was out of things I wanted before the end, just like I eventually got tired of the hacking and the inventory management and decided not to bother. The two things I did quite like were the persuasion checks against NPCs, where you do actually have to pick multiple precise options to convince the other person and how the game would artfully remove things like quest markers to create an investigative feeling in some of the better sidequests.

I went over a month without being able to motivate myself to play this game. It's not entirely the game's fault, some of that was external circumstances, but it summarizes my opinion well enough. This was to my review of 2011 what Red Dead Redemption was to 2010.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

BetrayedTangy posted...

Glad to see your back at it! Also Dark Souls hype!

Thanks! And yeah I'm looking forward to revisiting that game too, so I had better not waste any more time:

Final Analysis: Deus Ex: Human Revolution
What I thought of Human Rev: A little uninspired
Would I play it again? Probably Not
Did it deserve to lose round 1? I would say yes, but given its opponent I'm not sure.

I watched Disney's Meet the Robinsons the other day. It's generally regarded as "not that good," and I can see why, since it has a cliche plot structure and the time-travel mechanics make Back to the Future look immaculately well-planned in comparison, but you know what, I actually enjoyed it. The kind of over-the-top comedy and frenetic pacing it goes for was a lot of fun for me, and it was easy to feel for Lewis, the orphan protagonist naively devoting his childhood to a hopeless quest to find his mom.

Oh look, Exdeath is starting the write-up by rambling about some completely unrelated thing to communicate that the game was boring again. Okay, but here's my point: those kinds of kids' movies are refreshing once in a while because they have characters with actual feelings in them. Aside from a straightforward goal, what I liked about Lewis was that he had a passion - inventing in this case, but it could've been anything really. I would argue that those are the two main qualities that make this protagonist from a second-rate movie for children a much better character than Adam Jensen, who just never gave off the impression that he cared about anything. He never does anything unique or idiosyncratic and it's hard to imagine what he'd do in his spare time. He's all business all the time, but usually I don't get what motivates him. There are sidequests based on covering up secrets for the company he works at, but what makes him loyal to them? I couldn't tell you.

Now, Blade Runner had a dull protagonist like that, but it was at least done with a specific sense of purpose: to help pose questions about whether Deckard was a replicant, which in turn serves the film's themes about what the difference between a human and an android is in the first place. Since Adam is more machine than man now, could Human Revolution be doing something similar? Well, maybe, but there are a few problems with that: for one, he comes off the same way when we see him before he gets roboticized at the start of the game, and for another, I get the impression that the game is trying to give him emotional motives and connections with other people and just not quite selling it. He does actually get a clear motivation around halfway through the game, which is to find his ex-girlfriend. They put an exclamation mark at the end of one of his lines when he finds out she's still alive to try and show that he's happy to hear that. The bravado Malik shows when she dies is supposed to show that she and Jensen care about each other and Pritchard has an arc about slowly coming to respect him. It's just all conveyed in such a lifeless way that none of it added up to an impression that Adam ever really felt anything, which made it hard for me to care about him - or anything that happened in the story - in turn.

That was definitely my biggest problem with the game, and it made the overall experience a slog for me, but to be fair that might say more about me than it does the game. I have a strong preference for stories where characterization and psychology are a major focus, and it's important to me that I connect emotionally with a story, but a good narrative can also be one that doesn't necessarily make you feel as long as it makes you think. That's obviously what Deus Ex is going for and what it does best. The main issue it's dealing with is cybernetic enhancements, or "transhumanism," and it extrapolates that into concepts like the dangers of advancing technology and issues of bigotry and class conflict. It creates a dystopian near-future setting with capitalism gone rampant, most visibly through the contracting of major public services including the police and medicine to corrupt private corporations who enrich themselves at the cost of the rest of society and keep the media in their pockets in order to continually accrue more power and [insert cyberpunk here.]

Part of this is definitely my own bias speaking, but I found most of that tired. Still, let me back-track to how it deals with this whole transhumanism issue, because that is the best part of the story. I appreciate how it presents multiple different views on the topic through different characters. You have Darrow with the aggressively anti point of view, Sarif as his opposite, and Taggart whose point of view is a little more balanced but still pretty adamantly opposed to the whole idea, and then the player through Jensen is caught in between them all and has to decide what his own views are. Considering the somber tone the game is going for, I liked how none of those characters were very sympathetic and their points of view had clear flaws, but I did kind of feel like their arguments were usually too abstract when more pertinent, concrete points were available. Sarif raps about how humans have a constant need for experimentation and progress that shouldn't be bound by busy-bodying big government, but I think I would've been more on-board with him if he said something like, say, "we can use this technology to help people with injuries or disabilities" or indeed "hey Adam, you wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for your augments." I always found it weird how when Adam himself was arguing with Taggart or Darrow (as Adam always argues with whoever he's currently talking to,) he never brought up how he needs augments to live. The anti-augmentation arguments are a little better with points about addiction to anti-rejection drugs and how the devices could be hijacked to control people but still had a tendency to get wrapped up in less coherent points about how they could take away people's ability for self-judgement.

I guess it also says a lot about me that I'd take this long getting to the gameplay, but the two things do feed into one another. It's not usually good form to start a film off with an action sequence because the spectacle will be even better if the audience also cares about the characters involved, and I think Human Rev. had a similar problem for me where although the mechanics themselves aren't too bad, I couldn't get invested in them because the surrounding context was doing nothing for me. I think this game definitely solidified my realization that I'm not really into stealth games. You know what I think they need? A short-range rewind power like Braid, so that if you get spotted you can rewind instead of having to incessantly quicksave and quickload. Besides that, I think the big problem that's common to stealth games is a lack of clarity in terms of where people can see you and, when you've messed up, who saw you. Human Rev does have a partial solution with the stealth enhancer power-up that gives you more information on your GUI, and it's competent enough for the most part. You can get by skillfully if you watch your radar and it's fun how the different power ups interact with the stealth, even if the invisibility one is kind of broken. The best thing about the game design is all the different routes you can take through the levels depending on your playstyle, which perks you take, and how much you're willing to look around. That adds a certain depth to the missions and shows a lot of care went into the level design.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

LinkMarioSamus posted...

To be fair I played Civ and Age of Empires in the first place because of my interest in history. Also the book is actually called Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. I guess I was more just pondering something.

I hate the whole concept of city-states so bah to Venice's inclusion in Civ5. Sorry.

No need to apologize to me, I'm not important to me if you play it or not. Though maybe I explained it a little badly because yes, I agree from a mechanical standpoint that city states are the worst but Venice's existence itself doesn't share mechanics like city state influence or anything like that - in fact, its special power is to permanently remove a city state from the game by converting it into a Venitian city, though you do have to play with city states on for them to be any good which is a bummer in and of itself.

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But let's conclude the story of Adam Jensen, protein bar addict. I think we last left him as he was about to return to China. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be over there knew he was coming and decided to shoot down his helicopter, and the pilot character he spent most of the game with didn't make it. Apparently it is actually possible, though quite hard, to save her by taking out all the enemies in that area quickly enough, but on my successful attempt of that part I just went sneaking around and felt slightly guilty when I saw that I had earned the "ghost" exp bonus. After that you have to wander around the city hub area while all the guards will attack you on sight, until you meet up with the mob boss guy who helped find the hacker last time, who is now wearing a cybernetic arm from one of the Sarif scientists. He helps you hatch a plan to sneak onto a cargo ship and wind up in Singapore where the rest of the scientists are held, which is the real final mission of the game with three simultaneous objectives, lots of guards, and no objective markers until you find the source of a signal jammer. It makes the most of the open-ended level design and is quite tough, to the point where I admittedly got frustrated by having to keep reloading saves.

At this point in the story, you find out (somewhat predictably) that almost every major player in the story is involved in the Illuminati conspiracy. You meet the medical CEO lady again who sicks a naked Turkish man on you for the third boss fight. He's had body mod so that everything below his neck looks like an exposed muscular system and fights you in an area full of dummies that look the same way, but he doesn't pull the Blade Runner hiding-among-the-dolls trick outside of the initial cutscene.

The big scheme is to mess with people's cybernetics to shut them down or control them, so you have to do that boss fight without your power-ups and with interference effects all over the screen, which makes it hard to spot the guy since he also turns invisible. It was a slow boss fight for me, since I'd seek him out, get one or two shots off, and then retreat to wait for my health to come back.

Once that's out of the way, Adam finally meets back up with his ex-girlfriend. It's a characteristically cold reunion. They don't hug or anything like that, but Megan at least fixes up his cybernetics. For everyone without a tech wiz GF, a broadcast is being transmitted that causes them to see severe hallucinations that effectively cause them to lose their minds and attack anyone they meet, so Adam has to head off to the Arctic ocean to stop it.

The man behind this signal is named Darrow. Adam spoke to him in Sarif's office at one point a little earlier. He was one of the primary inventors of the cybernetic technology in this game, but came to think the technology was too dangerous and hijacked the Illuminati's mind control signal for a vaguely Watchmen-esque scheme to manufacture a crisis around the tech and thereby convince the world it's a bad idea. You have to talk him into giving you the codes to stop the broadcast. In this final area the gameplay de-escalates quite a bit with the only threats being a little bit of automated security and some half-mad victims who will only run at you and scratch for not much damage. Sarif and Taggart both give Adam suggestions on how to modify the broadcast to transmit a message, with Sarif wanting him to lie about the "kill-switch" and blame it on the anti-augmentation activists so that government won't put any restrictions on research in that field and Taggart wanting you to say the frenzies were caused by a bad batch of the anti-rejection drugs for the augs in order to encourage restrictive legislation without outright banning the stuff. Before you can do any of that, though, you have to have a final boss fight against the Medical CEO lady in a big machine, guarded by turrets. I'd say it was an underwhelming final boss, since it just passively sits there and lets you methodically take out the turrets and then dismantle the machine itself, though it's at least somewhat effectively creepy since parts of the whole machine are seemingly tortured/enslaved people whom you have to kill to beat the boss.

Once that's out of the way, you pick the message you want to give the world with some help from Eliza. You also have the option to just destroy the whole facility, killing all the most important characters including yourself and thus leaving humanity to decide for themselves what to do next. I picked Darrow's message, not because I particularly believe in his stance on the augmentation but because it's the one that presents the actual events with the least amount of lying. I'd say that's a strength for what the game is going for, though, that none of the options seem all that great.

Jensen gives a soliloquy about how whichever choice you picked was the way to go and there's a post-credits stinger in which Megan joins up with some of the remaining Illuminati guys. I thought this was meant as a sequel hook for Mankind Divided but apparently it's actually to set up the OG Deus Ex, since this game is a prequel.

Final Thoughts on Human Revolution coming tomorrow.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 20/129
Currently Playing: Dark Souls

I might be wrong, but I think the only older Italian states that could be classified as serious world powers were Venice and (if you count it) the Papacy, which wasn't a very large state in its own right but had a huge influence on European politics for a long time. The Republic of Genoa was the only Italian city besides Venice that held territory abroad as far as I know with some Greek islands and part of the Crimean peninsula, which makes them an interesting campaign in something like EUIV because they have multiple avenues of expansion. Tuscany and Milan were wealthy areas but they didn't exert that much influence anywhere else in the world, so you only started to see major Italian powers rise up after the Napoleonic wars through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Sardinia-Piedmont, which was the one to ultimately unify the country.

The book you're reading is The Civilization of the Middle Ages, right? I think that does cover an earlier time-frame than most of the stuff I mentioned so I can see why the French and Italian parts might seem a little less interesting. I think Spain was going through the Reconquista at the time for example, which is probably a little more exciting to read about than Italy being divided between the HRE and Aragon or England and France doing very little except fighting one another for centuries.

As much as I like Civ, it's probably the worst strategy game series I know for serving as a springboard into learning about real-world history because its randomized maps and religion system completely divorce pretty much every country from their actual history and no one plays the scenarios, which are the only campaigns to be based on real events or to really have any kind of context around them at all. EUIV does a good job simulating how scary the Ottoman Empire was for the nearby Christian kingdoms by making them OP as Hell, but in Civ they're a joke and there are no mechanics that deal with the various ethnic and religious differences among people in that nation (a Muslim state that had a majority Orthodox Christian population for a long period of its history,) or its conflicts with Christendom. I don't have any problem with the inclusion of Bulgaria on its own (even if it does seem kind of strange that they're differentiated from other Slavic countries when Poland and Russia aren't given how much more prominent those two countries were,) because I actually really like when games include more esoteric and weird countries. That's probably part of the reason I like Civ V Venice, how it has this status as a glorified City State. In theory, the idea of being able to play as the Papacy in Civ would appeal to me a lot, until I think about it some more and realize the game just isn't designed in such a way as to show off what made that country important and unique - the same goes for the Holy Roman Empire which I've always found interesting just because it was ultimately a really weird country in terms of how it was run.

It sounds like part of the issue with AoEII is that it has so many different scenarios about really specific points in history, but its actual faction pool is comparatively small and limited. If they are still doing updates, then I guess I'd like to see the Russians and the Poles both added, and then maybe the Bohemians to round things out, but then that would make the Slavs start to feel really out of place, and I can see how removing or rebranding them might seem weird now that they're already around. In general, it sounds like a lot of those campaigns could benefit from having new civs added to the game and then replacing the stand-ins that they have there.

I'd say the big difference between reading about Ancient history compared to Medieval is just that there are a lot more surviving sources and accounts from later times, which is both a good and bad thing because it means there's more specificity to read about but there aren't the mysteries that can make ancient history more intriguing - was Troy ever a real city, for instance, and was Socrates a real person? I'm like you at the end of the day, though, in that a lot of what I know comes from video games, lol - I'm probably most interested/knowledgeable on the part of history that fits into EUIV's 1444-1820 time-span.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I'm glad you posted that, because it gives me an excuse to go on about history and strategy games, which are much more interesting topics than Human Revolution imo. While reading all your posts about Age of Empires II, I did consider booting up the game again but never got around to it, and one of the things that turned me off was exactly the issue with the faction naming that you describe. The example that I found particularly disappointing was the "Slavs" as the sole representative not only for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, but (presumably) also for Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, which also creates a sort of redundancy/confusion since Bulgaria, which is a South Slavic nation, is its own faction. At least you can sort of simulate the wars between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by doing Slavs vs. Lithuanians, I guess. I would assume that the Tartars are supposed to be the Golden Horde successor states like the Crimean Khanate, Great Horde, and Nogai. And yeah this issue is present in Civ also to a certain extent. Like you said, Italy has always implicitly been represented by Rome except when V included Venice, Scotland used to be represented by the Celts (They spawn in Edinburgh in the Into the Renaissance scenario in V that uses the map of Europe,) and Germany is usually led by someone who ruled over either Prussia or the Holy Roman Empire, again because a united Germany is a relatively new thing. Of course the most egregious of all has to be Canada finally making it into Civ VI only to be represented by fucking Quebec.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having particular countries that you like to read more or less about than others - probably everyone who does like to read about history has their favorites, mine is obviously Russia. Though I will say the severity of your distaste for French and Italian history specifically does seem a little odd, at least the way it comes off from reading your post. For me, there's definitely a connection between my interest in the culture of a country and the history. I got into Russian history because I fell in love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and I also like reading about Japan because I was raised on JRPGs and anime. Britain benefits from producing most of my favorite music and it helps a little that I live in a British Commonwealth country that still swears fealty to Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II. If anything though, I'd be offended by you bashing France rather than Italy, since French is the only non-English language I have even a shred of literacy in and I've always kind of liked them. I think Venice is an interesting enough country historically but I only gravitated to them in Civ V because of the game mechanics. Really though, every European country has a really rich history with plenty of interesting things to read about. France has stuff like the Hundred Years' War, a role in founding both the USA and Canada (some of the same American polictical commentators you take issue with for their attitudes toward China and the Middle East probably also forget how instrumental the French fleet was to the U.S. War for Independence, for example,) an unusual alliance with the Ottoman Empire, and of course the Napoleonic Wars which were incredibly Earth-shaking both for politics and philosophical thought all across the continent. Crime and Punishment, for example was both a response to and a prediction of writers like Nietzsche who created the Ubermench concept using Napoleon as his example. Without having read much about Italy specifically, they were the home of both the Renaissance and the Papal States, Italian merchant republics like Venice and Genoa colonized all over the place, they had a lot period of being pushed around by stronger neighbors like France, Spain, and the HRE followed by a difficult unification and emergence as a major power, and Venice had a leading role in the sack of Consantinople during the Fourth Crusade, which crippled the remains of the Roman Empire and contributed to the later fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, which is generally considered one of the most significant events in all of European history. I think all that stuff is super interesting, but to each his own at the end of the day. But really, its us in the formerly-colonial nations that don't have much in the way of interesting history to speak of, apart from that of the American Aboriginals of course.

I think the main thing that keeps me from spending more time with games like Age of Empires II is that instead of taking the time to learn them I always go back to Europa Universalis IV. Part of that is just because I already know that game pretty well so I don't have to go through the rougher early learning curve, but I also find it more interesting in terms of things like diplomacy and Empire-building, since a 300-year Grand Strategy campaign gives more of a sense that I'm building up an Empire than the (comparatively) short matches you get in an RTS. If you don't know about them already, I might recommend the Paradox-developed Grand Strategy games (EUIV and Crusader Kings II, and also Victoria 2 and Hearts of Iron IV if you're interested in later periods of history too,) to you as well if you're looking for something where the history itself takes a greater focus. They use the real-world map and just about every nation that existed in those time periods is playable, even tiny and seemingly-doomed ones like the post-Byzantine Epirus or individual Irish clans.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Now for another chapter in the life of Adam Jensen, vent enthusiast. The mission in Montreal starts with Jensen wandering through an empty building - the news station he's investigating has been completely evacuated. This gives you a free chance to loot the place and hack everything, but really there's not much there to get.

Predictably enough, the whole thing is an ambush. Jensen meets an hologram of Eliza, the journalist he's trying to get in touch with, who then vanishes and calls a strike force after him. What follows is one of the tougher parts of the game, where you're trying to sneak through rooms that are swarming with mooks. I had to make liberal use of protein bars and invisibility to get by. At one point, you have to call down a slow-moving elevator, and when you press the button you alert the enemy to your position, so theoretically it's kind of like the part in Halo Reach where you're defending the scientist, but in practice I just turned invisible to press the button and then hid in a little alcove in the same room until my ride was there.

It turns out that Eliza is actually a supercomputer built to manipulate the global news. Her AI is starting to gain some kind of self-awareness related guilt over fucking with Jensen and seems sympathetic toward him. The second boss fight takes place in her room, against a buff woman who can turn invisible - hey, that's my trick! There's a lot of "coolant" on the floor, so you use the ripples her footsteps cause to track her down, just like that one boss fight in God of War 2. Meanwhile, the news-bot gives you gameplay tips via voiceover. I don't know if this boss is supposed to be an established character at all, but the computer does share some vague details about her backstory. It's a much more legitimate boss fight than the last one. She can attack quickly enough that you might have trouble regenerating health, keeping the pressure on while she's invisible is tricky, and you have an option to blow up parts of the computer to electrocute the ground, which can hurt both of you - I mostly refrained from doing that and just chased her around with a shotgun.

Once all that's over, it's back to Detroit where some riots are going down, centered on Adam's place of work. Adam's boss has a little chat with him where he reveals that the bad guys of this game are the Illuminati. After that, his task is to hunt down the aide of an anti-cybernetics activist, who also happens to be the brother of the boss from the first mission. As a matter of fact, since I spared him, I bumped into that gentleman on my way through the mission, and had to knock him out, since I didn't want all that effort I spent talking him down earlier to go to waste.

But that's getting a little ahead of myself, because there's one interesting sidequest before all that. Prittchard gives Jensen a new lead that helps him delve a bit into his past, talking to the PI Sarif hired to check him out back in the day and a senile older lady who worked at the orphanage he was in as a kid. The gist of it all is that some kind of experiments were being conducted on the kids there, including Adam, and his birth parents died burning the place down to try and prevent such experiments from being perpetrated on more kids. Adam also apparently has some kind of remarkable DNA, possibly as a result of genetic modification that took place when he was still in utero. For another sidequest, the police hired me to ice some guy who was trying to detonate a gas bomb near their precinct. I did it because I needed a little more cash to fund my body mod addiction.

Anyways, when you do find the younger brother he has been denounced by his activist boss, blamed for a lot of violence, and is feeling really guilty about having participated in the attack on Sarif Industries, given that a lot of people died then. I had to go through speech checks to convince his boss that he was part of that, so I wonder if the encounter is different if you take the other approach and sneak through that part. I had to talk him out of committing suicide, which was the first time I failed a speech check and had to reload to pick different options. Hilariously enough, it's possible to talk him down only to immediately cap him yourself, but I wasn't that mean.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Just to ask Exdeath, what was your favorite civ to use in Civ5?

I've played the game so long that I've had different favorites at different points in my life, but when I first started I had the most fun with The Huns and Mongolia because they had such ultra-aggressive playstyles. I remember thinking it was a riot just destroying someone's city within the first 20 turns of the game with the Hunnic battering rams, and also having that fun feeling of "Okay, this is overpowered" with the Keshiks. My first Mongolia game ended up being a decent replication of how the horde worked in real life, where I just had a huge mounted force that went from city to city looting and burning and then immediately moved on.

These days I'd probably say Venice. You can't build settlers early on so you get to just focus on building up a massive capital and then you kind of recover the benefits of having 4 well-developed cities with your Merchants of Venice, and you have so many trade routes that you get super rich.

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That sidequest surrounding Malik investigating the murder of her friend ends in a pretty cool way. You have to confront the guy pretending to be a blackmailer and get him to confess to the killing by proving that you know all the details of the crime, which you turned up earlier by searching his apartment. I like the more investigative side of this game. It's a nice touch how they get rid of the objective markers at certain points.

That was the last sidequest I did in China before heading off to the next major story quest, which has you infiltrating a base that belongs to Tai Yong Medical, which is connected to the guys who ganked Sarif Industries. It's a medical lab and not a military base, so the mission is pretty easy with most of the NPCs being scientists who won't bother you even if they spot you. You have to break into their server room where the security is heaviest, but most of it is automated with infrared lazers and security cameras being the only threats, and it turns out you can really trivialize those parts with the invisibility because it prevents the lazers from seeing you. I would literally just turn invisible and sprint straight through entire rooms. What you find in that data center is a recording where some of the guys from the evil organization claim that they actually kidnapped Megan and her crew instead of killing them. Adam does not have a very strong emotional reaction to finding out his ex-GF is still alive. One of the higher-ups in that gang is staying in the building you're infiltrating, so you go and confront her. She's wearing a ridiculous Elizabethan ruff. I was hoping for another boss fight but she just badly fails to confront you and then tricks Jensen with the old feminine wiles in a cutscene and then shuts herself into a panic room and calls an army of guards. Unfortunately there are no dialog options to not fall for that trick or anything like that, so all I could do is impotently yell at the screen while Adam sank into the obvious trap.

Then you have to escape while an absolutely huge swarm of guards pour into the room. Now, even one of those guys can kill Jensen with a single spray of ammunition, so I imagine that part could've been incredibly tough with a different skill build, but I once again just turned invisible and sprinted to the elevator, and that was that.

The next part of the game has you going to Montreal, which would've made me very happy under different circumstances, but it seems like there's no Montreal city hub and it's just one self-contained mission to attack a news anchor there.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I sent Adam Jensen to China and spent a few hours clearing out (what I think is) most of that section of the game. I didn't exhaustively search the city hub (to use the game's term) for side-quests, but I found one where you rescue a missing girl and then kill a man for a prostitute, which paid pretty well, one at a bar where you're supposed to convince a woman to keep paying tribute to a gang that paid for augmentations for her, but which I "solved" by knocking the girl out with a stun gun, stealing her augs, and giving them back to the quest-giver, who wasn't very pleased with me, and one sidequest for the woman who chauffeurs Jensen around in a helicopter where you investigate the murder of her girlfriend, because she used to live in China. I haven't quite concluded that one yet. I found all the evidence at the killer's apartment and when I play next I'll go and confront him.

In between all that, I made some progress in the main story. The reason for Jensen's little tourist trip is that the hacker we've been dealing with so far is hiding out in China, so your first big task is to track down his apartment which is being guarded by the local (private) police, in corrupt service to someone who wants him dead. In stark contrast to my first couple missions, I managed to get the ghost exp bonus on this one for never being spotted. That was in part due to the help of the invisibility power-up, which I've maxed by now. It starts out as effective as it will ever be, but the subsequent upgrades increase how long you can use it for, from 3 seconds per energy bar to 7. As of now this means I can sometimes stay invisible for up to 21 seconds in a row, which is pretty OP. That requires liberal use of consumable items though, because your energy only regenerates up to 1 bar on its own.

You don't find the hacker himself in his apartment, since he ran for it as the police were coming in, so you have to track him down at this very depressing-looking group housing where everyone's private space is about the size of a bed. There might be multiple ways to do that, but the method I went with involved smooth-talking the owner of a local bar, who helped him relocate. Once you do find the guy, an brigade of soldiers on the payroll of a rival medical corporation to Jensen's one comes and tries to kill you both. You have the option to give the hacker guy one of your weapons to help him get away. I gave him my machine pistol since I hadn't been upgrading it. Truthfully, none of my weapons have been seeing much use lately, and I can probably afford to sell off some ammo. I'm just saving them for the mandatory boss fights.

Since this game has a bit of a noir tone, I keep expecting the sidequests to be more twisty and I think that would be nice. I'm kind of hoping some time later I'll find out that the prostitute I helped has become some kind of terrifying criminal overlord with the rival I took out removed, and I found myself kind of wishing that the quest about the pilot's girlfriend would resolve with the twist that she was the killer. Now wouldn't that be interesting, Jensen having to choose between bringing the real criminal to justice and making sure he had a ride home at the end of the day. I think I'm enjoying the stealth a little more now that I have the best power-ups and I'm actually being diligent about quickloading every single time I get spotted. I guess my Jensen's story is one of redemption where he got so many people killed in the first mission that he's resolved to spare as many lives as possible from now on.

The AI in this game is kind of funny. At one point I accidentally upset the neutral police by firing off my assault rifle to see how the silencer upgrade I would put on it worked, and I escaped by hiding in a closet with the door closed. Closing doors seems like a good way to confuse them in general. They can tell when you're running past them while invisible by the noise, but they aren't very good at following the sound, so when you're caught it seems easy to get away just by cloaking and making a run for it, which also makes me think I don't need to invest in the silent running power up. It seemed like they knew I was in there, but couldn't open the door, so they just stood in front of it until they left alert status, and then I could just walk out and they ignored me. Neutral characters like this can also turn aggressive if they see you hacking something, but it takes a while, so if you finish the hacking and just walk away they will forget all about it.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

After an inexcusably long break, I returned tonight to the life of Adam Jensen, the winner of the Michigan state gravellyest-voiced man contest. Thanks to Linkmariosamus and ctesjbuvf for keeping this bumped while I was away.

For the sake of jogging my own memory, let me summarize the story I played through earlier: Adam Jensen is an ex-cop who works for a tech company that makes weapons for the military and experiments with cybernetic augmentations for humans on the side. His ex-girlfriend Megan is the lead researcher for that latter occupation. The company gets attacked by a mysterious terrorist organization which kills Megan and critically injures Jensen, who can only stay alive if he gets rebuilt like the Six Million Dollar Man. He never asked for this.

A few months later, Adam is back in commission solving security crises of his company and trying to find out who killed his ex-girlfriend, and the way I've been playing him he has very little concern for the sanctity of human life or the collateral damage he causes, including the lives of hostages he's been sent in to save.

Last time, I was rounding up the sidequests that you can do in the Detroit "sandbox" area and about to start on the second major story mission, which I played through today. Jensen finds out that someone's been hacking into his friends' database and traces the signal to a military compound, where it turns out the same guys who killed his ex-girlfriend are on patrol. My usual tactics weren't very effective here, because this crew is a serious step up from the gang mooks of Detroit. I found that any time someone spotted me Jensen would be dead within a few seconds, so I resorted to the usual stealth game approach of saving every five seconds and loading whenever I got caught, which made me wish I was playing on PC given how slow the PS3 is at doing those things. It was pretty tough and took me a lot of restarts and a little bit of swearing at my TV screen to finish the mission, ironically being far more merciful to the mercenaries who killed my ex than to the random hobos on the street. I guess that's corporate for you.

One thing I consider a downgrade from the original Deus Ex is how you move bodies. The old game let you carry people over your shoulder in the usual old-school stealth game style, seen also in the Thief games, while in the new one you have to very slowly drag them, which just isn't as cool. At one point, I thought it would be fun to hide one unconscious guy in a vent, but couldn't get him over the "lip" of it. I'm also unsure how I feel about the new hacking minigame. In Deus Ex 1 hacking was just watching a progress bar move forward, which wasn't very interactive, but maybe it was for the best because the hacking minigame this one brings to the table is kind of lame.

I did that whole second mission without any stealth upgrades, because I've been focusing on the hacking upgrades (which seem quest-mandatory at points) and the damage reduction power, because I knew going in that there are unavoidable boss fights in this game. The first such encounter marked the end of tonight's mission. It's a fight against a big guy named Barret. Either my game messed up or it's one of the most laughable boss fights I've ever seen in a game, because all he did was stand in the center of the room and mindlessly unload his gun at me, even if I was behind cover, until it overheated and I had a free chance to shoot at him. This made him easier to deal with than a single random enemy from the area leading up to him. I think I'll get the cloaking device next.

In the aftermath, Prichard, who is Adam's hacker co-worker and kind of a dick, informs him that the boss is hiding information to them about a private back-door he had through company electronic security, which the enemy used to hack them. I managed to talk him into spilling the beans on it, and it turns out that (possibly among other things) he used it to solicit an Private Investigator to find out that Adam was adopted. With that out of the way, Adam is getting sent to China to follow up on something cryptic Barret told him as he died, so before leaving I went and finished up the sidequest involving Adam's old police friend, who hires him to illegally investigate a shady officer she's trying to take down. Once you gather all the evidence, you can choose whether to confront the guy yourself or not. If you do, he bribes you to let him go, which I accepted because I thought it would be funny. He told me the money would be at Adam's apartment, which is when I realized I can't remember where that is.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

He protec

He attac

But most importantly

He never asked for this.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I've been busy getting ready to move and then moving for the last little while, but last night I finally had things sorted out enough that I could play Human Revolution for a couple hours. I didn't make a lot of progress mostly due to my own ineptitude, since I died a few times and also spent a while reloading when I got spotted trying to stealth around. There's a sidequest you can find on the street by talking to an old cop acquaintance of Adam's who is trying to bust another, corrupt cop. Part of it involves infiltrating a gang's turf and finding a weapons cache, but there's a side objective to avoid being spotted at all while you're there. I tried to get it for a while, but ended up losing patience and massacring almost all the NPCs in that area. The need to load a file the second you get spotted was always one of the more frustrating parts of stealth games for me. There's a story-mandatory mission in the same area that revolves around disabling an antenna that's helping someone hack into your company's data storage, so I did that while I was in the neighbourhood and that's where I left off.

I'm reminded a little bit of Dishonored as I play this game, another 3D stealth game that I thought was pretty good. One thing I kind of miss from that game was the short-range teleport, which was nice for getting you through more enemy-dense areas quickly without getting spotted. In this game, if you have to pass over a certain area that's being watched, all you can do is wait until the enemy move away, which can talk a while since they often stand still to chat.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Lightning Strikes posted...

This is going to sound ridiculous, but if you have a Wii U try to get that version, because they made a lot of improvements.

I love the original Deus Ex but it is incredibly inaccessible.

That does sound kind of funny. Unfortunately I don't have a Wii U, so I'll have to stick with the PS3 version. To be fair, older PC games tend to be a lot less accessible. I really like the OG Fallout games, but most of my friends who tried them didn't get past the first couple hours either. I'll stick it out with Deus Ex, I think my first writeup about the game probably came off as more negative than I intended because I was in a bad mood that day.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Btw, depending on what platform you'd rather play on and what you already own, some of the games you'll eventually play are free on Playstation in the near future as part of their stay home program.

Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, it looks like I'll be able to pick up Subnautica and Horizon Zero Dawn through that, at least.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

With Blade Runner a lot of it is more that if you've taken in a lot of media like that then it probably loses a lot of impact. That being said, I only saw Blade Runner for the first time in 2018 and still loved it.

I got Age of Empires II

That might be part of it, sure. I can see Blade Runner being one of those movies that's so influential that it almost seems cliche to modern viewers who are familiar with the imitators. I felt kind of the same way about Casablanca when I watched that recently. It didn't feel as special to me as it seems to have been for a lot of people, but I could tell lots of movies had been influenced by it. I think for me personally the bigger "issue" is that Blade Runner just doesn't quite connect with me emotionally, though.

I've only played a bit of Age of Empires 2. I wasn't that thrilled by the combat either, so I ended up leaving it to go back to strategy games like Civ and Europa Universalis that have more in-depth diplomacy, which I find a little more interesting. I liked playing as the vikings, although they don't seem that good.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Update, I will join in on the Dark Souls playthrough, being mostly able to use my thumb again now.

Glad to hear it! I hope you like the game.

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I found a physical copy of the PS3 version of Human Rev. in my apartment. I must have anticipated that it might not work on my PC and bought it just to be safe. I played a bit here and there over the past few days, up to the point where you can do some sidequests between the first and second larger missions.

Both Deus Ex games start with some kind of shadow organization talking about their plans, and then cut to your mostly-unaware protagonist doing his own thing. In Human Reverend, that's Adam Jensen, who never asked for this. He's head of security at a company that's researching cybernetics. They want to increase people's potential by augmenting their bodies with technology, like for instance replacing someone's arms with stronger metal limbs or implanting a data display into their actual eyes. At the very start of the game some mysterious assassins bust into the place, kill most of the people there including Adam's GF, destroy the research, and injure Adam to the point of death, but luckily he gets rebuilt Robocop-style. Six months later, he's back in commission and ready for some covert corporate missions, starting with retrieving some experimental tech from a lab that's been attacked by terrorists before the cops find it.

The game makes an effort to re-create a lot of the mechanics from the original Deus Ex. You still move crates around the same way so you can jump on them, there's a Resident Evil 4-style inventory system like the first game's, and the emphasis is on open-ended level design with multiple solutions. The level-up system is a bit streamlined since the first game had both skill levels and augmentations and the second one combines them into one system. You gain a resource that lets you move through the skill tree by leveling up but you can also find it lying around or buy it. I've mostly focused all my levels on the hacking skill, but I also got the ability to lift heavy objects, which I used to solve one sidequest where you're looking for a police locker by stacking dumpsters on top of one another so I could hop a fence.

Since I was going for the full stealth and quickload whenever someone sees you approach in the first game, I picked lethal rules of engagement in this one, so I could start with a revolver instead of a stun gun, and although I try to stealth through the areas I just kill everyone once I get spotted. After the first mission one of the NPCs made fun of me for doing too much murdering, and I also failed to save any of the hostages except the very last one that you rescue by picking the right dialog against the boss. One thing that I do appreciate is how the "speech checks" are more complicated than they were in something like New Vegas, where you mostly just picked one option that was indicated by being the one with a speech requirement beside it and instantly convinced the other character. Both this first encounter with the terrorist leader and another one where you have to convince a cop to let you into the police station even though he's mad at you for not shooting a 15 year old boy during your backstory feel a little more nuanced because it's actually kind of hard to talk them down. I succeeded on my first attempt with both guys, so either the system is kind of lenient or I just got lucky. It might become annoying later on if I end up having to keep re-loading to find the right options though.

Playing on normal, I'd say the difficulty is above average compared to most modern games. Even with his augmentations Adam dies pretty fast to any old gun. Ironically the opening tutorial section is the hardest part yet, because you're facing guys with cybernetics and helmets, so they don't die even to headshots, while with the revolver I could one-shot the mooks in the following mission by hitting them just about anywhere. My personal distaste for stealth games aside, I'd say the gameplay is pretty good so far, but I'm not too interested in the story just yet. It's still early on, though. I've heard people criticize the whole central issue of prejudice toward "augs" as not making much sense, and to a certain extent I agree, and I also have a little bit of a problem with the world-building in that at least some of the cybernetic technology doesn't seem very practical. I doubt people will want to graft LED displays into their eyes instead of just carrying a phone or something, for starters.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

LinkMarioSamus posted...

That doesn't sound like that uncommon of an opinion. That being said, count me as a big fan of the first Blade Runner.

Maybe not. For what it's worth, although I have some criticism of both movies (I wish there was more nuance in the character of Wallace from 2049 for example,) a lot of the difference between me and someone who loves the Blade Runner movies is just personal taste. I think it would be possible to argue against the comparison I made between them and those Japanese examples, especially with 2049, because K's character arc is pretty central to that movie - I guess it just didn't really click for me.

ctesjbuvf posted...

I intend to join in on Dark Souls and Arkham City, but I sprained my thumb less than a week ago and currently can't use it, which is a big deal breaker for most games, so it depends on how fast you are going through Deux Ex.

Ah, I see. Get well soon. It's hard to say how long Human Rev will take me, but if you want I can do something to arrange things so that I don't start Dark Souls until a little later, like playing another game early or something.

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It turns out my PC doesn't have the specs to run Human Revolution. Even after turning off all the bells and whistles in the graphics settings I lost so many frames during the opening cutscenes alone that I knew it would be unbearable to go on. I should be able to get the PS3 version in no time, but for now I'll have to make do with only the original Deus Ex, which I've played for a little over an hour so far.

My major impression of the game is that it's old as fuck. Aside from the dated graphics, the enemy AI is really ancient and the core mechanics are rough. I've mostly been playing stealthy, which means quicksaving all the time and quickloading the second someone sees you. You have a really close range stun baton that needs ammo and there are theoretically tranquilizer darts too, but as far as I can tell those are completely useless.

On Steam, most of my friends who tried this game played for less than an hour. I can see why, because it's not a very accessible game. I had to look up a guide to realize that you can't hack security systems without a specific limited use item that you don't start out with even if you specialize in electronics during character creation. It's a pain to try and figure out the core mechanics when you're in a stealth situation and lingering indecisively for even a few seconds, and it seems like you have to be very methodical about looting to keep yourself stocked on lockpicks and multitools. Some of this will get better with more experience, but I'm convinced the stealth and gunplay mechanics will feel like crap the whole way through, so while I'm going to press on for now my guess is that Deus Ex will be an experience significantly hampered by gameplay that's just not fun.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Release Date: August 23, 2011
Playing on: PC
Previous Experience with Human Rev: Watched someone play a mission
Expectations for Human Rev: Above Average Western AAA

Break out the streamers, the party hats, and the cake, because this is game #20! All I need to do is get through this one and my topic has officially become a resounding success.

Here's a hot take for you: neither Blade Runner film is all that great. They're gorgeous to look at and a ton of creativity and effort went into the world-building, but I'm not really drawn in emotionally by the stories, and they focus too heavily on mostly tired themes about inequality and corruption. Those issues are replicated in most of the cyberpunk fiction I've seen. There are a lot of cliches and the social commentary is way too on-the-nose.

I'm biased since I'm clearly a weeb, but I think Japanese cyberpunk is where it's at, especially Akira and the partial example of Final Fantasy VII. Yes Akira deals with issues of class and makes a concerted point of showing the rot at every level of its dystopian society, but the emotional core of that story is the relationship between Tetsuo and Kaneda, whose lifelong friendship gets turned on its head as Tetsuo loses his mind. It eventually becomes clear to Kaneda that Tetsuo needs to be stopped, but he feels conflicted about taking him out because deep down, he still loves Tetsuo. Likewise, yes FFVII deals with SHINRA enriching themselves by destroying the environment and oppressing the people below them, but the heart of its story is about Cloud's quest for self-acceptance. In contrast, I thought that Deckard's and K's personal journeys could've used more focus - they didn't connect with me on an emotional level.

I fear Human Revolution might be the same way for me. I know it uses body modification as a metaphor for civil rights, but I haven't heard much talk about Adam Jensen as a character. All people really say about him is that he never asked for this. That being the case, I doubt it will cure any of my reservations about his genre.

What I am hoping for is a bit of that New Vegas-style freedom of choice that Western RPGs specialize in. I've heard the original Deus Ex was really excellent in that respect, but I've also heard that Human Rev. was a disappointment to some fans of the original. It does feel a little remiss of me to start this one without ever having played its predecessor to compare - I considered sticking it in as a last minute addition to my extra games list. It would certainly be interesting to try the game so good its fans whined that it wasn't winning by enough back in the first GotD contest. Maybe I'll play an hour or two of it in between my sessions with Human Revolution. As for this game itself, I hope to like it, but I'm not expecting to be floored.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

BetrayedTangy posted...

Yeah Bastion's ending was really cool. It actually left me thinking about for a day or two after. I also found it pretty funny when Dark Souls sort of went with a similar concept in its endings.

Oh yeah, haha, I guess they are a little similar. There's also some parallels in Owlboy, another story-focused indie game I really liked.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

All these short games and long games juxtaposed against each other must make for some interesting whiplash!

I think it's nice. There's a certain comfort to having the short games to almost unwind with in between the long ones.

Lightning Strikes posted...

Dont worry weve got like four big RPGs and open world games back to back now so thatll be a bit more consistent!

That's true, it's long games until the end of 2011 now, between 20ish hour RPGs like Deus Ex and (possibly) Dark Souls and true behemoths like Skyrim and Minecraft.

Final Analysis: Bastion
What I thought of Bastion: A good story-driven game, with some minor gameplay issues
Would I play it again? Sure, it would be nice to see the other ending.
Did it deserve to lose round 2? If anything it should've gone further.

Video games are a young medium, and people are only starting to explore the possibilities they bring to the art of story-telling. A lot of developers still make the mistake of treating them like books or longer films, locking all the character development and lore behind long cutscenes or text scrolls.

The real trick is to somehow integrate the game mechanics and the story, and I think more games are consciously doing that these days. I recently started up Doki Doki Literature Club, for example, and I thought it was nice how the game takes away your save files to help drive home the feeling that its most tragic story moment could not be undone.

Bastion sort of does a similar thing, but what it chiefly accomplishes with its particular style of narrative is that the story and the gameplay can almost always play out at the same time without interrupting one another. There is quite a hefty amount of contextual dialog based on your moment to moment gameplay choices, but it doesn't really effect the broader story. It's still a more elegant approach than most games manage, although the one major downside of it is that you have to go through a lot of repeated dialog if you get a game over and have to restart a full level.

The game's narrative structure is purposely limiting - apart from what we can glean from the visuals as the Kid walks along and fights, all the information we have is from the inherently biased perspective of one of the characters, Rucks. One of the most clever moments comes at the very end, when the game finally lets you break away from that perspective, just for a moment. As purposeful and well-used as it is, that limitation has its downsides, with the biggest one being that a lot of the storytelling is essentially done through exposition dumps. It might have been more effective if the character backstories were shown rather than told to us by Rucks.

All minutia around the story devices aside, the core of this narrative is really very good. There's a lot of nuance to the characters and their feelings - we as the audience can sympathize with everyone, even if Rucks and Zulf have some heavy sins to answer for. One of the major themes is reconciliation, shown in the conflict between the Ura and Caelondia, and how hard it was for them to let go of their past war, but is personified by the characters of Zulf, an Ura orphan who was raised by a Caelondian missionary, and the Kid, who has the most important choices for the fates of both peoples in his young hands.

But I think the most central theme is atonement, which is housed in the idea of the Bastion itself. There are a lot of people out there who have done things they wish they could take back. I have mine. That desire is expressed in the "restore" function of the Bastion, which is essentially a time travel device intended to undo one calamitous mistake, but it leaves the possibility that everything will just repeat itself again, because in truth you don't get to take things back. The only real way to atone is to accept what happened and try to move on, and to do the right things going forward - that's why I picked the evacuation ending.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Gall posted...

I totally agree about procedural generation. It can feel like a real missed opportunity when a game has fun movement/combat/etc, but the level design doesnt properly take advantage of it. I find that I like procedural generation the smaller the scope of the randomness.

I think that's become a very pronounced feeling for me. I was interested in Eagle Island when that was coming out but when I found out it had procedurally generated levels and rougelike elements I felt kind of let down, like the falconry concept had been put to waste because it was connected to those mechanics.

I was running like 5 different idols at my peak, but I stuck with just 2 after I had to restart that one level. My impression is that they really aren't that necessary for the rewards they include and serve more as a mechanism to let players challenge themselves a little more from the second playthrough onward.

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I finished Bastion. The last few levels and ending were definitely really cool. It's revealed that the Calamity was caused by the Kid's country trying to wipe out the Ura, and Zulf was smashing up the Bastion as a form of revenge. It turns out that a decent number of his countrymen survived and they come back to attack the place. I lost my pet blob and bird in the raid, sadly. To get the very last shard, you end up going into the Ura territory, where it's revealed that everything the narrator has been saying to the player has been him telling the game's story to Zia as they wait for the Kid to beat the last level, which explains why some of the references to her were in second person. The function of the fully-upgraded Bastion is to set things back to the way they were pre-calamity, but it also has the option to give up on going back and take the few survivors somewhere new. You're given two choices at the end of the game: whether to save Zulf when his countrymen attack him for leading the Kid to them or to leave him behind, and what to do with the Bastion. I chose to save Zulf and to evacuate.

I thought the whole moment where you're dragging Zulf along and the few remaining Ura fire on you at first but then eventually just let you pass, and the narrative device where you finally hear Zia's voice right at the end were both really cool. The central dilemma about what to do with the Bastion is interesting. On the whole I thought it was quite an emotional ending, and probably the best part of the game.

Final Thoughts on Bastion coming tomorrow.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 19/129
Currently Playing: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Okay, played a little further, probably to the point where I'm closing in on the end-game now. The shards you start gathering after Zulf leaves let you upgrade the various facilities on the Bastion. I started with the forge, which lets you upgrade weapons five times instead of the previous cap of three, and then I did the lost and found and the distillery, and finally the memorial. I still need to get two shards to upgrade the other two buildings.

The first level I did when I started playing again has the Kid wander into the jungle, get high off some poison spores, and fall into a nightmare, which I thought was a cool sequence. It reminds me of the Tanetane Island sequence in Mother 3, which is one of my favorite parts of that game. The rest of the jungle levels are more traditional, just with a new set of enemies and hazards, including a couple little boss fights against a giant flower and an alligator that lurks in tall grass, possibly a rejected design for fifth generation Pokemon. I found a few new weapons like the spear that you can use for longer melee range or just chuck at people and the carbine which is functionally pretty similar to the bow, but overall I think I still prefer running the hammer and bow. I like the musket too, but it combines better with the machete or the spear. I also did the level where you run through Zia's backstory.

My overall feeling is still that I'm digging the story but I'm not as enthusiastic about the gameplay. It's alright, but not fantastic. One complaint I do have is with the checkpoint and retrying system. You have a few lives to get through each level with and if they run out you have to start the whole thing over, which can mean losing quite a bit of progress and is kind of frustrating. I think a more ordinary system where there were just multiple checkpoints within each level probably would've been preferable. I was running all the available idols for higher difficulty and rewards, but I lost one level right at the very end, got tilted, and turned them all off, so I'll probably keep use of those to a minimum from now on, since the extra rewards don't seem that important anyway.


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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 18/129
Currently Playing: Bastion

I played the first few hours of Bastion tonight. The white-haired boy from the cover art is just referred to as The Kid, and even though he's the main character the narration is all done by another character, Rucks. I think The Kid is probably in his mid to late teens. The power up system involves him boozing and there's a part where he knocks himself out by smoking a pipe and then has a bad dream about his backstory, where it's stated that he used to get picked on for his white hair, which implies that it wasn't very common in the now-destroyed world he inhabited. Rucks has the same hair color, which makes me think he might be The Kid's dad, but maybe it's still normal for people's hair to turn white when they get old in this world. The Kid spent a lot of his childhood taking care of his sick mum and the rest of it as a member of the Night's Watch from Game of Thrones.

Besides those two, there are only two other characters in the entire game, named Zulf and Zia. They're from a country that used to be at war with The Kid's country. You meet Zulf a little after Rucks and Zia near the end of the first section of the game, which reminds me of the first Mario Galaxy, because you're collecting "cores" from all the levels to power the titular Bastion and unlock more features from it. I played until the Kid finds the last core, Zulf breaks the monument that powers the Bastion and leaves because he read something in a Ura journal, and you start gathering that monument shards instead of the cores.

I'd say I could take or leave the gameplay for the most part. The core combat is okay and it's cool how it has a lot of different options, but I tend to get frustrated when I try to do the optional "proving grounds" areas, which are mostly way harder than the real levels. I also died twice on the very last of the 20 waves you have to do for the Kid's flashback, which was upsetting. I've mostly been playing with the hammer as my melee weapon and alternated between the bow and the musket for range. I don't like the repeater that much and the dueling pistols look cool but don't seem that effective. The musket is nice for clearing out grounds but it sucks as long range which makes you very reliant on the parry mechanic to take out ranged enemies, so overall I find the bow better. When it comes to the different Q skills you can pick there are a lot I haven't tried out yet but I think the hand grenade is really good.

Still, whatever complaints I might have toward the gameplay, I am enjoying it so far. I think it's doing a good job telling a story through the limitation of having only one speaking character, and it manages to have at least some emotional weight behind things like the memories of the world before it was destroyed. It is overall pretty impressive just how many different little things the narrator has voice lines for. He'll comment on things as small as how many hits you took in a specific fight or how often you've fallen off the edges of the levels. It's a charming way to deliver the story and the voice actor is quite good.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 18/129
Currently Playing: Bastion

Bastion
Release Date: July 20, 2011
Playing on: PC
Previous Experience with Bastion: Listened to some of the music
Expectations for Bastion: Baby Hades, but thankfully not a roguelike

Bastion has been on my radar for ages. I remember wanting to buy it because Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee placed it in his top 5 games of 2011. As a matter of fact, I have all four Supergiant-developed games on Steam... but the only one I've even installed is Hades. I bought Bastion on sale years ago, probably around 2015, but for one reason or another I just never got around to starting it up.

I have some reservations about the isometric combat because it reminds me of Diablo, but I thought it was well designed and generally fun in Hades, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this much-praised story, allegedly delivered by a narrator with an extremely sexy voice, goes down. I'm excited to finally be giving this game a whirl, and I think the odds I'll like it even better than Hades are pretty good.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 18/129
Currently Playing: Bastion

Final Analysis: Terraria
What I thought of Terraria: Yeah, this game is pretty good.
Would I play it again? Eventually.
Did it deserve to lose round 1? I'll have to decide once I play Bioshock Infinite.

I've talked before about how one of this decade's narratives is the rise of indie games. I'm really happy about that - I think I like indies better than AAA these days - but I'm not sure I like the trend that's come with it, which is the rise of procedural generation. It makes sense that the two go hand in hand, because overall it's easier and cuts costs to have an algorithm design maps, but the thing is that robots just aren't that great at game design yet. You can always tell when a level is custom made and when it's done procedurally, and I would contend that all the best indie games of the last few years - Omori, Owlboy, Cuphead, Undertale - are the ones that don't use that technique at all.

But then again you have some games that find some clever way to use it. There's Hades, for one thing, which integrates randomized levels and permadeath into its story, and there's Minecraft, which found a smart gameplay innovation for computer-designed levels: giving every player the power to freely dig up and rebuild the world around them. In a time now lost to history, Bethesda released Daggerfall, a pioneering title in procedurally generated levels, where the randomized quests would often be impossible to finish because the essential item would be cased in on all sides by impassible walls. Such a situation could never occur in Minecraft, because the player could just dig through.

That mechanic was so good that a bunch of other games stole it, which I think is a good thing. People should rip off good ideas more often, I think - I've always lamented how RPGs didn't adopt Chrono Trigger's dual techs or Earthbound's way of skipping battles that were too low-level to be worth it, for example, because those mechanics are so good they should be in every game. As long as you're remixing the original idea with some substantial tweaks of your own, a little bit of copying is fine in my book.

Terraria does a good job managing that. To Minecraft's earth-moving, building, and crafting core gameplay it adds unique NPC types, boss fights, and something approximating a main quest line. It gives you accessories that massively increase your mobility as a marker of your progress, which was probably my favorite change. It's inherently satisfying to go from a small jump and slow walk speed, which force you to extensively build bridges and lower ropes to get around, to being able to walk on water, double jump, and even fly. The building mechanics transform randomized levels that might be terrible or even unplayable into interesting challenges of their own, but they also add fun dimensions to the moment to moment gameplay. You can trap enemies in walls to get around them, build sky bridges to "skip" large portions of the world, or drop sand onto monsters from high above.

But all the most interesting parts of Terraria are still the ones that have been programmed in manually - the giant "living trees" that take up a huge part of each world, the boss fights and special encounters that bring the combat mechanics to life, and the way your quest has you gradually descending until you get to Hell itself. Likewise, it doesn't solve all the problems that come with prodecural generation - for instance, the dungeon in my world was positively tiny, meaning I missed out on a lot of the interesting loot and special paintings you can find there, and it can be frustrating how important features like the more useful accessories and some crafting stations might just never spawn in your world, or how you might play for hours upon hours without stumbling on the unique biomes like the glowing mushroom area.

Although the mobility power-ups do a good job speeding up some of the more tedious parts of the gameplay later on, I wish there was a better solution for the need to place torches every few feet. I also thought the spawn rates for mostly-irrelevant enemies could get kind of annoying. It's a pain to have to interrupt whatever else your doing every few seconds to switch to your sword and swat a bat or something. Maybe it would better if the mobs didn't spawn as often, but were generally more powerful.

Depending on your goals, the game can get quite grindy. You'll spend a lot of time just wandering through caves looking for some rare and obscure resource you need to make a particular item, especially if you want something specific. I like Michelangelo, so I spent a while trying to find the "Creation of the Guide" painting that's basically a pixel-art version of his Creation of Adam, which is a rare spawn in dungeons, but I just got tired of grinding out multiple worlds' worth of dungeons before I came across it, and I'm still a little heartbroken that I never found a replacement for the Finch Staff I lost to mediumcore mode.

So Terraria is not a game without its flaws. It would be remiss of me not to mention corruption spread, which has made some players incredibly angry by essentially destroying their entire game worlds, and although it does have a solution it's unbelievably tedious. All that being said, though, I had a lot of fun playing it. I put over 20 hours into it in 5 days, which only a handful of other games in this project can boast.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 18/129
Currently Playing: Bastion

Gall posted...

So Terraria has more of a traditional gameplay focus than Minecraft, with stuff like boss fights and stat and equipment upgrades. It seems like the sort of thing Id like moreso than Minecraft, although I dont really want to get into another another big timesink when Im already neglecting Dragon Age.

Minecraft has its own main questline, but Terraria's is a lot more central to the game, yeah. It doesn't take too long before you don't need to worry about digging for rare metals any more and most of your progress is more based around running through prodecurally generated dungeons, which speeds the game up. For what it's worth, it took me around 20 hours to take down the Wall of Flesh, which is what I'm using as a stopping point, so in that case it's not such a huge time-sink.

-

So yes, I managed to complete all 5 tasks on my to-do list for Terraria today. I was actually over-preparing for the Wall of Flesh by gathering as many fallen stars as I did - I had about 450 but he went down quite quickly, after probably about 100 shots. I made a long bridge throughout the underworld to fight him on, but it could've been a lot shorter considering how quickly I won. I remember having a really hard time beating this boss when I fought him on the PS3, but I think that was because I tried to use the Night's Age instead of standing back and shooting at him with a long-range weapon.

Mining for Hellstone was kind of tricky. The underworld is covered in lava so even though there's lots of Hellstone around you can't always get your hands on it safely, and every hellstone block you destroy leaks even more lava out. You have to dig carefully to drain the stuff to somewhere safe and you get harrassed by enemy spawns the whole time. I made the Fiery greatsword, a full suit of armor, and a pickaxe out of Hellstone which took a lot of methodical gathering.

When you take down the WoF, your world turns over to hard mode which makes the enemies much stronger and increases the spread rate of corruption. It's best to get your ducks in a row before you do that so that you can clear out all the hard mode biomes quickly enough that you don't have to dig through your entire world to block off the corruption. I mainly just prepared by making a few more houses so I wouldn't have to spend any time on that afterward. Since I had the extra space, I moved my NPCs around so that the guide was nearby the Clothier and the Zoologist, which made him as happy as possible before I offed him to summon the boss. RIP my dude, your sacrifice will not be forgotten.

Final Thoughts on Terraria coming tomorrow.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 18/129
Currently Playing: Bastion

When I started playing Terraria tonight I made the Star Cannon, a very high damage ranged weapon that uses fallen stars as ammo. I spent a long time running around gathering fallen stars at night, and I think I have about 200 now. The main intention behind making this item is to use it against the Wall of Flesh, which is hard to fight at close range without getting messed up. I found one crystal heart in the underground jungle putting me at around 15 hearts but I will want to get to the current max of 20 before I fight that boss. I also mined some obsidian and made the Obsidian Skull, which means I'm ready to head down to the underworld if I want to. I think that basically just entails digging straight downward until you find it.

I took down the Queen Bee boss in the jungle. You can break into the hives that are underground there and spawn her by destroying larvae, but the one I found didn't have any so I just gathered some ingredients and made her summoning item. She's the same boss that I had to farm for a bee costume last time I played, and has a really wide variety of potential drops. I got the beekeeper, a sword with comparable damage to everything else I have so far that also spawns bees when it strikes an enemy, and I also used the material she drops to make a staff that summons a hornet to fight for you. I found the Granite biome and the Goblin NPC, who moved into the tiny bathroom of my slime house, which seems to indicate that bathtubs and toilets are considered tables and chairs, respectively, by the game.

As of now, my priorities are as follows:

1. Build a bunch of houses to get more NPCs to move in
2. Find more life crystals until I have max health
3. Grab more fallen stars, probably until I have 500
4. Go to the underworld and dig for hellstone to make better equipment with
5. Find a guide voodoo doll and then fight the WoF

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

I got up early in the morning and played a ton of Terraria. I think the first thing I did was start exploring the corruption and the underground jungle, both of which were giving me a lot of trouble. The enemies in the corruption aren't that bad in and of themselves, but the place is full of super deep chasms that killed me a couple times through fall damage, which made my items really hard to get back, including one time where they fell even further from the place I died at and I had to retrieve them in three parts.

I made a terrible mistake by going into the dungeon without taking down the associated boss, which I had forgotten is a no-no because an invincible dungeon keeper spawns and one-shots you for doing that. This rendered all my items irretrievable because it would just kill me again the second I picked them up. I even lost some of my back-up items that I took out to try and make it back to the dungeon safely.

So that was all the patience I had for mediumcore mode. Since you can't change the difficulty without creating a new character, Marche is now retired and I'll be playing the rest of the game with a character named Cody 2, in honor of the true hero of Terraria. I looted all the useful items from my chests in the old world and then had Cody 2 run around in a new one for a slightly better chance of finding Life Crystals, and then I took out the Eye of Cthulu again to get my sword back. I found another cloud in a bottle, but have yet to replace the Finch Staff :(

I built the tower of babel out of ropes and then a sky bridge so I could find floating islands, and got the balloon (increased jump height) and fledgling wings (very minor flight and slow-falling) accessories from chests there. You can also convert the buildings on floating islands into useable houses for NPCs just by throwing a torch in one, which led to the Dryad coming to my world. I bought the purifying powder from her which let me transform the corrupted Ebonstone into regular cobblestone, which was really handy since I didn't have a pickaxe that could mine Ebonstone at the time. That let me access some Shadow Orbs that were locked in closed-off areas of my Corruption biome and smash them with a hammer. Breaking three spawns a boss called the Eater of Worlds, who is basically a giant version of one of the worm enemies. There's a cool idea behind him where he's composed of like 80 parts with their own health bar and every time you break one that's not at the very front of the formation it makes the boss split in half, so you gradually end up fighting more and more independent bodies and it's harder to dodge them all. It was a pretty easy fight over all, though, and I took him down a second time to get more of the shadow scales he drops. I made the nightmare pickaxe which seems like it will suffice for the rest of pre-hardmode, and a suit of shadow mail for the movement speed set bonus.

After that I took down a few other bosses in pretty quick succession. I found some rubies which let me summon the slime king and take him down for a solidifier, which lets you make slime-based furniture and blocks, and I've decided my new ambition in this game is to make a giant slime palace, though it's just one room so far. A goblin army spawned and took down a few of the doors in my brick building but didn't do much else, and I went and got my revenge on the dungeon keeper, Skeletron. I focused on his hands and then his head was easy to take down.

When the Eater of Worlds died, it caused a meteor to crash into my world on the border between the eastern corruption (there are two corruption biomes, one east and one west,) and the beach. With a good enough pickaxe you can go and mine meteorite to make stuff with, though you get constantly harassed by flying enemies and you can't stand on the meteor without taking really fast damage over time. I just covered the place in ropes and mined while hanging off them. The armor is actually inferior to the Corruption armor, but I made the space gun which uses mana instead of ammo and have adopted that as my main ranged weapon for now. I went into the dungeon and found the muramasa, and then I poked around in the jungle to get the necessary items for making the Blade of Grass. These two swords are ingredients for the best pre-hardmode weapon in the game.

I'm closing in on the start of hardmode, and I'm considering stopping there, and treating the Wall of Flesh as the final boss for the purpose of this playthrough. I'm still having fun with it, but I just can't shake the thought that it's about a 20 hour game if I stop after WoF but likely to end up being more like an 80 hour game if I go all the way to the true final boss.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

Lightning Strikes posted...

The Aphrodite scene was originally supposed to end with her pulling a knife and trying to kill you. Im kind of glad we didnt get that, but whats left is still embarrassing.

Glad this topic is back!

Yeah, I think embarrassing is a good way to put it. I'm glad they didn't add that too, I thought it was kind of nice that they had at least the one god who didn't try to kill Kratos and who he didn't kill either.

And thanks!

BetrayedTangy posted...

So I beat Dark Souls awhile ago, but kept delaying my write up because I was continuing to play the game, going so far as to actually get every achievement. Which is something I've done with only a handful of games. As you can tell I really liked it!

Glad to hear you liked it! Yes, I definitely agree that Dark Souls is a deeply artistic game. I've always found the "entropy" theme very interesting and emotionally resonant, but I think what particularly impresses me about Dark Souls is how its story is conveyed. It's a game that makes great use of the medium, in part because the player has to dig to get the details of the lore which lends to the feeling of exploring a dying world, but more importantly because Dark Souls is ultimately a game in which your character is being manipulated. It's easy to complete the game and go along with what Gwyndolin and Fraampt want you to do without ever finding out that Anor Londo is an illusion and that they're lying to you. Of all the secrets you mention, I think my favorite is the existence of Darkstalker Kaathe, who is hidden behind really obscure conditions but completely recontexualizes the game's story when you find him. But even though he serves to expose what Fraampt is doing, Kaathe himself is still trying to manipulate you, which is why both of those characters are serpents. It's hard to tell which of the two endings is actually the better outcome.

I do think Dark Souls is a (mostly) excellently well-designed game and one of the rarer examples where both the story and gameplay are awesome. I think my favorite thing is just how open-ended the game is, both in terms of the exploration (it really nails the sort of 3D Metroidvania idea) and build paths. I love just how many different weapon options are viable and how they can change up your playstyle.

The larger "Soulsborne" franchise feels kind of iterative which can make the individual games feel less special, definitely. I think it's okay to skip DS2 but I personally thought Bloodborne was really great and gripped me more than most other games I've played in years, though it may have helped that it had been a long time since I played any of the Dark Souls games when I started it.

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I played a little further into Terraria, mostly spelunking to hunt down life crystals. I did manage to find a few and extend my life meter to a just under twice its original size. I found out that the corruption was beyond the jungle to the far east and that there was a frozen biome in the west, but I still haven't made it to the boundaries of the world yet. I played around a little with the minecart system, which I don't think was implemented last time I played. There's a really long mine track running through the underground in my world, which can be helpful for getting around quickly or navigating cliffs but leaves you a little more exposed to enemy attacks. It's kind of fun. I think you can expand the cart railway but I don't see myself bothering with that, even though I found a ton of iron again today.

There are a lot of significant power-ups just lying around in chests. I found a pair of flippers that let you jump infinitely in water and a cloud in a bottle which grants a double jump, but I think the most amazing thing I got was a Finch Staff, which summons a baby finch to fight for you. It nests on your head when you're out of combat, which is cute, but I wasn't expecting it to be very useful at first. It turns out the baby finch is invincible and does contact damage to anything it touches, and it also stays active for an unlimited amount of time once used. It can absolutely tear apart the otherwise-annoying worm enemies underground because they consist of many components that each get damaged on contact, and it was also a huge help when I went up against the first boss, the eye of Cthulu. You just use the suspicious-looking eye item at night time to summon the boss. I think it's crafted by taking a bunch of lenses to a corrupt/crimson altar, but I just found one in a chest. It's a fairly tricky boss to hit at melee range without getting smacked in return, so most of my damage on it came from the finch and the blowgun I found yesterday. I also made soup out of a mushroom and a goldfish, which apparently gives you an 8 minute buff to all stats. I'm not sure how important it was. It dropped demonite ore, which I used to craft a sword called the Light's Bane.

My base hasn't really changed much since last time. I completed the third room and the merchant moved into it, and then I started on a forth. I think I could be getting NPCs to show up faster if I were to build with more common materials, but I'm not too worried about it because I remember the NPCs not being very important to the game's progression.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

Alright, I started up Terraria. This is the first game I've played in a while that has a character creator. A lot of the time I like to base my character on a pre-existing one, and this time I decided to celebrate a classic of video games by naming my character Marche. It's been so long that I don't remember much about the game's progression path, so I probably wasn't being all that efficient, but things went okay. You can't punch rocks in this game like you can in Minecraft so it starts you off with some crappy copper tools. The first step is to cut some wood to make a crafting table and a wooden sword with, and I also used wood to build an early shelter. It's also useful to kill the low-level slimes that spawn at daytime since you can make torches, which are essential for exploring caves. Just like in Minecraft, tons of mobs spawn at night, so you have to bunker down inside (and block the doors) and wait out the night, at first. Your starting weapons are too slow to kill the enemies so it's tough not to get overwhelmed at night. I dug a cellar underneath my house and started mining for stone and clay until sunrise.

Early on, what you really want to find is iron. I think I remember slowly saving up iron for ages when I first played. Either they made it more common in patches since then or I just got quite lucky, because between finding some decent iron veins and a full 10 iron bars in a chest, I had enough to make an anvil (the most important immediate use of iron as far as I know,) a sawmill, a broadsword, and some armor within the first couple hours. I found a little bit of tungsten and platinum too, and made a tungsten axe because I was tired of how slow the copper one was. I also poked around the naturally spawning caves for treasure chests, both to raid the contents and to take the chests themselves back home for storage. I found a lot of rope to explore with and a blowgun that fires seeds, which has been a fun and surprisingly decent ranged weapon so far. I found the desert and jungle biomes to my east and stopped at a lake not far to the west.

With iron equipment I was prepared to fight at night and do some spelunking. The main reason to go out at night is to find fallen stars, which increase your max mana - although that isn't super relevant at this point. There are also eye enemy types that drop lenses, which can be used for a lot of different things including summoning the first boss. I know an important early step is to start digging up the crystal hearts that increase your max health. I haven't found any yet, so my next step will be to look for them.

Although we do have a goal here, which is to take down the final boss of a hard mode world, this is one of those games where you have to make your own fun to a certain extent. The little project I've set out for myself is to build a big home base - kind of like an apartment building - mostly using red bricks, which means I have to mine clay to depletion wherever I find it. Here's how it looks so far:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/380275424208617474/818865701640863744/terrar.jpg

I'm playing on "mediumcore" mode, which means you drop both money and items when you die. I'm not sure if that was the right call, because it is a little bit annoying. I got offed by a random explosive trap underground and dropped a full inventory's worth of items that it was then kind of tough to retrieve. There was a little bit of fun to be had figuring out how to get back with no weapons then, though. I'm having fun with it so far - probably more than I expected to.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

Terraria
Release Date: May 16, 2011
Previous Experience with Terraria: Took down the Wall of Flesh
Expectations for Terraria: A fun, if slow-paced, little indie game

I'm just young enough to be in the first generation of kids who are nostalgic about Minecraft. My little brother played it a lot growing up and still revisits it once in a while, but I never played it beyond a few hours of the beta and don't have much interest in trying it again.

Terraria is basically proof that I rejected Minecraft for shallow reasons. It's not far from being a 2D version of the same game, but I spent hours mucking around in it and even made a decent amount of progress. Some of that was circumstance, since my dad and brothers were playing it while we lived together, but the biggest fact is that I'm just a sucker for sprite-based 2D graphics, even crappy ones like Terraria's. One of my strongest memories of this game is grinding for a long time to assemble the three pieces of a bee costume for my character, and I also played it for a long time on a PS3 with no internet connection, which made me rely extensively on the normally-useless Guide for tips and crafting recipes, which made me so grateful toward him that I didn't want to kill him off to progress the main quest, which is mandatory. My guide's name was Cody. I think I made a new world and switched over to it so that Cody would be OK.

I haven't really touched it in years. I think revisiting it will be a slightly weird experience. I don't imagine playing it on my own will really measure up to the memories I made staying up to play it with other people, and I'm not sure how much I like the game in itself. I think it will still be fun, but maybe a touch bittersweet.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

Final Analysis: God of War III
What I thought of GoWIII: A very moving game, and one I'll remember for a long time.
Would I play it again? My second playthrough is already underway
Would I nominate it for GotD 2030? Hard to say, but probably.

Every game has a lineage, whether obvious or not. Something like Adventure gave way to The Legend of Zelda which was the main source of inspiration for Symphony of the Night and belongs on its family tree right beside its own series. While it's not quite as important as Nintendo's biggest names, Earthbound has its own happy little family - most of them indie games. Lisa and Undertale are the most well-known examples, and I enjoyed both of those games, so when I found out about their depressive little brother God of War III I didn't hesitate for long on buying it.

Actually, Zelda might be a part of the lineage here too, because God of War III uses that kind of split-world dualism that's so important to Link to the Past or, if you prefer a more obscure example, the H.R. Geiger-backed Darkseid. You start the game as the God of War in his happy-go-lucky dreamworld of Olympus, but the God of War is just a coping mechanism for the real protagonist, Kratos, who is three days away from leaving his hometown of Sparta for good. Lots of things in Olympus are symbolic and almost everything has some counterpart in Sparta, but what's really important is the sense of contrast it creates. Olympus is half dream and half memory: it's a representation of a time when Kratos was happy. The God of War has friends all around him, and he goes on whimsical, straightforward adventures. The Kratos in Sparta has lost people he loves and watched his friends move away from him. He just wants to go back, and I at least found it hard not to feel for him - which itself is essential for all the other fascinating things God of War III's story achieves.

God of War III deals with some pretty heavy themes. Kratos has a lot of guilt to deal with, and he's trying to forgive himself, but does he even deserve to be forgiven? Every story needs balance, though. If it's only depressing and miserable all the time, it stops meaning anything - that's why Grave of the Fireflies is full of scenes where the kids just play and enjoy themselves. More than anything else, God of War III is great at managing that balance. Ultimately, it's a game about healing, and Kratos does not have to do all his healing alone - in fact, he couldn't do it without extensive help from, among others, his friend Athena and her brother Hephaestus.

I think what impresses me most is how effortlessly God of War III made me love its characters. There must be something instructive in it - I think the essence is that it comes up with weird, almost random things, commits to them with a lot of energy and no embarrassment, and never really lets up. All the kids are so earnest, emotional, and charming. They have expressive easily-differentiated personalities and a lot of emotional range. I know it's not just me, either, because this same kind of feeling is expressed in all the parodies and memes that the fans share. Athena seems to be the fan favorite, probably because she's so spontaneous and fun-loving, but I think my favorite character is her brother, who of all the characters is the one I find most admirable.

It's obvious that the story is the stand-out part of God of War III, to the point where it's hard to focus on everything else, but for the record the rest of the game is really good too. The battle system is fun, with the follow-up attacks and emotion system doing a lot to differentiate it from others, and although the overworld graphics are as unimpressive as any other RPG Maker game, the battles and the dialog are full of great drawings by the game's illustrator-turned-director, Stig Asmussen.

One of the most important ideas the Mother games show off is how to unify your gameplay and storytelling. The high points of both Earthbound and Mother 3 are the final boss fights, which are never solved by defeating the enemy the normal way. Instead, they made creative use of RPG mechanics to create some of the most emotionally-charged encounters I've seen in the medium. God of War III learned well in this respect. Later areas are blocked off by fears Kratos will overcome, linking his personal growth the the expansion of the game-world around him, and this game's own final boss is one of my favorite game sequences I've seen in a long time. I can see a more gameplay-focused player not liking God of War III all that much, but as someone who is most interested in games as a young medium of storytelling, I thought this game was special.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

Oh, haha, were they in the first two games too? I remember that part near the start of the first one where two girls are asking Kratos to come back to bed, but I didn't get any QTEs with them. I must have missed it altogether in 2.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

Sorry about the long hiatus. Things have been a little busy for me lately - it looks like I'll be moving pretty soon.

I finished God of War III over the last few days. I think it's the best game in the original trilogy over all, but it also has the worst part of all three games. In 2010 games like Mass Effect 2 and RDR, bless them, were trying to push video games storytelling forward. Then you had God of War III with that scene where you do QTEs to make Kratos have sex with Aphrodite while two other girls watch and talk about how good he is at it, which I feel set the medium back by several years on its own. I still find the gameplay a little monotonous at points, but the upgrade system made more sense in this game and I actually used the Hercules Cestus along with the Blades of Chaos. I think I liked how they made the enemies like Sirens and Wraiths have specific counters. The overall highlights were the fights against Poseidon and Cronos. The Cronos fight incorporates the stupid climbing combat but the sense of scale that came with it was really cool. A lot of the encounters with Gods like Hermes, Helios, and Hera were disappointing.

I think the story becomes better the less the writers expect us to sympathize with Kratos. It makes more sense as just a fun romp where we watch a horrifically evil guy go on a rampage for no reason, but this particular game does seem to be trying to give Kratos a redemptive character arc about forgiving himself for killing his family. That's overall more interesting, and it's subject matter that I have found really impressive when it was explored in other games like Silent Hill 2, but I think the execution in GoW specifically is about as sloppy as it can get. My biggest issue with it is that Kratos never stops committing atrocities, so it feels really cheap to have him "atone" right at the end. I mean, he pretty much destroys the world over the course of this game alone. He does things like chaining a defenseless woman to a wheel so that it will crush her body and get stuck to keep a door open for him. I might have liked it better if he actually spared Zeus after that whole psychological horror section during their fight where he makes peace with himself. That feels like it was a chance for him to actually act upon his redemption by ending the cycle of violence he's been keeping on. For most of the last hour or so you're doing escort missions with Pandora who sort of serves as a surrogate daughter figure to Kratos. It kind of predicts those Last of Us and new GoW "Dad games" that have become more popular lately. Parenthood is definitely a theme of the game as shown by Daedalus and Hephaestus having storylines revolving around their kids. I felt like the bond between Kratos and Pandora was so rushed that it felt forced, like Kratos became protective of her simply because the script wanted him to. It doesn't help how it's been less than 2 hours since he murdered her dad.

Anyway, it's a relief to have this trilogy out of the way. I'll try to pick up the pace starting now.

Final Thoughts on God of War III coming up.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: Terraria

colliding posted...

boy xenogears sucks huh

Yeah it's so bad. I really hope no one stuffs for it and makes it win the whole thing, that would be a horrible result.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

Lightning Strikes posted...

Yep, Persephone is the main villain and final boss of the first PSP game. There was a second one that used the original planned GoWII plot. They also got bundled together on PS3. They were really impressive for PSP games but likely dont hold up outside it.

I am interested in the discussions that will be had when you get to GoW2018 regarding the characterisation of Kratos.

Hmm, yeah, I can see them just seeming like slightly-downgraded versions of a normal God of War game if you went back to them now. It feels a little weird for this game's story to be so "reliant" on side-games a lot of people might have missed, but I guess that's common enough for video games. It's no Kingdom Hearts in this respect, and it's at least pretty easy to understand what's going on without having played those games. I'll be curious too see how I like Kratos in the new version too. From what little I do know about it I think I'll like him better as a character. I've seen a couple of clips from that game where he acts more like an actual person.

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If I was a bit underwhelmed by what this game does with Hades, that's nothing compared to how it uses Helios. You don't actually fight the guy, really - you shoot one arrow from a ballista at his chariot, a titan crushes him like a fly, and then you run over and finish him off while he's lying wounded on the ground, after he says something about the plot of the PSP games again. This doesn't really do justice to the idea of fighting a God, imo. Kratos tears off Helios' head, which still emits magical light, and then you play a dark level based around using it to see where you're going. It also uncovers secret areas for you sometimes.

Last time I forgot to mention that Kratos also killed Gaia. After he gets out of the underworld she shows up hanging onto a cliff with one wounded hand and he cuts her down so she falls. I guess he's fighting the Titans as well as the Gods now, since the same one who helped him kill Helios tries to crush Kratos when he sees him.

Hermes shows up next. I always liked him when I was reading about Greek Mythology as a kid, although I couldn't really tell you why. He might be my favorite character in these games too so far. He just runs away while saying mean things about Kratos to hurt his feelings. I guess it's nice to see someone who's not just completely serious all the time in these games. I stopped just after his introduction.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

Undeserved

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

colliding posted...

If you haven't learned yet, if you come into one of these polls and say something negative about a game/person/condiment/chip flavor, that choice gets vote- stuffed.

hmm...

Xenogears fucking sucks, I can't believe people are voting for that garbage. Disc 2 was literally the worst gaming experience of my life

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

I got just past the part where Kratos escapes from the Underworld. The fight against Hades was a little disappointing, in comparison to the one with Poseidon. He's just kind of a large man with a chain whip, where Poseidon had a lot of awe-inspiring water powers to show off. He talks a lot about Kratos killing his wife Persephone, which I don't remember. Was that part of the PSP game? Hades has a weapon that can harvest souls from people, which Kratos steals during the fight and uses to capture Hades' own soul. Oops! The underworld goes to Hell and Kratos is free to swim in the river Styx with no problems and use the magical portal out of there and over to the city of Olympia. Helios rides through the skybox on his chariot when Kratos first arrives, so I assume he's getting killed off next.

The whole characterization and conceptualization of Hades probably come off a little worse after last year's game with that title, where he was a much more complicated character and the fact that he and the other Gods can't die was integrated into the overall story. He's kind of just a big angry man who looks like he's dressed for some very hardcore BDSM in this game.

Like I said before, the gameplay is more or less the same as the first two games, including all the weaker parts. The climbing combat is still a joke and the puzzles kind of lack creativity. The gorgon and minotaur enemies look different but they still do all the same things. Although the combat is definitely the best part, I do find myself getting kind of bored with it. Maybe it's similar to other combat-heavy games like ME2 where when not much else besides combat is happening I have trouble getting invested, since some of the encounters can be kind of long.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

DeathChicken posted...

Nick Cave & PJ Harvey - Henry Lee

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

I liked Cabin in the Woods, but everything else I've seen involving him has been mediocre to terrible. I haven't seen Firefly or Buffy though.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

It's interesting reading your speculations on the story so far.

What are some examples of other games in the same genre as what you're expecting from Omori? I think the game does have a definite "lineage" that's easy to see, partially from Earthbound-influenced games like you've said (it reminds me of both Undertale and Lisa at different points,) and also older indie games like Yumi Nikki.

I would definitely second the recommendation that you answer the door.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

Porky Minch or Shadow the Hedgehog

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III

Game is good

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 17/129
Currently Playing: God of War III