Evil Within is Awful

That is all.

Okay that's not all. It's really that bad. Poor Shauna had such high hopes for the game. I think she was expecting scary and instead we got blurry graphics, poor performance, terrible controls and all around bad gameplay. All it has going for it at this point is a few intuitive game mechanics. I think this is the first game we have changed the difficulty on to make it easier. And that's saying something when we played all of Alien Isolation on HARD.

I actually had to take a break from fighting the butcher boss. He's the one with the chainsaw in the barn on chapter 3. I was so angry and stressed out it mixed with my upset stomach and the heat, and I literally ended up needing a 10 minute break from the game as I sat on Shauna's couch with a bag of frozen hashbrowns on my face. So we have now coined the term "Hashbrowns-on-face bad" to describe a game. Might just shorten that to "hashbrown bad," but that would suggest that hashbrowns are anything but delicious.

Before this boss you have to wander around this town area using the "stealth" mode because your weapons and fighting skills are shit. You can't see half the traps. You can't see half of everything. We had to reduce the resolution and graphics quality just to get the game to run at 25-30fps. Anything higher than the reduced settings gives us 10-11fps. This is all BEFORE Fraps is a factor. Actually we had so many issues even getting the game to run at all. I had to upgrade drivers, turn off settings, edit some files and FINALLY it ran. Even before we reduced the graphics quality, the character moves in this lurching, drunken gait. We had to turn off motion blur because we were getting nauseous. It was even bad during the cinematics, which feature all these plastic looking people.

Then the controls. After playing a good 2-3 hours last night, I finally got the controls to work in my favour, but seriously, I keep hammering the R3 button to crouch or run because muscle memory dictates it. I keep accidentally turning on my ass light and alerting all the zombie dudes because it's bound to L3. I pull out my gun to shoot, but then I want to switch to my fists to pummel a guy and end up shooting with my melee button because the melee button (R2) switches when you have a gun out (becomes Y...as in WHY DOES IT DO THIS?) and then L2 lets you aim and shoot, but the hip fire ends up being more accurate half the time. The inventory system lets you bind items to the D pad (figured that out last night), which helped greatly (though not with the melee issue) and sometimes when you try to use a pistol you whip out your crossbow and UGH. Then you're sprinting away from dudes, have a limited sprint, and when you run out you stand in place and catch your breath for three seconds which is long enough for a zombie to catch up and ram a pickaxe up your ass.

Realism. It's great. Except when it's not. IF the game had ways to compensate for the stamina feature, the slow-down on the stairs, the jittery and ineffective crouch system (seriously, you'll exit stealth randomly after performing certain actions), the lurching walk/run and the terrible camera (IF!), then yes, maybe we could work with this. But it doesn't. Combat is just as cumbersome (as mentioned above), the enemies arbitrarily see you when you sneak up on them, the enemies suddenly have weapons like shotguns (actually one cool aspect of the game I liked is that the AI will actually find and pick up weapons, so you often need to sneak or get to those weapons first) and they all do shit tons of damage. The traps are BS. I like the variety and they do catch me off guard and they are useful for killing unsuspecting enemies as you can lead them through trap areas, but disarming is awful. The bombs for instance. I assumed you'd get multiple turns of the needle to try and land the blue area. Nope. You get one shot to land it and if not, you explode when the needle hits the 12 0' clock position. Which, is incidentally hilarious as when you die to explosions your body just falls apart like a bloody, gooey mannequin. Your head just comically rolls off. Another great one (and quite satisfying), is when you land a headshot with a melee weapon and the zombie's head explodes you are showered with radioactive pink jam.

So yeah. Melee with weapons, when it works, is great. AI going for weapons is great. Needing to burn bodies and make sure things stay dead is great (though you can only carry FIVE MATCHES at the beginning of the game...and don't ask about where Shauna thinks he stores them). Having effects like fire and melee damage carry to other enemies and do splash damage is great. The variety of traps is cool. Everything else is disgusting. I'm to angry while playing to even pay attention to the atmosphere (or lack of) or the story while playing. All I know is that some detective dude was investigating an asylum and there's this undead ripoff Assassin's Creed assassin running around trying to be creepy, murdering random dudes and sticking knives in things and suddenly we're getting in car crashes and falling off cliffs and there's this mental patient that's important for some reason and an upgrade area with a doctor lady and...just what?

Man I'm sorry for all the typos you're going to find in there. That rant wasn't supposed to happen. Honestly, I'm more angry with this game than Awesome Possum. Yeah. You heard right. At least I expect that game to be awful. I expect the anger. When I need to run around for 30 mins trying to kill a guy cause I ran out of ammo and my only option is a spike trap (which was hard to time because Butcher McIdiot Face can't make up his mind whether he wants to get lost and confused or run at us at light speed) and need to stop to put frozen hashbrowns on my face, you know there's a problem.

War for the Overworld

This was meant to be a surprise since I was going to record and post this game as an LP, but we need to have a little chat about War for the Overworld.

What is this game? Well, this is kind of like the spiritual successor to the Dungeon Keeper series. It IS the Dungeon Keeper series essentially, but at the same time...it is not. The game is a kickstarter game released officially yesterday. It was around for early access, but I had forgotten about it and was none-the-wiser. Oliver told me about the game and I picked it up, because really, when Dungeon Keeper 2 is one of my all-time favourite games, and, incidentally, my first ever LP, I couldn't pass it up. So why do we need to chat?

Because the problems with the game are conflicting with my nostalgia. So last night I booted up the game, albeit not as excited as I should have been (I had a rough night) and was welcomed with a very loud menu screen. I went into the sound options to fix this. It's...not a sound option you can fix. The ambient noise in the menu is not one I can alter, so I need to use the windows sound to lower the overall game volume. Okay, whatever, small issue. I get into the , watch a cinematic (which was...all right yeah makes sense to set the stage) and it is also incredibly loud with no way to fix it. Also it seems to be very similar to Overlord's plot (if it has the same plot twist at the end I'm going to strangle a bear). Then we get to the campaign map. It looks like a Dungeon Keeper map. Swell. I click on the tutorial level and listen to the instructions, narrated by the mentor (who is the same voice actor as the first two games...cool!) Only the sound is still unbalanced and some of the voice acting just seems...weird to me. I want to say it sounds a little forced, but I don't know if it's just the specific inflections, or if the voice just isn't edited to be deep enough. I try and start...and then windows delightfully decides to throw the online permissions pop-up in my face. It crashes Fraps, which then crashes the game. GG.

I boot up the game again, watch the cinematic...again and try to start the level and finally get in. And this is where things get interesting.

Immediately upon entering the game I can see it's all there. The Dungeon Heart...I MEAN DUNGEON CORE. The rooms like the training room (UH BARRACKS), and the hatchery (ER UM SLAUGHTER HOUSE). I can see the gold, you can dig out areas for rooms, there are imps (uh workers?) and the legions of overly pompous and pathetic heroes. Only things are a little different. Rooms aren't simply given or researched by the sorcerers (er cultists...), you need to allocate "evil points" in what looks like a technology tree. And you get them in REALLY WEIRD orders. Yes, I am totally biased, but this is weird guys. I understand why it can't be just like the other games (copyright lollllll), and frankly, I don't mind a little change up. I'm going to still call everything what I'm used to calling it. Deal with it. This goes for the creatures as well.

So what do I like about all this and what do I not like? Well here's a list because I can't organize my thoughts enough right now to form coherent sentences. We'll start with the bad, and then move to the good.

Bad:
1. Buggy as hell - I have found multiple bugs already. For instance, in possession, if you select one of those whip options for the imps and click...your arm becomes a blur of movement in a jittery spazfest. Another one is for some reason, randomly, I could not build rooms, or select minions or sell anything. I think this is tied to the events manager where the game wants you to build something specific, but you ignore it or were doing something else at the time it assaulted you with objectives. Last, which was my all time FAVOURITE (and by this it made me want to start gnawing on my arm) was that if your dungeon heart is under attack, the game decides that this is the best time to drop your frame rate down to 1, as in it freezes for a couple seconds before recovering back to 60fps for a second and then freezes again. It becomes unplayable because you cannot act fast enough, in the 1 second you have to try and do something about it. I will need to start a level over because I just couldn't do anything.

2. Possession sucks - If you played DK2, you'll know that possession was extremely easy to use, had smooth movements and allowed you to fight, claim land and dig tunnels yourself. Here, you move like there's super glue on your feet. If you try to change directions while moving, you come to abrupt halt and get stuck on nothing, causing you to hammer the keys to get you moving again. If you stop and use the

3. The mini-map - What the hell asufhasliukfnaekdrsdfskfasld. This mini-map is messed up. Like really messed up. Okay so you enter the dungeon viewing the dungeon heart at an angle. This element is the same as DK2. That is fine. You can't click on the map and reorient it. You are always at an angle. Maybe I haven't been playing long enough to figure this out, but I'm pretty sure this is the map. You can't bring up the map fullscreen to look at things. AND IT IS CONFUSING. It's on an angle just like the view on the main screen is. So you look at the map and say, oh something is happening to my right...so you scroll to the right...and realize that whatever is happening is not actually to the right. It's actually UP. Not only that, but there's another bug where if you are being attacked, you get pinged, only sometimes you get pinged in a random corner of the map for no reason...

4. The camera - THAT'S A NICE LOOKING WALL. Okay so whenever the game takes over the camera to show you a new creature entering the dungeon, you hardly SEE the creature because the camera spends 75% of the time jammed in the wall. Great.

5. Story - I have no idea if they're going somewhere, but really, what made the other two games great on this front was the simplicity of it. Hi, you are an evil overlord. You want to take over shit. Great. Let me debrief you on this area, a little background on what you need to do to achieve your goal and GO. If they make this more than that, I will be upset (see previous comment about strangling a bear).

6. Over-explaining and hand-holding - Yeah, I get not everyone has played Dungeon Keeper before. Good on you for having the tutorial, but a lot of this stuff can be explained with a single line of dialogue. We don't need hightlighted areas, we don't need ten lines of dialogue explaining something simple (multiple times). Point to an area once, or move the camera to show, but don't make this excessive people. We can figure it out. We're evil overlords. Just let go and let us figure out on our own how to destroy our enemies, body and soul.

7. Zoom - Since I can't view the map in fullscreen (easily at least...I will look into this again). It'd be great if you could zoom out more. You can't. Only zoom in. In fact you can zoom in so far that you can essentially see the nose hairs on the cultists. Great. I'd prefer to zoom out.

8. Sound balancing - No matter what I do, some of the audio is too loud, and some is too quiet. this is going to take a lot of work to get to reasonable levels. Also some of the voice acting has some REALLY weird pronunciations, and I'm pretty sure that's not an accent issue.

Good:
1. Humour - The humour is still there! And that element is great! Some of the humour is unintentional, but it's still there! I like the dark humour and silliness. Micropigs! Hilarious! This is exactly how it should be.

2. Tone - While it has some significant changes in feel, the basics are still there. It's cut-throat, dark, and has those elements of the first game in it. I even appreciate the constant nagging, cause really that was a thing before (though I will rage before the end). I'm just waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

3. Graphics - Game is fairly pretty. There are some low-res assets, but those can be overlooked unless the camera is jammed places it shouldn't be. The tiles and the rooms look pretty neat. You an see where all the effort went in this game. There are some issues, like particle effects breaking and units turning into a mess of black squares when they die, but overall, its not bad. I could pick out a few other REALLY weird things, but that's just nit-picking at this point.

4. Level design - I see no problems with this so far. Looks like there will be good elements of strategy and a variety of environments to deal with. This is what I will continue to play the game for. I may rage, I may have issues with the interface and whatnot, but as long as the game FUNCTIONS and has the ability to challenge me in terms of the actual intended gameplay, I will play and finish this game.

5. Getting the old voice actor - As forced as it sounds sometimes, the voice actor is a nice touch. He is the same guy from the first two games (as mentioned before). My largest complaint is that his voice isn't deep enough in the campaign overview screen and randomly changes volumes (I still don't know the difference between "campaign voice" and "mentor voice" and if I set them at the same level, one is still quieter than the other and it makes no sense to me at all).


So should you get it?

I don't have a clue. I can see a lot of people playing this for nostalgia reasons. I have seen swaths of good comments and people raving about the game. Is it as good as the hype says it is? No. In my opinion it is not. It needs work. If they fixed the bugs, made possession and the interface more intuitive and smoother, than yes, this would a decent game. Currently, I am playing it solely for the level design and nostalgia aspect. I sincerely hope they fix a lot of things.


EDIT: I hoped and they delivered. Got an update today and they fixed a lot of things. Possession is a little less annoying (but still buggy). Attacks on the Dungeon Core do not freeze the game (though frame rate drops randomly and drastically in places). Sound has been rebalanced so things sound nice. The interface is now easier to interact with and doesn't lock me out anymore. Good job devs =D

Life is Strange Episode 2

Episode 2 is going up today. Marathoned the game again last night once I had access. It actually came at a really good time because I doubt I could have slept last night had I not taken the two and a half hours it took to play it. Went to sleep all right after that despite how...intense it got at the end.

So after having a little more of a taste of the game, what do I think? Well I'm interested enough to play and LP Episode 3. It didn't lose the momentum it had from the first game. The story is actually engaging. I want to keep playing and see what happens, and the story isn't afraid to delve into some dark stuff. The ending of this episode was proof of that (and I won't ruin it, but let's just say you can "fail" the climax of this little installment). The dialogue is....well strange. Heh. At some points, you seem to be having a real conversation with a real person...aaaand then you fall into cliches and lines that I don't believe any real person would say given the situation. In other words, sometimes the characters act like they would in real life, and then sometimes the characters act like ideas or stereotypes of people in real life. Like the only experience the writers had with teenagers is from bad high school dramas.

Graphics and gameplay is on par with episode 1. I forgot how one of the game mechanics worked, and I mention it, but I never actually had to use it. Music was lovely and mellow and sets the tone nicely. The game is paced well (an issue I see with a lot of games...and movies, is just poor freaking pacing). There are actually few games I would say are paced perfectly, but this is one of them. Even one of my favourite games, Transistor, had a few pacing issues. There's enough balance between actions and dialogue to allow for character development to happen.

My favourite part, although completely expected, is the attempts at making all characters sympathetic (but not necessarily likable). Even some of the nastiest characters at the school seem to have reasons for being the way they are and doing what they do. Doesn't make them good people, but you at least get everyone's backstory and understand where they're coming from...even if you really don't give a shit and would love to see them burn anyway. Also really interesting to see some actual research going into victim response and recovery implemented in the game, especially when I've been doing a lot of research in the area and training myself.

At any rate, I still recommend playing it, or even watching it (should find someone more interesting than me though).

That janitor though. Creepy as hell, but I can't help but think he's the only one who actually knows wtf is going on in the town...in terms of mystical bru-ha-hah anyway.

Soundtrack Thursday 20

I've done quite a lot of these now, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only one that enjoys them. I've collected a lot of good soundtrack music through this.

Might as well start with Watch Dogs as it came out a few days ago. Naturally, the soundtrack is already uploaded. My initial impressions of the game are below. The soundtrack is good. Reminds me a lot of  inFamous Second Son elements in some places.

Next up is Mirror's Edge. Never played the game, but after the soundtrack...I kind of want to. Nice background working music.

inFamous 1 and 2 in the same compilation for the next section. Clocking in at two hours, this should get me to the end of my work day.

So Watch Dogs. I have the PS4 version. It does not feel like a PS4 game. I wasn't super hyped about the game to be honest. My brother on the other hand, was excited, especially when he heard that people from Driver San Francisco were going to be working on the project. He's camping right now with his phys ed class. He might be a little disappointed when he gets back. I played some Watch Dogs last night, and while I've never played Driver SF before (it's on the list because Michael keeps nagging me to play), I doubt the cars in there drove like spazzy boats. I am terrible at driving in video games, and it looks like Watch Dogs will be A LOT of that.

Let's talk about my initial impressions. It's...not as good of a game as they were marketing. I played maybe about an hour of it, and while I started warming up to the controls and interface, I found a lot of elements confusing. They throw a lot of different controls and game mechanics in there. First off, I think it's got too much going on. You have: driving (ugh), third-person shooter elements (which I haven't encountered much of), tons of minigames that you can find and try (that I haven't tried), a side-quest element (a lot like AC where you can intervene in crimes and save people or follow people to get info), a perk element (which is actually laid out quite well), a crafting element (which...I'm a little unsure of), MORE MINIGAMES (which are actually essential to the game's missions such as following a trail of cameras and phones to open doors or get codes), freerunning (which results in some very silly glitches), and probably a lot more that I haven't encountered yet. It's like GTA meets Assassin's Creed meets Last of Us.

Now the game has positives. The perk system is neat, the premise and idea behind the game is brilliant, the traffic lights element (though incredibly broken and I'll elaborate on that) is hilarious, the dialogue is passable (neat that people are having actual conversations on benches etc.), the writing is cliché, but passable, the characters are interesting (though sometimes cliché and act...strange) and the voice acting is fine so far. Then the game has more negatives. The driving element is so bad. I don't know if I'm alone on this, I haven't read many reviews yet, but it's awful. The steering is the issue, and the AI is the issue. At some points they'll all be stopped at an intersection, and every direction has a red light, and the lights will never change (or at least I'm not patient enough to wait). Then if you hack the lights and make them all green, every person at that light will go ball to the walls stomping on the gas and careen into each other. No attempts to evade, just chaos. The cars you drive sway at the slightest touch. The only plus is that the acceleration and braking is realistic and responsive. The AI drivers are pretty terrible too, where they'll just run into random objects for no reason (and then the objects will bounce around like rubber). I spent an entire car chase giggling my face off because I hit nearly every single object on my path and things were bouncing all over the place. This was not on purpose. I can't go anywhere without causing millions of dollars of property damage. Then the god damned flower pots are immovable, indestructible objects. Why?

The graphics do not look next gen. One of the very first scenes you see is a shot of the city, and the buildings were low res, flat objects IN THE FOREGROUND. Two of the main buildings at least were blurry messes. Character models and textures were fine so far (despite the random jittering animations, but that's another issue). I just love that while watching the opening cinematic and these shots all I could think of was "wow, this looks like shit." The graphics are okay generally, but they look like PS3 or even PS2 graphics in a lot of cases. There are also seams everywhere. Huge, glaring, white seams. That and the running animations are taken right out of Assassin's Creed. A little bit lazy there guys.

Interface is a mixed bag. I mentioned the perks are interesting. I got the car stealing and driving ones right off the bat. I also anticipate combat will be a pain in the ass, so I got lower recoil initially. There are so many buttons to remember immediately. It crash-courses you through all the controls at the beginning in the first mission, but by the time I got to driving I forgot half of them. I'm at the point where I can't figure out how to put my gun away, so I'm just running around freaking people out. Or not. People are kind of oblivious sometimes. What really got me was that there were wheels inside wheels for selecting different devices, but then I couldn't figure out what was needed for crafting and what I COULD craft. I'm an hour in and super confused, and usually I pick up on game mechanics fairly quick, even if I am bad at implementing them. Not only that, you'll get a mission to do something like chase and take down a car. I couldn't figure out if I was supposed to run the car off the road or hack something or shoot at them, so I just tried ramming into it and steering in front of it hopefully trying to stop them. If there was instruction on that, I either missed it or it wasn't there, and no mission details are repeated once you start them unless there's some way to access that through your phone...

I talked with Oliver this morning and he said other problems like impossible train tracks, inconsistencies with settings (sleazy biker bars with pretty flowers and friendly waving people outside) and reflections were all messed up. There are other bugs present as well. For instance, after a car chase and I FINALLY broke the dude's car, he jumped out and we played a game of hurdle jumping in a tunnel over barriers. I tried to jump one barrier and locked onto the dude for a take down instead. He was about 2-3 metres away from me. So I'm just swinging in the air and he's getting beaten up THROUGH THE POWER OF MY MIND. Then half his body fell into the barrier.

I will continue to play as I am interested in the characters enough and the game functions well enough to get used to. The game has an obvious lack of testing and tons of logic errors. Too many people working on too many elements without communication is my guess for what happened. That and I assume a good chunk of that massive budget got stuck into marketing instead of testing, graphics upgrades and making unique animations and elements rather than ripping them from other games. A lot of people were hyped, a lot of people bought the game, and I can see why people are upset. This is...pretty much par for the course on a lot of games lately.

Too Many Pigs

Shauna and I finished A Machine for Pigs today. We had mixed feelings of the game, but ultimately we enjoyed playing. It surprisingly didn't match up to Outlast in terms of overall horror, but, it did have one section that I was nearly paralyzed with fear, so I'll give it that. I think it might have been an early instance of a pig man being right behind me with no warning, but I was crippled for about 30-40 minutes playing where I became a shaking mess of garbled words. Stay tuned for part 7 (whenever I catch up in my encoding) to see me almost fall apart completely.

In other news, I am a mad genius without the genius in that I have concocted an new idea for a (hopefully) humourous compilation video. The idea came to me when I put the image of two incredibly creepy ghost children to the theme of Captain Planet. I'll let your imagination run wild for what the rest of the video will be like. I'm not sure of the timeline on that one as I want to get the full LP out first, which requires me to sync audio, make comments, clean up the video as best I can and encode another 4 (ish) hours of gameplay.

Half life has been paused for a moment to create more hard drive space and for when I have a good chunk of time to sit down and play. Expect this LP to be done mid-October. Also, Diablo 2 will be LPed. I have done some tests and the videos have been produced perfectly. The only issue that I may have is balancing audio. Regardless, I will be co-op LPing with two other people.