PlayStation Plus, Dungeons & Dragons, and other madness.

With Grand Theft Auto V coming out next week, and unofficially starting the autumn/winter video game rush (though not really given the time between it and the next big release, but shush to your logic), I figured I would write out a long blog covering the last of the video games that I've played over the summer but never got around to writing about, because of laziness. I might (and I stress might) write up a RockStar retrospective blog next week about the other RockStar games of this generation that I played (and recently replayed), but don't be surprised if that doesn't happen!

As you might have gathered from that title, I recently subscribed to PlayStation Plus. I have before, but this time I bought a year, because I'm doubling down on Sony and finally got around to pre-ordering a PS4. I'm pretty sure that I got one of the last ones that Amazon was offering, because I had to get a bundle with a second controller because they were not selling any other versions, and the last time I checked, they weren't even selling that one any more. It won't be arriving on launch day, unless Amazon tops itself in delivering it early (which often happens in my case, but I highly doubt it will this time).

But I'm fine with receiving it a few days later when the alternative would be either waiting a month or more to have a good chance of finding one in a store, or racing from store to store, not find anything, and then get disgruntled. Plus, Amazon still isn't charging sales tax in my state, so I saved a little bit of money there. Conversely, I don't mind paying sales tax, because, unlike some people, I realize that the state needs money to run, but I don't want to turn this into a political discussion, especially given how many games I want to cover here.

I have not pre-ordered any games for the PS4 yet, but I doubt that finding Watch Dogs or Assassin's Creed IV in a store will be a problem. And there's going to be a couple free PS+ things days one, like that lessened version of Drive Club, though I have no idea as to how gimped or not gimped that version of the game will be. Oh, and Resogun. I suppose I could just buy Watch Dogs or something digitally, but I'm still a dinosaur in the sense that I feel like if I'm paying that much money for something, I still want a physical representation of it. And while my internet is fast enough to play games online and stuff like that, it's still faster for me to drive to a store and buy a game than it is to download larger games, and let's be honest, game files sizes are only going to get LARGER as this next generation gets going. We're going to run out of storage space faster than you think.

Now that I've finished critiquing anti-tax people and the digital only future, here's some games that I played, most of which were "free" (don't forget that $50 per year subscription fee) on PlayStation Plus!

Hitman Absolution

Before getting into this game, the only experience I had with the Hitman series was playing a demo of Blood Money. I had been intrigued by Blood Money, but it was one of those many games that I filed under, "I might buy this if I see it for cheap at some point," but never ended up playing it. But for the price of "free," I couldn't pass up Absolution.

And it's a pretty good game. My understanding is that this game has a lot more "traditional" stealth levels than the previous ones, which is kind of a bummer, but I didn't mind it much. I like "traditional" stealth games, and with my playing this close to when Splinter Cell Blacklist released, it helped scratch that stealth itch and keep me from buying another $60 game right after buying Saints Row IV. Not that I don't want to ever play that game, it sounds quite good, but I've already dedicated over $400 to a new console, so I'm trying to be frugal at least every ONCE in a while.

I'm bad at staying on topic.

So, the levels in Absolution that are more in line with the "classic" Hitman games were a lot of fun. Searching through an environment filled with NPCs for ways to stealthily eliminate the target(s) is a way of doing stealth that most stealth games don't do. In most stealth games, if you get seen, that's it, you've alerted them, etc. But when games do have areas where you can walk around where you shouldn't be, I absolutely love that. It's sort of like the ultimate form of stealth. Being completely hidden whilst in plain sight.

It's just that I feel like the disguises in the game don't work as well as I think they would in real life. Now, I played on Normal, but the enemies in the game can see through disguises EXTREMELY QUICKLY! There are some cases where I think this is totally justified. When I'm in a town courtroom in a small town dressed as a cop, it makes sense that the other cops would know all of the cops in town, and would be suspicious of Agent 47 in a cop uniform. But if I'm wearing a full body haz-mat suit, I think it's crazy that other haz-mat suit wearing people would be able to tell that I shouldn't be there. Maybe if I was doing something crazy, like waving a gun around, then sure. But if I'm just walking around acting in the same exact way that the other haz-mat people are, then I think that's ridiculous.

But this whole game is ridiculous. This is a game set in a world where this secret Agency that assassinates people all over the world is genetically engineering super soldier girls (or maybe just one, I don't know) that everyone is trying to get, and there is a squad of murderous "nuns" called the Saints (no relation to the Third Street Saints) that get referenced several times throughout the game, but only appear in one level where they (SPOILERS) all get killed by 47.

But overall I enjoyed the game. It looks really nice too. Obviously not as good as the PC version (shut up, smarmy PC video game playing people, I'll get a high end PC when I can afford more than $400 or $500 for a new video game machine), but it still looks nice. Lots of great lighting, colored and otherwise.

His most cunning disguise.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

You may be aware that this game was critically acclaimed. It was game of the year on some websites, including this little one I like called Giant Bomb dot com. Given that, I was interested in playing this game to see if it lived up to its reputation. And it certainly lived up to it.

By which I mean that this game is really, really, REALLY hard. Let me put it this way: Before XCOM, the last game that I had been forced to turn it down to easy because I was not able to cut it on normal was Ninja Gaiden II. However, I was able to beat Ninja Gaiden II on easy. I was not able to beat XCOM on easy. I made it not only to the very last mission, I made it to the last BATTLE in the last mission. But given the state of my squad, with no one at full health, and all medikits used, I wasn't able to win. Maybe if I had spent more time "grinding" to get better armor and weapons for everyone, I could have done it. Maybe if I had played on easy from the start, with its increased resources than normal, I could have done it.

But I didn't. Instead, I tried to beat that final battle a bunch of times. I tried different tactics. I tried different approaches. If every single "dice roll" went my way, and every enemy attack missed, then sure, I could beat it. I'm pretty sure the game is built in a way where that will never happen, but I obviously can't say for sure.

That last battle though, even on easy, is so hard that I think calling that mode "easy" is disingenuous. I have no problem with a video game making all of its difficulty modes challenging, but if that's the case, then don't call the least difficult one "easy." If a game mode is called "easy," then it should be EASY. I got through the first nine or ten hours of the game without too much trouble, but at a certain point it got so frustrating that I wasn't having fun, so I turned it down to easy, thinking that I would have more fun on easy. And for a while, I did. But then it got frustrating again, and eventually it got to the point (in that last battle) where I just deleted the game from my hard drive. I was really angry at the time.

And given the fact that I stopped playing the game on an angry note, it made me even angrier about a lot of the "smaller" issues in the game that I had been able to overlook when I was having fun. Things like how the framerate is bad on the PS3. I don't understand how, because the game doesn't look particularly good (in terms of detail), so I can only assume that it's just a case of it being a bad port. Even if the game had run perfectly, things like the unrealistically short view distance for the soldiers just made the game frustrating. Or how the enemies get a chance to move into cover when I discover them, and if I happen to discover them on my final action in my turn, they then get their NORMAL turn in addition, which often means that I would be screwed. I get that these are "design" decisions that the developers thought were good, but I disagree. I don't see how making all my my soldiers so near-sighted improves the game. If every mission of the game had been set in the dead of night, then I could understand why they can only see about twenty feet in front of them, but there are day missions too, and the vision is just as bad.

Really, the completely arbitrary nature about a lot of the systems in the game just drove me nuts. Why can't my heavy use his rocket launcher after moving? Why can't this soldier where an anti-mind control helmet and carry a medikit at the same time? Sure, support soldiers can upgrade to carry two "items" at once, but that still doesn't explain why a helmet takes up an inventory slot for a thing that, in almost every other case, is kept in a storage thing on the character's belt!

Why is XCOM so strapped for cash in the first place? Why can't they afford a single hover-plane thing to be able to respond to more than one incident at a time? Why not just send in a whole bunch of soldiers into these situations instead of six? Why are the aliens even invading in the first place? Oh, wait, that gets explained, BUT IT MAKES NO SENSE, especially not in the context of the final mission of the game, which is where it gets explained (SPOILERS, the aliens were testing the human race to see if they had psychic powers, and even after determining that the humans did have these powers, and that they wanted them to be a part of their space organization, they still kept trying to kill my soldiers instead of offering peace. But hey, maybe there's a better explanation after you beat that mission, BUT I COULDN'T BEAT THE GAME!)

Aside from my little rant there about the story, those are design decisions that can be argued as being sound. Obviously there aren't more than six soldiers because eventually it would turn into a large scale war game, instead of being this small scale thing. But the bigger point that I was trying to make is that I don't think the game does a good enough job of making this seem like something that could happen. Why wouldn't the US military be using all of its troops to combat the aliens? Are the aliens really that much of an issue? I don't think there's ever more than, I dunno, forty aliens in one place at any time. That's not really that many in the grand scheme of things. Maybe I'm over thinking it, or not thinking about it in the right way.

Either way, I didn't care for this game. I don't think I'm going to be playing any strategy games any time soon. And I'm fine with that.

I put about as much effort into this picture as I think it deserved.

This blog has gotten really long. RAPID FIRE!

Bit.Trip Presents: Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien

This game is a lot of fun, I ended up playing all the levels and finding everything in every level (but not the retro game cartridges), and it was nice to hear Charles Martinet as a character that isn't Italian. The only other one I can think of is Skyrim. He was Paarthunax. Yeah, Paarthunax the dragon. I KNOW! Crazy.

Machinarium

I don't really play many point and click adventure games, and I really don't think the PS3 controller is the best way to play one, but I had fun. It's short, but not longer than it needed to be. Especially given the price. Which was free. I don't think I would have wanted to play any more than a couple of bucks, or maybe five for it. Still, I enjoyed it. Really nice looking game, decent sense of humor. Good Space Invaders clone hidden in there.

Knytt Underground

Never heard of this game? According to Giant Bomb, it's actually a sequel to a game called Knytt. I dunno, the only context I had ever seen this game in was seeing it on PSN in the Free Games section of PlayStation Plus. So I tried playing it, because it was free. I didn't play it for very long, because it seems quite boring to me. Parts of it looked nice, but I really didn't like the look of the characters in the game, and it's one of those indie games that thinks it's really clever and funny, but isn't. You know what I mean.

Jet Set Radio HD

Despite owning a Dreamcast, and having bought it whilst they were still being sold in stores ($70!), I never played this game, or Jet Grind Radio as it was known then (in the US). So I started playing this game, and hey, THIS GAME IS CRAZY. Crazier than I had thought.

In this game, the police are so obsessed with stopping these punks from spraying their graffiti that they go to some CRAZY extremes. Riot cops? Not enough. SWAT? Still can't stop 'em. Dogs? Getting closer. Paratroopers? Almost.

I wasn't too surprised when those showed up, but I just about lost it when the game threw ATTACK HELICOPTERS at me. I'm not kidding, they are helicopters that shoot MISSILES at these kids as they roller blade around. You may be thinking that's overkill, but it really isn't when these kids can DESTROY HELICOPTERS WITH SPRAY PAINT. You get close enough to spray 'em, and they crash.

This game is madness. Kinda fun too. I stopped playing it, might get back to it. This new, HD version has a little 20 minute "making of" thing in it that was actually pretty interesting.

Galaga Legions DX

You can play as Pac-Man in this game. It's all right.

think that's it for games on PS+ that I've been playing. I also started playing Dungeons & Dragons with some friends. I played a sorcerer named Vin Diesel. His back story is that he was the king of the illegal street racing in Detroit until he fell through a portal into a parallel universe where he realized that he can cast magic. He has 9 in Streetwise. We didn't play it for too long, because we kinda only just BARELY know what we're doing, and it took a long time to just make my character (the other two had played a little once before, so they started me at level 3 to be caught up with them). But we're (probably) going to keep playing, so I'll try to blog when some really interesting stuff happens.

Also, I played Borderlands 2, and have been replaying it. I actually played it around the time that Ryan passed, and it was my "I need something that uses enough of my brain to keep my mind off things, but not so much that I need to actually think" game. Now I'm replaying it because it looks beautiful on my TV (360 version), and it's a really fun game. I like it (for the most part) more than Borderlands the first, but it is, in most ways, just more Borderlands (Morederlands), so I'm not going to write too much about it.

Read my book! Please! I think I arbitrarily set it to be free until the end of Thursday (the 12^th of September), so GET IT NOW! If it's not, then it's only a dollar. US Link. UK Link.Canada Link.

I know you've probably read me shilling for it a bunch of times now, but I haven't made much progress toward getting the sequel in a state where it will be publishable. I mean, the story is written, I just mean having my friends tell me if it makes sense/is good, typos, etc. And I need a cover too. Anyone reading this now a way that I can get someone who can draw to make a cover for nothing in return other than a special thanks in the book?

That's it! I'm done! If you haven't had enough Year of Luigi, then here you go!

I didn't feel like editing another one.