Dragons, Dogmas, and a PS4.

As you may have guessed, in the time since the last time I wrote up a blog, most of what I've been doing has been sitting on my butt and playing video games. And by video games, I mostly mean Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, which was yet another PlayStation Plus special. And now that I've beaten it (and played about an hour or so in new game plus), I decided to write this up about it.

Dragon's Dogma is a weird game. It's perpetually letter boxed, and I don't understand why. That's only a minor grievance, and the kind of thing that I got used to during the course of my playtime (close to forty hours). Other issues, like the frame rate, only seemed to get worse as I went on, but even that never got bad enough to ruin the experience. And while I'm on the topic of complaints, I might as well mention that the story stuff and writing in the game comes in one of two varieties. Either completely half-assed, or utterly insane. I like the insane parts, but those are by far the minority (at least until near the end of the game, but there's definitely some insanity to be found earlier in the game in some of the side quests), and when it's half-assed, it's some generic-ass fantasy-ass fantasy.

Sorry about my language there, but that was the best and most concise way to describe it. Now, I can talk about the stuff I like in the game, by which I mean the combat. It's really good. It's not super deep, like games like REVENGEANCE or Bayonetta, but has enough going on to be fun. I played the game as a daggers and bow using person, which I found enjoyable throughout, especially with abilities like shooting ten arrows at once.

Difficulty wise, I found that most of the game wasn't terribly hard, but every once in a while I would come across a group of enemies that was arbitrarily harder than the other enemies I had fought just fifty feet away (same type of enemies, I should say), and I didn't care for that. Not the spike in difficulty, I mean the fact that it was the same exact type of enemies with nothing about them to indicate that they were more powerful or higher level than the other ones I had just fought. The game definitely should have shown me what level the enemies are in relation to me. Well, that would be assuming that the enemies do have levels like my character and pawn (more on that in a moment) do, and I don't understand much of how this game was designed because it's crazy, so who knows.

Oh right, the pawns. So, rather than having actual combat, or named characters that join you as you quest about, instead you make another character that follows you around. And in addition to that, you can summon two others that were created by other players around the world! Or, if you're playing offline, I think there's pre-made ones that probably aren't as good. These, however, don't level up like you and your pawn, which forces you to swap them out every once in a while to make sure that they're high enough level to be of use. Since my character was a mix of ranged and melee, I made my pawn a mage so I could get some healing and fire spells on. And for the ones I summoned, I usually summoned another mage (though sometimes a sorcerer, which have more powerful combat spells, but no healing spells) and a fighter to have a pure melee person as well. And they're pretty useful, generally speaking. Of course, being user made, there's a lot of strange ones to be found, and I sometimes found myself skipping over a pawn that had good skills and abilities, but had something else about them that I didn't care for. For example, I found one that had an annoyingly high pitched voice that would have driven me nuts, and I found one (a female pawn) that was equipped with the most "video-game-y" of "armor," by which I mean the "sexy lingerie" and whatever the bra equivalent is (I found the "sexy lingerie," it's only a thong, I assume the bra comes separately). I should add that this particular item in the game is more revealing than equipping nothing on your character's/pawn's lower half (because like most games, nudity is forbidden).

You know, I don't have problems with games that include "clothing" options like that, my issue with it here is that it's marked as a female only clothing item, and I couldn't put it on my character, who is a dude (well, was, when I new game plussed it, I switched to a lady to see if anything would change in the game world (also, I had sold the sexy lingerie long ago, because I felt bad equipping it on my pawn, who was a lady, and also I'm pretty sure I had stuff with better stats)). Now, I'm not saying I would want to do that, I'm saying that if something dumb like that is in the game, it should be gender neutral. Do it Saints Row style. Now, if everything in the game was body size and body type specific, then that would be fine, because that would be realistic (ie, a suit of armor wouldn't magically adjust its size for any person). But this isn't the case, and I found quite a few items that were female only, but none that were male only.

While I'm on the topic, I should say the reason why I wanted to see if anything would change if I played as a lady was because early in the game there was another character that was implied to be, if not directly romantically involved with the player character, then it was a case of, "Hey, this character pretty obviously likes you a lot in a romantic way," and that character was female. But no, this character was still female, and everything played out exactly the same. Which is not what I expected, but sure, whatever. I don't mind playing a gay and/or bisexual lady in a game.

And as is typical, I've gotten fairly far off topic from what I was planning to write about. I was planning to get to my favorite part of the game, which is fighting the big enemies. I very, very, VERY rarely use the word epic (and for good reason), but some of the battles against the bigger monsters are epic. I had one battle against a griffin in the over world that lasted about 15 or 20 minutes, covered a fair amount of ground as I battled the beast, and at one point I was climbing atop it as it was flying, stabbing it with my fire daggers. That was rad! I just wish there was more variety with the bigger monsters. Griffins and cockatrices fight almost exactly the same (though cockatrices do have some magic attacks or something). While the chimera is a fun fight that can involve destroying different parts of the beat (like cutting off its snake tail) by focusing your attacks, it's also the only enemy in the game that works that way. I mean, yes, you can climb up lot of different enemies in the game, but there's not really much reason to in most cases. Maybe if you're playing on hard, stuff like that becomes more needed, but on normal, that's not the case.

At least in the main stuff. I tried to get into the Dark Arisen content (if you didn't know, Dark Arisen was when Capcom pulled a Capcom and re-released the game a year later with extra stuff), but it only ended with me coming up against enemies that were far too powerful, so I made a strategic withdrawal and went back to the main game. Maybe if I continue with the new game plus, and level up a bunch, I might make another go at it (you can access it from the starting village in the game), but I don't know that I actually will.

I think that's everything I want to say about this game. It's fun. I'm definitely interested in what Capcom might be working on in terms of a sequel, especially something built with newer, and more powerful hardware in mind.

Speaking of which, hey PS4! I don't have one yet. Mine is in the mail, and should arrive next week, another with some games. Well, not all at once, they were multiple orders, as I pre-ordered my PS4 back in August, and took advantage of that Amazon buy two get one free deal. I ordered Assassin's Creed IV, Killzone Shadow Fall, and Need for Speed Rivals. For whatever reason, AC IV and Killzone should be arriving next week, NFS is not. Hopefully that will soon though, because that game looks rad.

I do have a little experience with my friend's PS4 though (as an aside, this is the same friend that had borrowed my copy of Uncharted 2 last year, but my long national nightmare is over, as I finally have it back!). Unlike me, he pre-ordered his at a local GameStop, and thus I went with him and someone else to the midnight release, and then we spent some time with the slanted wonder (I mean the PS4 (you know, because it has that slant in the design)). I didn't really use it beyond a little menu navigation whilst my friend was out of the room, but I do like the feel of the controller. So much so that I might do something stupid like pay for a longer micro-USB cable so I can use it on my PS3, which I will continue to use as long as there continue to be free PS3 games on PS+ (Binary Domain coming up soon!). I did spend a good amount of time watching my friend play Killzone and...Madden.

Killzone looks really good. At least graphically. Game play wise, nothing I saw looked like anything that couldn't be done on a PS3. Not that it looks bad (though the "hey here's this thing that's supposed to get some emotion out of you even though you've never seen these characters before and have no connection to them" intro looked not good). But it wasn't the kind of thing that seemed great for playing at 1 AM with two people watching and heckling you. Though, it did make me re-think buying one of those cameras to do some built in live streaming with my friend that would be fun to do (though I doubt anyone would watch, so I doubt that either of us will actually buy the camera). I'm looking forward to playing the game, it should be fun, I liked what I saw.

Madden? Well, I've never played Madden before, and I have no plans to change that. I thought the animations looked pretty good, but most of the rest of it didn't. I had my friend turn on the snow, and at first I was impressed by how many footprints there were on the field, and how long they stayed there. Then I noticed that as the players fell down into the snow, that did nothing to the snow, and I also noticed that the cameramen alongside the field were still wearing shorts, which would not be the case in the snow.

That's all I have to say about Madden.

Hm... What else? Well, PSN seemed to be not working well that night, which didn't surprise me, because it was right at launch and I'm sure PSN was being barraged by tons of people all trying to log in at once. The included microphone thing is easily the flimsiest and most poorly built microphone thing that I've ever seen. I think I will continue not talking to other people when playing games online.

That's about everything that's worth writing about. No progress has been made on my next book, Space Cops 5000, but make sure to follow this dumb promotional Twitter account I made to promote it. There might be updates or something, I dunno! Depends on when I feel like using it to tell people what's up with that.

Nothing else going on in my life, but I won't harp on that, I'll just leave with a Luigi picture.