The Great Skyrim Irony. Also, Bastion.

Let me spin a yarn for you.

The year is 2008. Fallout 3 is coming out, and I'm very excited for it. Now, I tend to favor the PS3 (for various reasons, one of which is that I like the controller better), so I was saddened to see that it was the inferior version. But no problem, I bought the 360 version, and had hundreds of hours with the game.

Then, in 2010, New Vegas was about to be released. I was, of course, very excited once again. I once again opted to get the 360 version, which turned out to be advantageous because my PS3 was about to stop reading Blu-ray discs, which left me PS3-less for a while. And I got many hours out of New Vegas.

Fast forward to 2011. Skyrim is out, and my excitement is growing. Bethesda claims it's running on a new engine, an early word in the week of release (including from certain websites (that shall not be named)) was that not only was the PS3 version on par with 360, it was better because it didn't have the texture bug. So, I decided to ignore the fact that Bethesda chose not to send any PS3 copies out prior to release (as that is standard practice for a lot of publishers), and decided to get the PS3 version.

And now here I am, almost 50 hours into Skyrim, and the game's technical issues have gotten to the point where I don't even want to play it. I can put up with minor framerate issues, or a few lock ups here and there. I dealt with those issues throughout all of my time with both Fallout games. But it wasn't as bad as it is in Skyrim.

And it's not just the PS3 specific issues, I'm running into bugs that I'm pretty sure affect all platforms. I'm pretty sure that I can't complete the companions guild quests because the game messed something up, and nothing will move forward. And of course I didn't stop and try and solve it when the issue first arose, so I guess that part is my fault, but really, it shouldn't happen in the first place, right?

The worst part is that there's not really anything I can do aside from hoping that the next patch(es) will help. Spamming the Bethesda forums will only make me look like a jerk, and the old "boycott them" strategy doesn't work too well when it'll be two or three years before their next game comes out. By then this will be like tears in the rain, and I'll just buy Fallout 4, because as angry as I am at Bethesda for shipping a game that self destructs this badly over time, I still think that when they work right, they're like nothing else out there, and no one does it as well. Except Obsidian, who made New Vegas, which, aside from its own lengthy list of technical problems, is maybe better than Fallout 3 and Skyrim, at least story wise.

But now I'm getting off topic. Let me talk about something that made me happy. Bastion.

So, after seeing all the glowing reviews, all the awards, and even a top ten list in a newspaper with Bastion in it, I finally decided that it was a game that I should play, so I used some of the 1600 MS Point ($20) card I got from my aunt for Christmas on the game. And, shocker, Bastion is really good.

I won't elaborate on what Bastion is, because if you visit Giant Bomb and don't know what Bastion is, then too bad. There are plenty of videos and other things to inform you.

What I will elaborate on are how I felt about the game. Again, I liked the game a lot. There is a tightness to the controls that is often missing from a lot of full priced disc based game, and it's always great to see such a high level of polish from a game made by so few people (SuperGiant Games is comprised of only six people, after all). The narration, which I feel is probably less "dynamic" than I had been led to believe by people on the internet, is really good, and my fears that I would just think he sounded like Ron Perlman all through the game were unfounded. As the game progressed, I thought he sounded less Perlman-ish. Don't get me wrong, he could still pass for Ron Perlman's brother, but regardless, it was some top notch voice acting and writing.

But the game wasn't all lollipops and rainbows. While I think the game looks "good," and the art style definitely had a lot of time and care put into it, I still didn't like it a lot. But that's just me. And I was a little weirded out by The Kid's arms. They're kinda long from someone of his height.

And the same goes for the music. I think the straight music tracks are good, but not as good as a lot of internet people made it out to be. And I didn't like the couple of songs with vocals at all. There's one near the end, and when it started playing, all I could think was, "Great, they made some lame-a** song to try and be emotional or something."

The story stuff was all right, and I liked that the game handles topics that most games never would, but there was one thing that...Well, I'll put it in spoiler thing.

But again, I really enjoyed the actual act of playing the game. So much that within two days, I beat it twice and S-Ranked it. Which brings up my biggest complaint: It's too short! But definitely worth your money if you haven't played it yet, if only to support Greg Kasavin so when Elder Scrolls VI comes out he can live stream 12 hours of it online.

In other news, I started playing Bayonetta today, but I'll wait until I've beaten it to say anything other than, "This game is crazy," and "I like what I've played thus far."