Blops III Beta, More-derlands, and I finally played Limbo.

I hadn't really been thinking that I would have enough stuff to write about to get one last blog in before MGSV, but I did! Normally I would say that I don't have a ton to write about any one of these things, and that this'll be a shorter blog that normal, but I thought the same thing about MGS2 HD and MGS3 HD. So, no promises! All I will promise is that there will be words, and some pictures.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III Multiplayer Beta.

I had not actually expected to be playing this. Granted, they did open it up to all PS4 players (or at least people with PS+, because you need that to play games online), but I managed to get a code from someone beforehand. So, if you're reading this, thank you Ben, for once again being my summertime beta gatekeeper. I also didn't really know what to expect from the beta. It was obviously going to be, "more Call of Duty," but I hadn't been keeping up with the game at all. My line of thinking had been, "I liked the first two Blops, so I'll probably like this one." Which kept me looking forward to the game despite the rather lackluster demo at E3, which I brushed off as it being hard to demo a co-op campaign like that.

But then I played the game and... Well, it's definitely more Call of Duty. And, on its own, it's fun. In some cases, a lot of fun. I definitely played more of the beta than I did the online mode in Blops II (I really liked that campaign, but the online didn't grab me). So, I'm in this weird place where I'm not exactly sure what to think about it, because on its own, it's fun. But compared to last year's Call of Duty, what's on display is pretty disappointing.

The biggest step back is in the movement. Advanced Warfare added Exo suits to Call of Duty, which allowed for things like double jumping and air dashing. And it was great! It was definitely the most fun I had ever had playing Call of Duty, and I could go for some more of it RIGHT NOW. Well, not right now as of when I was in the middle of writing this, because that would be counter-productive. But more in the figurative sense of- Right, you got that and I didn't need to explain at all.

Blops III, however, has toned down that stuff. There's still double jumping, but it's not as...snappy, for lack of a better word. In AW, you just hit the button twice, and you double jumped. In Blops III, you need to hold the button on the second jump to get the max jump, and it moves more slowly than the AW one did. That would be fine on its own, if it didn't come with the fact that there's no air dashing, or side dashing on the ground. And as minor as that might seem to someone who hadn't played either of these games, it definitely makes Blops III a lot less fun to move around in. Never mind the tactical disadvantage of not being able to dash around a corner into safety.

On the plus side, I do think the slide in Blops III feels better than I remember AW's being. Or, at least you travel farther with it (at the cost of half the boost meter that governs the double jump). And, Blops III adds wall running, which I like a lot. It feels good, and wall running is never not cool in games. That said, it doesn't come close to making up for the loss of all the side dodging, especially when the maps only have one or two spots where wall running is useful. Really, I don't understand why they wouldn't include that stuff.

Unless it goes back to that old thing where the various developers of the CoD games are super petty and don't want to include things that the other developers put into their games. I've never really noticed that before, because I usually skipped years on these games. Or if I did play them on "off years," all I did was just borrow the game and play through the campaign once. But I think this is the first time where these petty squabbles have led to a game being noticeably and objectively worse than the previous one in a lot of ways.

Now, yes, I know, it's a beta. It's not the final version of the game. And maybe some of the issues that I have (ones I haven't mentioned yet) will be changed in the final version of the game. I really doubt they're going to fundamentally change the movement stuff in the game before launch, which is only a few months from now. We know these things say beta, and I definitely think the servers needed that testing (it got pretty laggy a lot of the time), but it's more of a public demo than anything else.

Now, the stuff that might just be a beta thing (but I suspect it's a full game thing) is with the character customization. Or, rather, the lack thereof. In AW, you could pick your character's gender and race (assuming you're fine with the gender binary, and picking amongst pre-made models, which had a lot more options for dudes than ladies, but was still robust enough), and there were lots and lots of different clothing/gear items to pick from. All cosmetic, of course. There were tons of different things to outfit your character with, and the game had a loot system where you were unlocking items of different rarities.

Yes, some of that stuff was monetized. I did, for full disclosure, buy an American flag themed Exo because I was peer pressured into doing so, and I often do dumb things. Given how much I played that game online, I don't think spending an extra $3 on it was that bad. There's also a similar loot system for the guns, where you could get named variants of the existing guns in the game, with different (often better) stats. My favorite of those was a set of double mini-guns called, "Death and Taxes." My friend Jay did get another set of those called, "Bacon and Eggs" that was pretty good too.

Blops III, at least in the beta, has none of that. The only character customization you get is the ability to pick a specialist. Each one looks different, and has a choice of two abilities that work like a using a super in Destiny. You fill a meter either by killing or just waiting (maybe getting points in general fills it), and then hit L1 and R1 to activate. It's neat, and I'm not opposed to that (even if some of them seem a bit unfair). I am opposed to them being locked to specific characters. Like, there were several of those that I wanted to try, but they were on dude characters, and I wanted to play as a lady. You know, for reasons. So what I did instead was just play as the grenade launcher lady and occasionally try out her armor ability instead.

If you could switch between a specialist's specials mid-match, I could see why they were paired like they are, but you can't. Once you pick one, you're locked into it for that entire match. You can change the rest of your loadout, but not that, or what specialist you're using. And I don't see any logical reason to tie those to those characters, unless those are all characters in the campaign, which, if that's the case, then color me less excited for the campaign as well.

On top of all that, there aren't any options for customizing the appearance of the specialists. That means that every person playing as the grenade launcher lady ("Battery") looks exactly the same. That means that, at the end of the match when it shows the three top scorers of the winning team (or overall in a non-team mode, I assume), you'll often see two, or all three of them being the exact same character.

The only potential explanation I can think of for that stuff is that Treyarch wants you to be able to tell from looking at someone what specials they might have access to. Then again, if you're paying close enough attention to be able to see and tell that stuff, you could just read at the start of a match who has what, because it's all listed there. And even then, they could tie that stuff solely to outfit, and at least let me pick my character's gender and race.

And like I said before, when compared to Advanced Warfare, all of this stuff is a big bummer. I get that Treyarch wants their game to feel unique, but not including as many options for customization doesn't do anyone any good. There isn't even a quick firing range like AW had to test out guns! The only thing I'd say Blops III has in its favor here is that you can apply emblems directly to guns, which I used to make mine all pink. Well, within the limits of what they let you put emblems on, which is again disappointing, because it's not the entire gun.

There's some other issues too. Like, how this game finally has an option to just mute everyone (except your party)...but it doesn't work. Or, rather, it resets. After every match. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Everyone that was muted stays muted, but any new players joining the match aren't muted. And, that doesn't make any sense at all. That HAS to be a bug, right? I don't even understand why these games (or games in general) still default to, "I want to hear random people talking which is usually either super offensive or so statically and garbage sounding that it is just a distraction." They really should fix this by launch, because having to go back into a menu and re-select that option all the time isn't any better than just manually muting everyone.

Another issue I have is with the score streaks. Unlike AW, there doesn't seem to be an option to set it so that your score toward each streak carries over after death, with the penalty being the streaks require more points to achieve. At least with this one I sort of understand the logic. You really have to earn the score streaks in this game, rather than just brute forcing it like I used to. Conversely, I'd get more than a few of them each match in AW, whereas I've been lucky to get a UAV per match in Blops III. Though, weirdly, it tended to either be nothing, or getting multiple streaks within seconds of each other.

Maybe the most disappointing thing about all of this is that it's still pretty fun at times. Just not as fun as last year's game. So, where does that leave me? Well, I feel like I would rather just keep playing AW. Unless the campaign is super great, I think I'll probably skip this year's game. Normally I'd say I would wait for a sale, but I want to say CoD is one of those series where the games never go on sale.

But, I might also get peer pressured into it if a bunch of my friends get it. Especially with it having a co-op campaign. Then again, if I don't get Blops, I can more easily justify making Battlefront my online shooter of the fall instead. Assuming that game is good, of course. I dunno. Only time will tell.

Borderlands: The Handsome Collection.

I forget how much I've said about this in previous blogs, but I bought this a while ago when it was on sale for $30. I think that's a great value for the amount of stuff in here, even if I had played Borderlands 2 on 360 a couple years ago (I remember using that game to help me take my mind off things when Ryan Davis passed, so it has a bit of a spot in my heart for that).

I don't really have anything new to say about BL2, other than that I still think it's a fun game to play, but not a well written game at all. I did play a bunch of the add on stuff for the first time, though. None of it is really worth mentioning, other than the fantasy themed Tiny Tina one. There's some clever stuff in there, and I thought that was a great piece of content.

The Pre-Sequel, however, I had not played before, so this playthrough I just did was my first time with that game. And, to be frank, I was pleasantly surprised with it. Part of me even wants to go so far as to say I liked it more than BL2. Which is not to say that it doesn't share some of the same issues that BL2 had, but for the most part, I did enjoy it more.

Probably the biggest improvement is that it just feels like a more tightly focused and well paced game than BL2. Granted, it's also a shorter, and smaller game, but not in a bad way. While I'm certainly a fan of long games, and of games having a lot of content, I'm not a fan of games that feel like they meander and lose focus because there's so much stuff in them. And there's definitely something to be said about a game that can keep you moving toward a specific goal, and do so without feeling like there's a lot of filler in there. There's still side quests in PS, and I did do a decent number of them, but even just the main story stuff felt way tighter and more focused than BL2 did.

The other big area of improvement is that the story and writing is a lot better. Which is to say that it isn't cringe inducing like so much of BL2 was. Or, at least not as much, because there's still some junky stuff in PS. But there's some genuinely funny lines, especially if you play as Clap-Trap. I wanted to play as Clap-Trap, and I did for a couple hours, but as much as I do think he's the funniest thing in the game, I just wasn't enjoying playing as him. Outside of the core shooting, which feels more or less the same as it did in BL2, minus the couple of new gun types (lasers!). (Quick aside: Pre-Sequel has exactly the same menus as BL2, which I count as a negative because a lot of the item organization stuff could use an overhaul.) Also, the running joke that Pandora's moon is basically Space Australia is pretty great, even if the Australian pronunciation of methane (mee-thane???) did bother me.

Clap-Trap is interesting as a character, game play wise. All Borderlands characters have a special skill. Some of them are pretty normal, but Clap-Trap's is, well, weird. When you hit the button, it doesn't instantly trigger. Instead, Clap-Trap analyzes the situation, and uses whatever it is that he determines is best for the situation. I don't think it's completely random, because there are things on screen that pertain to the situation, like how much health you have, and if you're in, "Lonely Mode" (single player) or not. And while I think most of the time the stuff he did was helpful, and useful, the delay between pushing the button and having the special trigger was just too much for me. Especially when combined with the fact that too many of the skills on the skill trees had substantial negatives to counter off the positives. Things like a buff to gun damage that comes along with a debuff to accuracy. And I just don't want to play like that.

So, I went online and looked at the skill trees (the official site is very helpful in this regard), and ended up starting over as Wilhelm. His dual drones special seemed the most appealing to me, as did his skill trees. One of which focused on cyborg upgrades, like a robot punching fist, and a shoulder mounted laser that triggers when your shields drop. I had a lot more fun with Wilhelm than I ever did with Clap-Trap, so that was definitely a smart move on my part. The two drones are handy, too. One of them goes out and attacks enemies, and the other stays close and heals Wilhelm. Little less useful if you're at full health, but still handy.

Though, speaking of characters, I do have kind of the same problem with Borderlands as I did with the Blops III beta. Namely in that all the skills and everything are tied to specific characters. Pre-Sequel justifies this a bit more than the previous games did, as they are mostly existing characters from the other games (dunno about one of the DLC characters that's included in the Handsome version). Well, I mean that pretty loosely, of course. Wilhelm was just a boss in the main game, and I vaguely remember Athena being mentioned in the first one, but I'm not sure. Nisha did at least have some dialog in 2, but again, you just end up killing her, and that's in a side quest. But, PS does have your character actually responding to NPCs, and giving a few lines of dialog here and there. Not a ton, but it does at least make your character feel slightly more like a character.

But not in any way that couldn't be done just as well if you could pick a character's appearance, gender, voice, etc, and then pick from the different classes available in the game. I really hope that Borderlands 3 goes in that direction, but I doubt it. I imagine they're going to double down on making the characters into characters. Which, honestly, is FINE, but I'd still like to be able to make my character, you know, my character. At least if they're not going to write a good story that really involves a specific character in such a way that it couldn't be a create-a-vault-hunter.

All things considered, that's a minor complaint in terms of PS as a game. Because, as a game, it's just as fun as BL2, but with some changes here and there. I like the low gravity, and the ability to double jump. The limited oxygen in certain areas isn't nearly as big of a deal as I thought it might be (part of why I started with Clap-Trap is that he doesn't need air). I never even came close to running out throughout the game. There's some cool stuff with the oxygen/lack thereof where weapons are bettero r worse depending on if there's oxygen. Fire weapons won't ignite enemies in zero oxygen areas.

The new laser weapons are cool, and ice is a good replacement element for Slag, which is missing, for some reason. Slag was, for me, always better in theory than in practice. You'd have to slag an enemy, and then switch to something else for bonus damage. Then again, freezing enemies was not something I did much in this game, so I guess it didn't make that big a difference. And come to think of it, I was a big fan of Axton's turret in BL2, which could end up having Slag bullets if you specced right.

You know, one thing I was a little surprised was that Pre-Sequel kinda reminded me of Arkham Origins. Specifically that this is a prequel (more of an in-between-quel, if you ask me) that is, in a lot of ways, probably my favorite one of the bunch. Either way, it's a game I quite enjoyed, and I recommend it if you've been known to enjoy Borderlands in the past. Unless you've really burned out on the series, then maybe not.

Oh, one thing I neglected to mention, but probably should, is the quality of these PS4 ports of these games. For the most part, they're pretty good. They look really nice (especially PS), and have the capacity to run at 60 FPS. But they often don't, which is a bummer. Some screen tearing too, at least in PS. Not that it ever broke the game or anything, but it was still a bummer that some areas just weren't well optimized at all. I dunno if it's because of the port jobs themselves, or because of the "weak consoles," but it'd have been nice if these were a bit better in that regard.

That said, I plan on playing more of PS at some point. Whether that's this week, or months from now, I don't know. But it's fun, and I'll play more of it.

Limbo.

Limbo, you may remember, is a hot new release from 2010. It was always a game that I was interested in, but never got around to buying, or playing. Part of that was because I had heard it was short, and thought the $15 asking price was too much, especially given my poor college student status at the time. And, now that I've played it (thanks to PS+), I can say that it is still too much money, given my unemployed college graduate status now. And now I'm just thinking about how five years have passed and I'm still unemployed and AAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Ahem, sorry about that. Don't get me wrong, I like Limbo. Quite a bit, really. I think it has terrific atmosphere, and some of the puzzles are pretty enjoyable to solve. It's super dark in some ways that genuinely surprised me, like how graphic the death animations are. I would go so far as to say that I think this is a game that everyone should play at some point in their lives. Both because it's genuinely good, and because I feel like it's an important game. Like, it was one of the first "mainstream" "artsy indie" games to make it "big," right? It was Braid, and then this, I think.

But all that said, I beat it in an afternoon, and as someone with far more time than money these days, I'd be hard pressed to recommend buying it if money is an issue for you. If it's not, and you haven't played it, then I think you should go do that. If it is, then I think it's still free on PS+. Which, if you don't already have that, then that's no better of a deal. But then again, equating dollars to hours is a bad way to look at games and I probably shouldn't have said any of that stuff, because there's nothing wrong with a good four hour game that doesn't have filler. I'm just cheap and perpetually poor.

I don't really have much else to say about it. It's good. I get why some people really love it, and I also get why some people probably wouldn't.

Anything else?

I did play enough Sound Shapes and Stealth Inc 2 (also PS+ games) to be able to tell that I don't want to play any more of them. But...not enough to be able to actually write anything worth reading about either. Under other circumstances, I might have to be able to continue the PS+ Catch Up stuff, but as it is, I just didn't want to play more of either. However, PS+ Catch Up will hopefully be returning, because next month looks like a solid lineup of games. Never mind that I'll be spending all my time playing MGSV.

Speaking of, I'm now in a position where I've finished all the games that I want to before MGSV. Not counting replaying games, because I still want to replay REVENGEANCE and Ground Zeroes. Given that I have an entire week (as of writing this, maybe not of posting), that shouldn't be an issue at all. That does, however, mean this is my final blog before MGSV.

I'm very excited. I can't tell you how excited I am. So, instead, I'll just salute you all, wish you a good day, and thank you for reading this. I'll see you all on the other side.