Just Let Ezio Die Already
But… why… no… why would you… but… Oh, Nathan.
What have I done?
Nobody thinks this is a good idea.
alright already, let’s talk about skyrim
Let me tell you what I love about Skyrim. Let’s just get that out of the way first.
There’s currently three people in my house playing Skyrim on the same Xbox, and our approaches to the game are all entirely different. I play the game like I played Fallout 3, which is a lot, coincidentally, how I played Jagged Alliance 2. I run into a dungeon, I beat people over the head with brute force, no stealth, no magic, no subtlety, and then I pick up everything I can carry and take it to my house (or, in JA2, quadrant or city or whatever) and I store that shit. I keep one of everything and sell everything else. And I mostly wander around and do this constantly. It’s insane. I know it is. But it’s what I do and it makes me happy. I’ve barely touched the main quest… or even most of the side quests? Mostly I just walk in a direction and kill everything that moves, harvest it’s bits, and craft things.
My other (temporary) roommate, Angus, does things a little differently. He’s playing a mage, but not the kind that throws fireballs. He’s going full out in illusions and conjuring and alterations. He spawns powerful atronachs to fight for him. He makes people go crazy. He sneaks around and shoots folks with conjured bows. He only wears robes. I watched him terrify a room full of giant spiders. They all backed into corners and stood still while he pumped them full of magic arrows. He’s the archmage of the magic school or whatever. He’s barely touched the main quest. But also, he spends a lot of time trying to get himself into places he shouldn’t be able to get to.
My other roommate, Eric, is running around with a sword in one hand and fireballs in the other. He responds to dialogue in the sassiest way possible. He (mostly) plays the game solo (no followers) and is a good chunk of the way on the main quest. He doesn’t seem to be too worried about having a house or storing shit. Or even selling things. He just goes from place to place setting people on fire and seeing what he can see. Quest-based tourism.
And I think that’s what I love about Skyrim. Everyone plays it different and the game totally allows for it. I remember talking to someone about Fallout 3 and they said they wanted to play the game as an explosives expert with zero luck so things would blow up in their face all the time and result in comedy. The downside, I guess, is that I can’t imagine a situation where that would make for a fun game at all. Fallout wanted to give you options, but let me tell you, if you wanted to have high unarmed skill in fallout and go full melee, you were probably going to be very annoyed that you spent most of your time being shot at. Skyrim seems to allow for all possibilities. I read this great review over at Killscreen that basically says the same thing, only it’s about how, apparently, there are groups of white supremacists who love the ultranationalism happening in the game’s b-plot.
Anyway… I’ve had this problem for years where I’ve been sort of a backseat player. I watch my friends play games and wonder why they’re not “playing it right” (like this one time where Angus was playing Red Dead Redemption and kept trying to see if he could climb up on the roof of this building) and I start saying “you should do x”. Skyrim is the first time I’ve sat and watched people play a game where I just go “huh, this is totally different than the game I’m playing… it’s the same world, but the rules are different for everyone.” I had a friend ask me about Skyrim and what the “goal” of it was. I was sort of at a loss for a real answer. And, typically, I think we’d suggest that it means the game is sort of pointless. But, really, there are just so many goals. I felt like the best answer was “to get lost in it.”
So here I am.
That’s what I love. Complete relativity? Oh, except you can’t put it the fuck down. So that’s a problem. And sometimes enemies that seemed like they were pushovers are met at the end of a dungeon with something that’s impossibly difficult. But whatever. All the old Elder Scrolls- and Fallout-style bugs and annoyances apply. But man. So satisfying. I mostly hope it’s a great omen for Fallout 4.
Yup.
A Creed Too Far
It’s pretty banal to mention this, but I really enjoy the Assassin’s Creed series. I enjoyed it from its divisive first installment up to the rapid fire turnaround of Brotherhood. Assassin’s Creed 2 Part 3: The Revelationing just came out and I grabbed it right away.
Free to Trundle
I complained a bit, earlier, about how social games made me feel like a resource being extracted. It’s a risk that any game following this newfangled “free to play” model runs. The game needs to be good enough to get you to want to buy stuff, but it also needs to not be too good in its free incarnation, as that would satisfy everyone too much. Or so seems to be the thought process behind most games, from what I can tell. In the worst cases, you get these really abusive feeling games that feel like video poker terminals, flashing lights and dings and numbers going up at you in the hopes of hooking you, but putting in lots of annoying barriers and timesinks in order to chip away at your wallet. Basically, what he said but in fewer than 5 million words.
In the best cases, you win whether you are a paying user or not. If you are a freeloader like I usually am, you get a good game at a bargain price. Even if you are a paying customer, there is a boost in that the masses of free people usually ensure a vibrant user population. Since we’re talking about online multiplayer games more or less exclusively, this is an important feature; these games live or die based on having a critical mass of population. Without the free-to-play model a lot of these games would basically be dead in the water. This is especially true of MMOs who would otherwise have to compete with World of Whatchamacallit on a feature-by-feature basis. It’s also true of the following little gem of a game: World of Tanks.
Dragon Clickers
Fine, I’ll post something. I guess it might as well have something to do with the Zynga stuff below, even though that post is ancient now.
So, Facebook games. As I mentioned in the comments I am now reading yet don’t remember writing below, I’m “That Guy Who Isn’t On Facebook”. There are various reasons why. It’s not quite entirely old mannish reactionary iconoclasm, but there are probably elements of that. In any case, the only thing that had me tempted to sign up is when I found out that Sid Meier was working on a Civilization game for it. But by the time it arrived I kind of didn’t care anymore and it appears that neither did anyone else so that’s that.
I did end up on Google+, though. Why? Basically because I already had a Google profile and use iGoogle and Gmail and Google Reader and Google Documents and Google basically owns my soul at this point and I’ll be the first against the wall when Google Skynet achieves sentience. I have no friends, though, so there isn’t much activity on it. But, a propos to this blog, it has games now! I finally get to see what everyone’s been talking about. Specifically, I tried the Dragon Age one and something called Edgeworld.
Yeah, so these games are garbage.
zynga and other happenings
I just wrote a post on my other blog about how blogging is dead and no one reads blogs. But I like this little blog. I have two other writers who play a lot of games. I play a lot of games. We all play games. All the time. I have like maybe 20 games on my iPod touch. I always have a favorite. I play them during tiny bits of downtime where there’s little else to do. This sometimes occurs on the toilet. Actually, it often occurs on the toilet.
So I don’t want to get rid of the blog because I think that Angus and Nathan and I have a lot to say about games and maybe some of it isn’t pointless or uninteresting. That’s a hunch.
I’d like to talk about the following in the next little while:
- Red Dead Redemption is amazing.
- I want more Xbox Live Arcade games.
- Shared reviews from Every Game Ever.
- Zynga
That last one is interesting because for the first time in the 2 plus years I’ve watched people blow their time on Farmville and I’ve sat around smugly insisting that they’re wasting their stupid time, I’m starting to get curious about their latest game, Frontierville. There’s got to be something about it that people want. I want to try it out. Maybe. I just hate the idea. We’ll see, I guess. But I’ll write about it. Right now I don’t know any serious gamers who play it because they all think they’re better than it (as a brief aside, core gamers are assholes. Complete Assholes. Maybe it’s just the ones who are vocal on the internet, but fuck you guys). But I was on the WoW treadmill for about 5 months on two separate occasions and from what I can tell there isn’t a whole lot of difference other than graphically.
So anyway… hopefully I’ll write these things soon. Hopefully. And hopefully also Nathan will start posting again. He said he’d stop until Angus or I wrote something. So here we are.
Oh yeah, and I thought it would be at least entertaining to mention that I traded in Final Fantasy XIII so I could get Transformers: War for Cybertron. It was about 400% more fun than Final Fantasy XIII, which was a pile of horrible story-telling and questionable game-play.
Try to remember that games should be fun to play. That is the point after all.
- M
Tips to make Deadly Premonition playable
This is one of a series of posts about Deadly Premonition.
As I think I’ve mentioned, Deadly Premonition is kind of a clunky game to play. Here are the lessons I learned that make the game a lot easy to stomach, moment to moment. A lot of these are actually mentioned in the surprisingly in-depth and lengthy manual (at least for this day and age.) Others are mild spoilers in terms of quest rewards, but trust me you’ll probably want to know them in advance unless you’re just going to get everything anyway. Anyway, here they are:
Talkin bout spoilers
This is one of a series of posts about Deadly Premonition.
Spoilers are always a threat with me, mainly since I kind of obsessively read up on games while I am playing them. Some games I don’t really care about spoilers, but others (like Deadly Premonition) are full of twists and turns that I don’t want revealed. That can be difficult to avoid, however, but I’m actually pretty good about it when I really want to be.
