Category: Games

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Games

Diablo III, the destroyer of Baulder’s Gate!

As an Xbox fan and someone who loves loot, Baulder’s Gate was always the go to game for couch coop; tons of pixelated gold; godlike armor and weapons and the obliteration of otherworldly creatures. However, now that I have finally taken the opportunity to play Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition on Xbox One, I think my favorite dungeon crawler of consoles past has been dethroned. Blizzard took a genre of game that hasn’t had a real console hit in almost ten years and revived it’s heaving corpse. Between the amazing look and feel of the game and it’s great story telling, this was a long needed break from the FPSs and TPSs that are currently taking over the console world. And although you have the option of playing online with friends, you can just sit on your couch, have a few beers and tear it up with a couple buddies in your living room.

Ok, enough of my babbling, let’s get to it.

I started this game up and linked all of my accounts and got rolling into what can only be described as a high definition brain-gasm of animated excellence. I’ve always been the type to push through so that I can see how the story progresses and with the way the technology has been leaping forward in the last few generations of consoles, I have been more than impressed with the level of detail possible in even the least funded indie game. But Diablo III is a beautiful example of story telling in graphic animation and gameplay.

Once I was introduced to my character and I was familiarized with the controls, it was a fairly linear progression for the first hour or so of Act I. Which actually works to your advantage. You need the loot and items given to you in that first hour of the game just to have a chance at surviving the onslaught of undead hordes and malicious minotaurs soon to be mobbing you at every turn.wizard-vs-skeleton-summoner-large I have honestly only started two characters and focused more on my wizard, but I found that the advantage of dealing damage from a distance with the healing power of the paladin companion makes for a nearly unstoppable combination. The crafting progression takes some time with the first play through, but all characters you create can take advantage of the items and crafting abilities you’ve earned. I like this mechanic, mainly because it gets boring when you decide to start a new character and end up having to farm like crazy all over again, but also because it allows you to create a character for each group you play with. I don’t know about your friends, but mine all have their favorite class, and I like to be able to join them whenever possible.

I don’t like to spoil things for people, so for those of you that haven’t played I won’t get into details of the storyline. But I will say that while playing, don’t dismiss the companions storylines. It may seem like there isn’t a point to listening to all the blabbering about their past, but Blizzard managed to round out those storylines quite elegantly. As for the rest of the games story, it runs pretty cohesively with bits of campy dialog scattered about. That’s not to say that there aren’t times you would rather get a root canal than blast through one more dungeon, but that’s just par for the course with dungeon crawlers.

Now down to brass tax. I give this game a definitive 9.5. It’s highly addictive gameplay and engaging story telling keep your appetite for the destruction of the Great Evils satiated heart pounding victories and soul crushing defeats.

So what are you waiting for? Tend to your homebrew, crack open a cold one and destroy the armies of evil!!

 

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Old Meets New In Watch Dogs

I have only just begun to really get into the full depths of Watch Dogs. The latest iteration from Ubisoft is without a doubt a marriage of GTA style shoot and scoot with a modern twist of network sabotage. I’ve read a few of the early reviews and I have to disagree with the maj0rity take. Watch Dogs has done something amazing.

A majority of the multiplayer-esque gameplay is seamlessly started with a click of the down button on the d-pad. It’s non-intrusive as the default setting is off for people to just hop in and reek havoc, but there are instances where you hack a particularly aware citizen, who then puts out a contract on you that allows other players to drop in and try to collect on your digital head. The only loading screens I’ve seen thus far are when you start/continue your game and when you respawn. The only downside I’ve found with online multiplayer so far is that, as a Windows user, I cannot download the ctOS Mobile app. I have not been able to use it and thus cannot comment on whether or not it’s worth using, but from some of the demonstrations I’ve seen online it seems like it’s a good idea.

The main campaign is supposed to be a total of 20 hours of gameplay on its own and with the available and future DLC it can go much further. Aiden has been described as “boring” and “less entertaining then the characters around him”, but I have found his character interacts well with the surrounding characters, and although his humor is somewhat dry, he still lends plenty of substance to the overall feel of the game. There is a lot to cover in the campaign but I don’t want spoil too much of the game for those people that haven’t played yet. So instead, I’ll just cover one particular mission that I found to be the most fun so far, and of course that mission involves going to jail.

Aiden is tasked with finding a man who can link him to several deaths that occurred at the stadium. To start this off you walk into a police station, gun drawn, and get yourself arrested. A bold move, but very effective. When being checked in you’re given your phone and baton back by an inmate that owed one to an acquaintance of Aiden’s. This gives Aiden the ability to change the name he’s checked in as and start hacking his way out of his cell. After hacking a few cameras and moving around as carefully as possible to keep from being seen, you reach a control room where you find out where this guy is. You find him on the roof where the other inmates are enjoying their yard time. While watching him Aiden wonders how he’s going to get to him, but he finds his task is taken care of for him when a couple of crooked guards take him off for some unorthodox questioning. So, you turn around and make your way down to the basement where you find your guy getting his ass handed to him. On your way into the room you find a shotgun and with a well place hack to cause a pipe to burst and take out one or two guards you start a pretty brutal gun battle in this tight space. This is the point where you’re introduced to the heavily armored police officer. This guy starts off scary, taking every shotgun blast with a laugh, but once you calm down and let him take his pot shots at your cover you notice he starts reloading. This gives you the perfect opportunity to show him how you hit something with a shotgun. And after a few rounds of blast and hide you take that smug bastard down. Cut to the scene in which you confront the snitch and scare this idiot into a special kind of silence.

Once that’s taken care of, you make your way to an elevator where you find someone has left you a gift. All of you gear in a duffle bag! Unfortunately you make your way to the parking garage where the whole damn department is waiting for you. A few well place grenades make getting out of the parking garage a snap, but the chase is on. Hack the chopper to temporarily shut down its ability to track you, and few well timed hacks to traffic lights, steam pipes and blockades and your home free.

I make all of this sound ridiculously easy, but the truth is that sneaking around is slow work and driving takes a lot of getting used to. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the fine tuned light touch of games like GTA and NFS, but I find that the driving controls need some help. And sometimes I find myself ready to chuck the controller when the right bumper doesn’t work, but this is all stuff that can, and probably will be, fixed in an update.

Overall, I would say that this game is a resounding success. I look forward to seeing how this franchise impacts the industry and how we play games on a social level. Have fun, and I hope to see you in-game.

UPDATE:
After having finished the main campaign, I have to applaud Ubisoft on yet another great story. Even the initial credits have added content to round things up. If a sequal is in the works for Watch Dogs I will definitely pick up a day one copy.

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Games

Grand Theft WTF?

grand-theft-auto-v-wallp-2013I have been avoiding GTA as a series for years. I loved playing the original 2D PC platformer, but when I gave GTA San Andreas a try I was pretty disappointed. The story was lacking in any real imagination and it was basically a slew of expletives and killing hookers. As it was a good way to kill time, it wasn’t exactly appealing or addictive gameplay. However, my wife recently saw a her cousins husband playing GTA V and watched a bit of storyline, and thought that I would enjoy this particular release of the GTA franchise. I was a little hesitant to say the least, but when I actually got started on the game, I was happy to find that Rockstar Games had done their homework and found that they needed to put more attention into their story and content.

First things first. I won’t go into the stories details. (I figure you’ll probably want to see that for yourself.) They have taken what could have easily been a very linear storyline and split it into three parts, each of which you can swap between at almost any point in the game. All three storylines crossover into one cohesive plot. In my opinion this was a great way to hook a player in and keep them going for hours. Personally I have a hard time putting it down. I just want to see what crazy thing comes next. You’ve got three very different characters.

  • grand-theft-auto-v-16892-1920x1080Michael is the mastermind behind most of the jobs you pull and he also acts as a sort of mentor for Franklin.
  • Franklin is the kid that’s just trying to keep out of jail and get himself out of the hood. Michael takes him under his wing after he sees Franklin is a lot like he was at his age.
  • Finally there’s Trevor. This guy is a total f***in’ nut-job. He spends a good portion of his time scaring the hell out of people and going on some seriously sadistic rampages. That being said, he really cares for his friends, even though he wouldn’t hesitate to kill them the minute he feels like they betray him.

On to the gameplay. I am seriously impressed by the amount of detail crammed into this game. This isn’t a next gen title, so seeing what they were able to do with it was amazing. It transitions flawlessly from cut-scene to gameplay. Driving isn’t clumsy anymore, they managed to make controlling your vehicle pretty intuitive and learnable (by learnable I mean that you can actually learn how your favorite car handles and keep it in one piece). There are plenty of side missions you can screw around with, making the game world  feel larger. Several of which actually make it possible to manipulate the in-game stock market. There are far more choices to make in the world. Several missions make use of many different options that you can try. Save before starting a mission so you can see which one works out better for you, or to see what changes in the world when you do a job the messy way.  The radio news you hear when in vehicles will talk about your exploits, although they don’t actually use names it’s interesting to hear that something you did was covered up or twisted by the news to sound more dubious then it actually was.

Online play, while interesting, isn’t what I personally will be playing a lot of. I gave it about 30 minutes of my time, and while I’ll admit that’s not a lot of time, it was enough for me to try a couple of the missions they have set up in the online Los Santos. The load times for missions involving other players are pretty long and if you activate it you’re in until you can get to a menu screen to exit out of the instance, and with the long load times, it makes it a bit like trying to pierce your cornea. Painful and frustrating. I hadn’t found anything in the time I played that was doable on your own, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means I didn’t bother to find it.

My overall impressions, as they’re mostly apparent in previous text, are good with a few minor buts. I did, at one point, find myself stuck and not knowing how to move forward. I eventually figured out that doing the character specific story missions move you forward, but it could have been made more apparent then it was. I also found that some of the getaways aren’t as smooth as they could be. I realize that may sound stupid, but when you want to move forward with the game without using to ‘skip mission’ option, it can be difficult to maintain your sanity. Parts of the map get confusing and make it difficult to get away from pursuing cops, particularly near the docks where the roads go in circles. When you’re trying to keep from getting cornered it’s hard to concentrate enough on the map and driving to devise a good escape. The strategy I came up with was to enter the map in the pause menu and pick a place far from the side of the map you’re on and follow the GPS. It keeps you from going in circles and gives you the chance to get to a customs shop in order to change the color of your vehicle, effectively lowering your wanted level and ending the chase. If asked, I would rate this game like an 8 out of 10. The main game is excellent, but GTA Online needs some help.

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Games

Titanfall Beta at an Xbox One near you!

Titanfall_ArtI, like many thousands of others, have downloaded and started playing the highly anticipated open Titanfall Beta for the Xbox One. My immediate assessment was “Holy hell, not another online multiplayer without a story to back it up!” But I was wrong, and happily so. I found that there are little tidbits of the games lore on the loading screens, and they seem to lend to what could be a rich main story.

The current game play however, is amazing. Respawn has given the player a limited number of levels to earn that net you some swag and customization options, an Atlas Titan, and some of the best online versus play that I’ve ever played. The maps are large, but not so big that you can’t find your next target. The graphics are running like butter, which just about left me speechless when that first Titan went nuclear and took out an entire intersect. About the only thing that could have made the gameplay better would have been the ability to take out chunks of buildings.

So far this beta has given us a glimpse at the amazing direction that multiplayer gaming is headed. It’s added a whole new element to virtual battlefield that will force players to reconsider their next move and change strategies on the fly. And with the addition of challenges (I know they aren’t the first to do this) that target things like ‘Time in a Titan’; ‘Distance walked’ or ‘Kills with insert weapon here’, it makes you want to try things differently each time through, making the next battle against the same team of players new and much less predictable.

All in all, Respawn did one hell of a job. Now go to your Xbox One, download the beta and get ready for March 11 (which can’t come soon enough!).

UPDATE: I never bothered to record any of my personal gameplay, but I’ve found this video from Machinima that has some of the Beta play. Just to be clear though, watching and playing are two different animals.

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Games

Fable Anniversary

Picture via Gameinformer.com
Picture via Gameinformer.com

This is my first game review and I’m glad it happens to be for this game. I really liked playing the original because it was the first game I played where my choices were actually reflected by the NPCs and the way my character evolved.

This isn’t the first re-mastered game I’ve played and I’m sure it won’t be the last. However, as far as updates go, this is a good one. The storyline itself seems to have been kept in tact (as I’ve only just begun to dig into the game I haven’t found any major changes as of yet). I have noticed some issues with the voice overs being doubled over, as if when updating to newer sound bites the old ones weren’t completely removed. I’m sure as people complain this will be updated to oblivion, but for now it’s just a small Easter Egg for those who’ve played the original. I’ve also noticed some freezing and glitch-y-ness, but nothing you can’t get past, just remember to save frequently.

It’s often easy to go overboard with adding things just because you can and fortunately Lionhead didn’t fall victim to this easily tripped landmine. They’ve made some significant changes to the menus and control layout, although those who are familiar with Fable II and III won’t have a very hard time adjusting to the updated controls. The controls are little slow with a wireless controller and I find myself button smashing on occasion, but I plug in my wired controller and things become smooth as butter. The menus take a little time to get comfortable with, but are otherwise pretty intuitive. Lionhead also added a Smartglass app that makes exploration a little easier, for about $3.50 (after tax) you can even add a little bit of help finding books, those elusive silver keys, chests, and opening Demon Doors. I haven’t been able to get my Surface RT to keep up, but I got my WP8 to run it no problem.

Technical hooey aside, I find myself just as engrossed in the Fable universe as I was the first time. The changes in detail make it that much easier to fall in and lose myself in the game. Lionhead’s team did a spectacular job of making those changes just pop in a way that keeps you finding more of the details they’ve added each time you play. They stayed true to the way the original game moved and felt while still pulling you in with rich sound and texture. I truly hope that you enjoy this game as much I have and put some time into your character, you’d be surprised just how much detail they went into when it comes to character evolution.

UPDATE: As I continue through the game I keep finding instances where the game just locks up, and as we all know, the 360 doesn’t handle lockups very well. So, for those of you who don’t follow Lionhead closely, here is a link to a thread that their support has posted.  Lionhead Support

UPDATE NUMERO DOS: There has been a patch rolled out in an effort to fix a majority of the bugs. Follow the link here and you will find the patch thread.  Fable Patch Thread

**I’ll try to keep this post updated as I find things or as updates change things.