Lurker > Evillordexdeath

Play The Henry Stickmin Collection.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

BetrayedTangy posted...
Ooh also some of the games for this contest are on sale for Nintendo Switch

Thanks! I picked up a few games through the current Steam Sale, including Dragon's Dogma which seems to be at a slightly lower price there than on Switch. I have almost all of the games for 2010-2013 now, but I'm still putting off buying later ones like Xenoblade 2 because there's a good chance they'll go down in price, or at least have a better sale discount, between now and when I get to them.

I've never actually played Civ V on any difficulty below Prince but I can see it being kind of interesting to see if you could get away with very low military strategies on those. You're advancing at a good pace so far but you'll probably find the difficulty a little more restrictive moving forward. I remember struggling a lot when I first moved up to 5 and 6 and I still find 7 quite tough.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I'm mostly just not a fan of 1-unit-per-tile or city states.

I can understand one unit per tile being kind of annoying but I do think it's a necessary mechanic to make terrain meaningful and allow certain strategies, but I won't really argue in defense of city states.

-

The Venice game finished without much drama. Austria eventually did fall to a combined offensive from America and Morocco, and I found out that both Denmark and Russia had conquered city states, which would delay my Diplomatic Victory. My relations with most Civs were fine until around the point when I picked the Freedom ideology. I wound up being the only one to pick that out of everyone in the game, which made all the others angry with me. I actually had the world's largest military for the latter portion of the game though due to Venice being such a massive city and my tech being ahead of most. I liberated Hong Kong from Denmark to get a couple extra votes and managed to force through both world religion: Sikhism (with Russia and Poland helping since I had converted them) and World Ideology: Freedom (By putting all my votes into it while the other countries split between that and one other policy.) I won in just under 400 turns, like the first game, in a victory that was never in much doubt.

Game 4
Civ: Babylon
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 7

I decided to up the difficulty and switch to a much more powerful country. Babylon is considered to be a top-tier civ in this game and is one of the most commonly used options for winning on the highest difficulty. Their special ability is Ingenuity, which grants a free Great Scientist upon researching Writing and increases the rate at which subsequent Great Scientists are earned by 50%. In a multiplayer game, rushing writing and creating an early academy will get you so far ahead in tech that the other players won't stand a chance of catching up, but on the top 2 difficulties it merely brings you almost up to par with the AI civs and their extremely powerful bonuses.

The AI is savage on 7, and will almost always attack you really early on if they spawn anywhere close. In this particular game, my spawn location was not the luckiest, with Babylon being stuck in a Tundra area near the north end of one continent, right on the border with Spain to the south, two city states in the west, and Denmark beyond those. I had to resort to founding my third city on a snow tile where it tried to make something of itself with a few resource-enhanced tundras and some water tiles, and my fourth city as an outpost between the city states and Denmark.

Spain was stuck in the south and couldn't really expand without attacking me, which caused an early and exhaustingly long war. I saw this coming enough to defend myself with the Babylonian Bowmen and Walls of Babylon, which are just slightly-stronger versions of the Archer and Walls. I even managed to capture two Spanish settlers and steal several tiles from their second city with a Great General that I earned fighting the war. My cities grew really slowly on the Tundra tiles and I had to produce so many troops to fight off Spain that I couldn't really keep up in science or culture. When the war finally ended, Denmark immediately pounced and captured my ill-defended outpost city in about five turns, at which point I resigned the game.

Game 5
Civ: Babylon
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 7

So I re-rolled and started over, which is a pretty common occurence on the top difficulties. A lot of Deity players will recommend just starting over right away if your start location is less than ideal. This time around I was much more fortunate, landing on Grasslands with enough room to create a tightly-packed four city Empire without angering any neighbors. I had Venice to my immediate west which let me expand toward them without any trouble and also shared a continent with Portugal, Ethiopia, and Poland. None of these civs were close or expansionist enough to really threaten me, and I got by with a small military force and a lot of buildings. Although I've spent just about the entire game nearly in last place in all metrics, I eventually managed to emerge as the clear leader in science and even build a few wonders (Sistine Chapel, Eiffel Tower, Porcelain Tower, Broadway) because I was the first to reach the necessary tech. I put a lot of effort into trying to keep a decent culture so I wouldn't get dissidents trying to change my ideology later on, but despite all that I'm facing a -7 happiness penalty because Venice has become influential enough to make my civilians prefer Freedom to my chosen Order. Poland, meanwhile, has taken firm control of the World Congress and used it to start banning my resources. I also have a pathetically small army compared to every other country in the world and my cities have lackluster production exacerbated by the fact that I didn't get a single source of coal in my entire empire. I tried to ally with the city state of Milan to build factories, but Venice took them away from me before I could finish a single one. I'll have to try and solve all of these issues while leveraging my one advantage of strong science to a victory next time I play.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

I ended up resigning from my game as the Iroquois. I made more progress through Portugal and had their capital city down to 0 health, but I blundered away my melee units trying to move them in to take the city and they rallied with some Infantry that were threatening my remaining artillery. I still could've taken the city, but it was delayed by several turns, and in the meanwhile France was growing into an unstoppable empire that was beating me in every measure. the only way I could've beaten them was through a really long military campaign exploiting the AI's inability to play tactically, but that would have been such a slow and tedious process that I decided just to take the L and start a new game.

Game 3
Civ: Venice
Map Type: Archipelago
Difficulty: 6

Venice is another civ that's considered low-tier, but they're one of my personal favorites to play as and I advocate for them being a little under-rated.

Ability: Serenissima Cannot gain settlers nor annex cities, double the normal amount of trade routes available, gain a free Merchant of Venice after researching optics, can purchase in puppeted cities

Unique Unit: Merchant of Venice replaces Great Merchant, same abilities, but can also purchase a city state, causing Venice to instantly puppet it and take control of its military

Unique Unit: Great Galleass like the name implies, a Galleass with higher stats.

You can probably already see why Venice isn't considered that great. Losing out on the ability to create new cities is a pretty massive downside, and they're consequently locked into a pretty narrow playstyle that can definitely be exploited in multiplayer games. Unlike Carthage or the Iroquois, where I'd suggest ignoring their special bonuses and playing as if they are a blank civ, Venice inherently changes what you can do too much for that approach.

The way I go about it is to build a worker and then spam buildings in the early game, saving time by building neither a settler nor troops. Then once I get Optics I recover the lost value of those two things to a certain extent by purchasing my first city state. I pick the tradition culture tree for the bonuses to capital growth and happiness, and I even have my trade routes transfer food and production to my capital to help turn it into a giant metropolis. I also rush the Hanging Gardens, but unfortunately on this playthrough an AI civ beats me to it by 2 turns.

Aside from the extra trade routes, Venice can also get national wonders really easily, and I quickly build the National College, Ironworks, Oxford University, East India Company, and others. Even without the Hanging Gardens, I succeed in making Venice the world's largest city by a wide margin, and its production and specialist capacity keep me competitive with every other civ in all measures. I found the Sikh religion and spread it to the Polish despite some opposition from Ethiopia and their religion of Eastern Orthodoxy.

At one point, Poland declares war on me to try and take out my puppet city-state of Brussels, but the army that came with that city repels them with no losses except a few boats and all my trade routes. After the war concludes, I rebuild with no trouble, and Poland never bothers me again.

The Archipelago map basically consists of a lot of small islands and tons of water. Venice starts on its own isolated island and never has to deal with barbarians or threats from other civs, and Poland shares a larger island with Brussels and then hops over to a separate continent in the east. The game is much more peaceful than the last game, with only a few stalemated wars between America and Austria, which serves Venice's purposes nicely as I'm free to build 10 trade routes and make over 200 extra gold per turn, which I will use when I resume the game later today to control the world congress.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I'm mostly just trying to back up my own statement though, not shaming you for liking Civ5! At least I hope that's what gets across.

Of course, we're all adults here. I feel like you haven't fully succeeded in explaining your opinion on the two games, though. It would help if you elaborated more on which mechanics Civ IV has that lead to more interesting strategic decisions, though. Civ V is a game with a heavy meta so a lot of the game does come down to knowing the strongest options/priorities, I'll admit to that.

In my opinion, it's not only clear that Civ V's combat is better than the older Civ games, but that it's a great deal better. IV's combat might be a little better than the previous 3, I haven't spent enough time with it to say for certain. I agree with you that combat shouldn't be a huge, game-defining area of focus for a game like Civ, but sometimes single badly-designed elements can end up having a huge amount of influence on the overall experience of a game, and the combat of the older games is an example of that for me, to the point of being a dealbreaker. I would opt for more peaceful strategies if I played those games again, but between barbarians and declarations of war from the AI there's no avoiding it entirely, and between its too-influential RNG (it's pretty common for the starting Phalanx unit to beat Bombers in Civ 1) and the generally mindless stat-check nature of combat encounters I consider it the worst combat system I've ever encountered in a grand strategy game. In contrast, I think the new combat system is fine. It adds a lot of things: differentiated unit types, the ability to use chokepoints, and city locations being relevant to combat being the most important ones.

I hadn't heard of Sullla before but after googling his site, I might check out some of those articles later.

Game 2
Civilization: Iroquois
Map Type: Pangea
Difficulty: 6 (Emperor)

Game 1
Civilization: Carthage
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 6 (Emperor)

I've still been playing the past few days, but I had a hard time summoning the will to write about it. First, let's talk about the Iroquois' unique abilities

The Great Warpath - Units move through forest and jungle tiles in friendly territory as if they were roads, and these tiles can be used to establish city connections after researching The Wheel

Keep in mind that this only applies to tiles inside your borders. It's quite difficult to use this to reduce your need for roads by much. The formula that determines where your borders expand doesn't take it into account at all, so you will usually have to buy those tiles if you want to save yourself road maintenance, which makes the economic value pretty minimal. I recommend building your roads as normal and skipping the few forest tiles along the way that happen to get added to your borders naturally. During this game, it has been handy once or twice for defending my territory, but I would definitely evaluate it as an under-powered ability. The Iroquois also have a forest spawning bias to help make use of this, which caused my city to spawn almost entirely surrounded by forest and reduced its early game value considerably.

Unique Unit: Mohawk Warrior: Swordsman with 33% combat bonus in forest and jungle which does not take iron. The combat bonus is a little bit situational, so the better part of this unit is that it doesn't require iron. I had a lot of iron in my territory anyway, but I just sold it to France for some extra gold every turn until I upgraded to longswordsmen.

Unique Building: Longhouse: Workshop, but replaces its 15% production bonus with +1 production to forest tiles. This is the reason the Iroquois are seen as particularly bad, since it can easily be worse than the regular workshop provided you don't have enough forests around you.

On the whole, the Iroquois have a weak ability and special building and an okay but unspectacular unique unit, making them one of the weaker civs in the game. I don't mind running a slightly weaker civ on difficulty 6 though.

Pangaea tends to be a violent map due to every civ spawning within reach of one another at the very start of the game. I appeared in the center-west of the world, with Aztec, Zulu, and Egypt all too close for comfort. I had the good luck of finding the natural wonder Fountain of Youth north of my first city, and claimed it with my second for +10 happiness. I founded my third city of Grand River right along the Zulu border, which prompted them to attack alongside the Aztec. I had made a terrible mistake by leaving zero units to defend this new city and it fell almost immediately, but I was able to recapture it shortly afterward in part because the Aztec sent no troops toward me. After that, I made peace with both nations.

I managed to get the Stonehenge and Notre Dame wonders, which let me start a religion and fueled enough happiness to make me think a domination victory would be possible. I met Greece, France, the Mongols, and Portugal. France didn't waste much time in wiping Mongolia off the map and turning its eyes on Greece, which had already taken the fight to the Zulu and captured two of their cities. This prompted Portugal and Aztec to pounce and try wiping the Zulu out entirely. The Aztec had to move through my territory to wage such a war, and once their army was caught in between two of my cities, I attacked them, encircled their entire army and wiped it out, and then took both of their cities in short order, allowing me to found another on the coast far to the east. Alongside France, I also marched on the Greek capital, but its walls were too strong for my Trebuchets to breach and I decided to step back until I had cannons.

Once I had upgraded my siege units, I decided to conquer the Zulu next. Egypt's border town was almost impossible to take from the east because it had a formidable mountain range in front of it, so I decided to go around through Zulu and Portugal and strike their capital directly. The Zulu fell quickly but Portugal always had a crucial technological edge over me that made taking them down really hard. They beat me to the Riflemen making their melee units too resilient to easily take down and they beat me to Great War Bombers giving them powerful, difficult-to-answer attacks on my backline. Meanwhile, Egypt made multiple futile attempts to take my cities and France gobbled up Greece and then attacked me next. As such, I could never really focus my troops on a single front and progress was extremely slow. The AI also ganged up on me via the world congress, taking several of my luxury resources away from me. Since I had to focus on troops to fend off three different nations at once, I fell behind enough on culture that France could force me to flip from the military-focused Autocracy ideology to the more balanced Order, but after around 300 exhausting turns of constant warfare I matched Portugal's bomber with Triplanes and took two major cities away from them. I brokered a 10 turn truce, and will reinforce that invasion force so I can finish them off the moment it ends. Any non-domination victory type will be tough for me to manage now.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Civ4 is still way better than 5 even with the latter's expansion packs factored in.

I have to admit I don't know a lot about Civ IV, except that it has roughly the same combat mechanics as the previous games. What do you think are its major advantages in comparison to V?

Lightning Strikes posted...

God of War was a revelation when it came out but nowadays is effectively a tech demo for old tech. 2 is much better, and 3 is better to play these days (and the PS4 game blows them all out of the water). At the time it was not only impressive for its scope and visuals (it was punching well above its weight for the weakest system that gen) but also the combat system and quick time events. Nowadays that doesn't really play as well.

If it makes you feel better, not only did ToS beat it in a 2009 shocker it would have won the rematch if it was a full 24 hours.

I've heard that the PS4 game is a lot better from others, but it does seem to be a significant change of direction both in terms of the general game design and the story. I do think the game has aged to a certain extent and that's kind of evident in the reception. I think a lot of outlets like IGN gave it the game of the year nod in 2005, but I also know IGN eventually dubbed Shadow of the Colossus, which also came out that year, the best game for PS2 with GoW dragging a little further behind in comparison.

Oh yeah, I remember reading about ToS' performance in the 4-ways but I had forgotten that God of War was involved in that. I remember Oblivion being one of the games in that match, but not GoW or the fourth contestant.

-

Alright, I finished up my Carthage game with a scientific victory, in just under 400 turns. I picked the Freedom ideology to rush for its Treaty Organization policy, which generates influence with city states as long as you have a trade route to them. After orienting my economy toward gold and setting up those trade routes, I was able to take away almost half of Greece's control over the world congress, easily delaying their diplomatic victory until I could win through science. I got ahead in research by setting my cities to have science specialists and pumping out as many great scientists and I could, and also by rushing the all-important Hubble Space Telescope wonder, which is essential for a science victory. If I hadn't been defeatist about my chances of getting it all game long, I think a cultural victory might possibly have been open to me too.

Greece became an ultra-militarist civilization, including picking Autocracy as its ideology. It destroyed the Zulus utterly and reduced Morocco to one far away city on a small island. There were times when I could have gone to war with them and slowed this snowball, but I was too lazy to go about it. Although Greece united their entire continent, they never made an effort to come to mine. Brazil, meanwhile, tore apart the remains of Austria, who wound up so weakened that their last city fell to the revived Sweden. The civ that was eliminated before I could ever meet them turned out to be Venice.

I made a lot of mistakes playing this game. I think an obvious one was that I didn't set any troops to explore the world for a long time. The extra information would have been useful to me. Either way, it was mostly a cruise to victory that was never in much doubt - there was a little bit of tension as Greece wiped out its neighbors but I was still confident I'd win. On the whole, I think I had a lucky starting location since I found the rather useful copper and silver resources in my second and third cities.

Difficulty 7 is a major step up, and I still don't feel comfortable enough to attempt it, so next time I play I'll be trying the same difficulty with another low-tier civ: The Iroquois.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

The stream stopped around 9 if I recall right, and I'll be running another one every day at the same time for the next two weeks.

Of course, this project is still forum based first and foremost. The Vod is up on Twitch if anyone wants to watch it, but if you'd rather just read, here's a summary of my first Civ V session

Game 1
Civilization: Carthage
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 6 (Emperor)

I thought it would be nice to start on the most standard map mode and the difficulty I'm most comfortable with, which is two steps above the normal difficulty. I picked Carthage, the historical short-term rival of the Roman Republic, whose special abilities include being able to cross mountains, getting free harbors on coastal cities, and two unique units: the Quinqureme and the African War Elephant, of which the former is really lacklustre and the latter not a lot better. This is considered a bottom-tier civ, and I played my game while mostly ignoring its special benefits, even building my second and third cities inland and thus forgoing the free harbors.

Not having a personality, I tried to devote the stream to explaining the game, both in terms of the general basics and some of the optimal meta-game decisions. Some of the stuff I focused on included:

- That it is better to spend turns moving your first city if it's preferable
- How production is the best city resource and you should optimize around it (because it can be converted into anything else needed.)
- Tradition is the best first cultural policy but liberty is good too
- The first thing you build should be a worker
- You can declare war on a city state, steal one of their workers, and then immediately make peace
- The best use of trade routes is to transfer food and production between your cities (except on the highest difficulties where trading with other civs becomes important for science)
- It's hard to get the early game wonders on high difficulties, but you can easily get the later ones.
- 4 cities is usually optimal
- You should balance your writer's guild, artist's guild, and musician's guilds between three different cities

And following these rules the game went quite well! Carthage spawned on the northern coast of one continent, close to Sweden, Austria, and Brazil. I was sandwiched between Sweden and Austria specifically, which encouraged me to expand as soon as I could into the contested land to my south. Between myself and Austria, Sweden had such little pick of good land left that it wound up with only a single city, rendering itself irrelevant from an early point in the game. Austria, meanwhile, expanded quickly but neglected military development, allowing me to breathe easy and focus on my economy, while eyeing Austria's capital with a covetous feeling in my heart. Tradition was my first policy and Aesthetics was my second. I picked it because I did not want to fall too far behind in culture, and in fact I wound up being the most culturally advanced civilization in the game! I did not get any of the early game wonders, but managed to build the Sistine Chapel, Porcelain Tower, Taj Mahal, Globe Theater, and Uffizi in one heavily production-focused city as well as Machu Picchu in one mountain-adjacent city. I founded Zoroastrianism but had a lot of difficulty keeping the Austrians' Catholicism out of my cities.

Continents tends to lead to two major landmasses with about half the civilizations on each. In this game, the other continent contained the Zulus, the Greeks, the Moroccans, and one other civilization that was wiped out by the Zulus before I could meet it. Greece turned out to be the real threat of the group, and has seized a dominating control of the various city-states around the map and the world congress along with it. Austria eventually attacked Sweden and conquered its only city, but I declared war on them shortly afterward, bringing a huge army of cannons and musketmen and quickly taking their capital city of Vienna, then liberating the Swedes. Austria also conceded their major city of Graz in the peace deal, leaving them and Sweden both weakened to the point of irrelevance. I gained two more wonders from the conquest of Vienna and sent an Inquisitor to Vienna to remove the Catholic Holy City, and therefore leave that religion without much standing in the world. Greece, meanwhile, declared war on the Zulus but didn't seem to make a lot of progress. I could only find 3 coal in my entire empire, preventing me from building the all-important 4 factories that grant the player a choice of Ideology.

As of 250 turns into the game, I'm in a pretty comfortable position to win in almost any victory type. I just have to watch out for Greece, which is the world leader both in science and diplomacy. My goal is to finish up the game during today's stream.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

Okay, I'm starting up the stream in a few minutes. If you're interested, the link is at the end of my last post. And if you're interested in this game in general, I recommend you check out another ambitious project from this board, Emeraldegg's civ V topic:https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/78740195

ctesjbuvf posted...

Good pace with God of War. I do believe they become better as we go. Several of the issues you mention become much less of a problem.

Thanks. Yeah, a few friends of mine also told me that the next two games are a noticeable improvement, with a little bit of argument as to whether God of War 2 or 3 was better. I know 3 has loads of boss fights, so I'm looking forward to that aspect of it.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Civ4 is way better than 5 IMO.

I can understand why you'd think that. It was a pretty common point of view when Civ V first game out. I don't know how V's two expansions have changed that. For me though, the combat in the pre-V civ games is just so unbearable that I can hardly stand to play them, while I think V's is fine for the most part.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

Anyway, let's move right along to the next game:

Sid Meier's Civilization V
Release Date: September 21, 2010
Previous Experience with Civ V: 687 hours on Steam
Expectations for Civ V: The same game I know so well

In the Starcraft II write up I talked about the first laptop I ever had to myself. That old thing could never have ran Civ V, but the game was out when I still had it. It was another of those strategy games that I coveted when I didn't know about pre-paid credit cards and didn't have to dough to buy a PC that could play it. Back then I had to settle for the original Civilization through Dosbox. Old civ games are kind of fun, but the combat is mindless and abysmal, so that whatever advantages they might have they're automatically worse than V or VI.

This game was a big part of the reason why I bought my second computer - I picked up a disc copy of the game alongside my new machine. It's the only PC game I've ever owned on disc to this day, but that packaged game was worth buying as the most cost-efficient way to get the DLC. I've still yet to play Civ V without its two expansions, but I know second hand that it felt a little content light on its initial release back then.

I wouldn't play it for 700 hours if I thought it was a bad game. Even after Civ VI has been out for a long time (the game I bought my third and current computer to play, incidentally,) I still prefer its predecessor.

Grand strategy is a genre that fascinates me. Civ V is only my second-most played game on Steam behind Europa Universalis IV. I think it's partially because, unlike real time strategy, it allows for cooperative and diplomatic strategies. In Starcraft II, you're the Zerg's enemy and that's that. You can't trade with them, you can't make peace treaties with them, and you can't really temporarily band together to take down the Protoss. All of that stuff is completely possible in Civ V. What's especially interesting is how even though you work together, only one of you can win - and that gives an incentive for a well-timed betrayal.

If the goal of this project is to find out how I feel about every game in the contest, then I could've skipped Civ V and still achieved that goal, but the thing is that after all this time I still want to play it, I want to talk about playing it, and I've even decided to go when step further: I will be streaming Civilization V, starting tomorrow at 6PM EST. My Twitch channel is here: https://www.twitch.tv/peopleranimals2

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

Final Analysis: God of War (2005)
What I thought of GoW: Fun at points, annoying at others
Would I play it again? Probably not
Did it deserve to make Round 3 (In GotD 1?) Still salty it took down ToS tbh

One of the purposes of games is that they can simulate experiences that you wouldn't want to go through for real. You can lie and backstab your friends in a strategy game without the betrayal tearing your social groups apart. Video games almost always do that with violence. Real world combat would be traumatic, but you can extract some of the thrill of battle without having to go through anything like that. Maybe that's part of the reason why almost all video games have combat. All my favorite games have combat, but I notice that I'm not a big fan of games that are almost exclusively about violence.

God of War, of course, is one such game. It's not really about anything except watching a big buff angry dude kill things in flashy ways. That will never be my biggest interest in life, so I could only ever have been so fond of God of War - about as fond as I was of Bayonetta, maybe. I can put aside quibbles like how the story's really bad and how not much care went into building a compelling or cohesive setting around Greek mythology, but I think the game has flaws that prevent it from really achieving its goals as a fun, flashy hack and slash game. It can be rough how you respawn from checkpoints with some of your health missing, because it can mean going through a tough fight with a minimum of resources. A lot of the encounters feel long and overly enemy dense. There are times when you're just fighting endless respawning clones of a single enemy type, which feels pretty repetitive. The climbing and platforming sections tend to be a pain. I don't like rolling with the analog stick and the circle button has more tasks than it can handle. Even the game's character progression system has the flaw that it discourages trying different options.

It still has solid core mechanics underneath all that, and there are definitely some highlights that I'll look back upon fondly, but I have trouble understanding why God of War was such a big name franchise. It was a common Game of the Year choice back in 2005, which I don't really think it deserved. Maybe it had to do with the technology involved, because one of its other major strengths is the impressive sense of scope it's capable of portraying.

For me, God of War needs a few things before it can be a part of that kind of conversation:

1. More enemy variety. I think the biggest thing that lets the moment to moment gameplay down is that there aren't quite enough enemy types. It can be a while between the introductions of new baddies and the ones that are around often have to pull double or triple duty to make up for that. It's common to see palette swaps of older enemies as powered up versions and there are a lot of battles against single enemy types. For such a combat-oriented game, I think having a few more types and mixing them up more would help keep the gameplay fresh.
2. More boss fights. The two boss fights against giant monsters are definitely the highlights of this game for me. They're challenging in a fun way and make good use of the game's theatrical violence. I get how much work they must have been to create, but I did think it was a little disappointing that there were only two in the whole game.
3. A better main character. I didn't find much to like about Kratos. He's one-note, uncharismatic, and pointlessly cruel. He doesn't think much of killing people who have done nothing particularly wrong and whom he doesn't need to kill to achieve his goals. I think this series is going for a sort of dark storytelling where the protagonist is deliberately a bad person, but I don't think he has the kind of depth that makes such a thing interesting. Even for a gameplay-focused game like this one, having a compelling main character can make things a lot more enjoyable and a lot more memorable.
4. Penises. Ancient Greece was famously one of the most homo-erotic cultures in human history. Men competed naked at the original Olympics and women weren't allowed to watch. That was reflected in a lot of their art, which was a huge influence on the rest of European culture. God of War isn't a Greek game though, it's an American game with some Greek influences, and America has an exceptionally puritan culture. Its devs had to limit their mature content to more socially acceptable things like watching people get disemboweled. It's not completely taboo to video games though. There are nude statues in Symphony of the Night, God of War's "rip-off" Dante's Inferno had a boss with a giant swinging dong, and even Animal Crossing includes David's best feature in its digital reproduction of Michelangelo's statue. I find it kind of funny that the M-Rated ultra-dark God of War is the game to chicken out and cover the walls of its temples with awkward neuter figures that the Greeks would be disgusted with. Of all the changes the game makes to Greek mythology, this is clearly the most egregious.

God of War wasn't everything I hoped for, but it didn't discourage me from trying out the second game. Of my four main criticisms, I dare to believe it can assuage 1 and 2.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

I finished God of War. I was actually saved right outside of the final boss when I picked it back up, unbeknownst to me. Kratos finds the Oracle of Athens bleeding out and she tells him that he's too late because the city has already fallen. It turns out that Ares' central motivation was daddy issues - he's attacking Athena's city because he feels that Zeus prefers her. Kratos manages to snatch away Pandora's Box while he's distracted, and it turns out that it just contains the Giant's Mask from Majora's Mask. He grows to a giant version of himself with identical controls and fights it out with Ares. It sort of functions as a "rival battle" similar to the fights with Jeanne in Bayonetta. It's a much faster battle compared to the Minotaur fight - it doesn't take too long to drain Ares' single health bar but on Spartan his attacks can drain half your health at once. He drops a lot of health and mana, so you can use the Army of Hades (the most powerful spell) against him quite a lot. It's pretty tricky to get a hit in on him normally - he has a lot of poise, he attacks all the time, and some of his moves make him essentially untargetable, for example a large flame burst attack that zones you away from him and another where he flies into the air and throws meteors.

It's a three-phase final boss, though. The second phase isn't against Ares, but illusions created by him. He makes Kratos relive the night when he murdered his own wife and daughter, but in this case he's defending them against hordes of clones of himself. It's the last example of what I consider one of the game's bad design habits, where it will just throw one enemy type at you in large numbers and make them respawn every time you kill one for a really long time. Your family have a separate health bar and you get a game over if they die. You can hug them to transfer your health into them. I found that the best strategy was to stand aside and do the light -> light -> heavy attack combo over and over again, aimed at Kratos' family. It's the fastest way to get out an attack that will knock down all the Kratos clones. I'd use Rage of the Gods or Poseidon's Wrath if I got surrounded. I found it really difficult, though. It was easy to get surrounded and then immediately get surrounded again after I had used my resources to escape, the section was pretty long, and because there were so many enemies around at any given time it could be tough to find a great opportunity to attack. The controls got in my way a little too. Circle is the button for grab, hug, and to use spells, so sometimes I would need to bail myself out with Poseidon's Wrath but Kratos would keep throwing single enemies instead.

For a lot of the later sections of this game I felt that I should have chosen to play on Normal, but it was this section that finally made me give up and take the game's offer to reduce the difficulty to easy. I had failed it a lot of times and was starting to get way too tilted. On easy mode, Ares' attacks that would have taken away half my health previously would barely tickle, and I beat the illusion section on the first try.

The final phase is essentially the same as the first, but Ares takes away all of Kratos' powers and you have to fight him with a giant sword from a statue, which has essentially the same moveset as the Blade of Artemis. There's kind of a tug-of-war mechanic going on with the health, where each time you hit Ares you heal a little and vice versa. It's harder since you don't have the Army of Hades, but since I was on easy mode by that time I could pretty much just mash square and win.

Ares realizes that he's beaten and tries to get Kratos to spare him by saying that he made him kill his family to try and make him into a great warrior, and Kratos quips "you succeeded" before impaling him through the chest. The Gods say that they forgive him for his sins but can't take away his nightmares, and then Kratos throws himself off a cliff in the scene we saw at the very beginning. I guess he didn't take into account how if he died he'd still probably have nightmares down in Tartarus. The gods decide to bring him back and make him into Ares' replacement, though, and the first game ends before they can start to regret it.

Final Thoughts on God of War coming later.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: Sid Meier's Civilization V

When I last saved, Kratos was standing just outside of the room where he'd finally get his hands on Pandora's Box. The only remaining obstacle was a surprisingly difficult room full of harpies and archers. Those are two of the weakest enemy types in the game, but their attacks still cause Kratos to go into his flinching animation, which makes him susceptible to the room's real enemies: a conveyor belt floor and grinding wheels on the walls. Getting knocked into these takes out a substantial amount of health, and because there are so many enemies with ranged attacks it's not a hard thing to see happen. I had squeaked through the previous battle with about a quarter of my health, which meant going into that room on low hp because the game remembers how much you had even when you restart from a save point or checkpoint. I couldn't beat the room with so little health and wound up having to backtrack across the entire cliffs of madness section to find a health box I hadn't opened yet.

Once that was out of the way, Kratos finally retrieved the box, but Ares sensed it happening back in Athens and threw a giant pillar all the way to the temple where it fatally impaled what I will generously call our hero. This sent Kratos to the Underworld where he would have to fight his way back to the land of the living.

I doubt it would be controversial to say that the underworld is easily the worst part of the game. It's mostly composed of annoying 3D platforming sections where you're constantly in danger of falling to an instant death. The most obnoxious part is when you have to climb a tall pillar covered in rotating blades, and getting hit at any point will cause Kratos to lose his grip and fall all the way back to the bottom. There were no new enemies in this section, just infernal versions of the ones I'd fought before.

When Kratos claws his way out of Tartarus, he's in Athens, where the mysterious gravedigger he met last time he was there has just finished digging the hole for him to climb through. I stopped shortly after that, but I spent a little bit of time in Athens fighting the old weaker enemies that had been there last time. The intention behind this might be to give the player that feeling of having grown throughout his journey that metroidvanias can kind of emphasize - I was surprised how quickly I took down the enemies with the fully upgraded Blades of Chaos.

I should be in a good position to wrap this game up over the weekend.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

Didn't play too long today, still on the quest for Pandora's Box. After the minotaur you tear the head off another son corpse to stuff in a wall and then you spend a good while just turning a crank to move the circular walls of several chambers so the doors all align and you can shine a light through to complete a puzzle, whereupon after some cutscenes you go to the "Cliffs of Madness" section of the temple. I found an unfortunate glitch after falling off a cliff at the entrance where you'll respawn stuck next to a book with no functional controls except the ability to read its flavor text, which I couldn't find any solution to except to restart the game, forcing me to do the elaborate wall-turning process and watch all the cutscenes a second time.

What we learn from the cutscenes is that after pledging his allegiance to Ares in exchange for a victory in battle, Kratos spent some time ruthlessly slaughtering people for him until he went into a temple for Athena as part of his job and accidentally killed his wife and daughter inside due to some trickery on Ares' part, after which he swore revenge. Hercules made the same mistake in the real Greek mythology, which was probably a source of inspiration for that plot point.

I encountered a new enemy type that wields a purple cane. I don't know what mythological creature it's based on, but it's probably the strongest regular enemy thus far, with the ability to block attacks, break out of combos, and dish out chained hits of its own. Apart from these guys, most of the combat in this section is against the weakest possible enemies, which I've gotten pretty good at dealing with. The main task on the cliffs is to find two necklaces for statues of the Godesses. The first one you find by doing a 10 picarat block arranging puzzle from Professor Layton except you have to have Kratos slowly push the blocks around and rotate them with a mechanical device. The second one was a timed challenge where you have to quickly push a box to jump off it before spikes come up and kill you. I actually found that one really tough, between the time limit being pretty tight and Kratos' charge kick move that you use to expedite the pushing being a little awkward. I stopped shortly after finishing up the Cliffs section and moving into the Architect's Tomb, where I completed my torn off head collection.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

It was definitely optimistic to think I could beat the Temple section last time I played, because it turns out to be an extremely long area. I think that something like half of the first God of War game takes place in this single location. I had been under the impression that the two muse keys unlocked the door to Pandora's Box, but it turns out they're actually entirely optional and only gain you access to some health and magic powerups.

I was saved right outside of the Poseidon section of the temple, whose first challenge is to sacrifice a man to the Gods. They have a whole bunch conveniently reserved in cages just for this purpose. You find the corpse of another adventurer who killed himself rather than committing such an act, but Kratos naturally doesn't bat an eye at burning the poor sucker alive. You have to push him up a long ramp and into the fire while infinitely-spawning enemies try to interrupt you. I think it would've been a good idea to take out the enemies in this section to allow the player to focus on what's happening in the story, since it's a moment that should give you some doubt as to the justice of what you're doing, but instead it's quite an annoying section and by the time I finished it I was too frustrated to pay attention to such ethical issues. The enemy type that hounds you while you push your living payload is a pretty tough soldier type who can block attacks, so it's really hard to take them down fast enough to avoid getting bogged down. On my successful attempt I used Rage of the Gods and kind of rushed the actual pushing. Up ahead, you gain the power to breathe infinitely underwater and dodge around some traps in a swimming section.

The next section after that is themed around Hades, and it has a lot of harder sections. A new enemy type is introduced in the Centaur, and in your first encounter you have to kill them within a very small circle to progress. It can be kind of annoying because the Centaurs have a decent amount of health, and it's not hard to accidentally kill one just outside the circle since your attacks push them around, in which case you have to start from scratch with a full-health enemy that spawns in to replace it. Further in, the game forces you to master those dumb mechanics where you balance on a narrow beam with a section where you traverse such while mechanical rotating axes try to cut you to pieces. Kratos' animation for climbing back up when he loses his balance is long enough that doing so usually results in a death. It's especially hard at one point where you have to jump over the axes as they approach. It's pretty easy to lose alignment with the beam as you jump and wind up just falling to your death. Hades also makes you go around a maze killing everything before you can progress, with one particularly troublesome little hidden cranny that you have to squeeze into during the brief moment before being crushed by the giant pounding pillar that normally covers it, which can kill you and force you to redo the whole maze.

I stopped immediately after taking down the game's second boss, a giant armored minotaur. This guy killed me an absurd number of times. It's a four-stage boss fight where you slowly chip away his armor to reveal the cow meat underneath, so it can be quite exhausting to get to the last stage only to die and have to start all over. He can kill you pretty quickly too, particularly during his final phase when his attacks do extra damage, he uses more dangerous moves, and he stops dropping health and magic orbs.

There are a few little tricks to this boss fight. First of all, you're encouraged to throw a lot of lightning bolts to get a little bit of safe ranged damage, since he drops quite a lot of mana in the early stages of the fight. If you're ever behind him, he'll jump a long way backwards, even interrupting an attack he's in the middle of performing to do so. Every time he breathes fire, you can roll in toward him once you've dodged it, which will cause him to roar at you thus giving you a good opportunity to get a lot of hits in. You finish off the first two phases of the fight by hitting him enough that he's stunned, at which point he drops health, and then doing some QTEs, at which point he drops more health and magic. You can actually deliberately fail the QTEs to farm more health and mana.

I had the most trouble with a four-hit ground pound attack which he follows with a head bash. It's not too hard to dodge and gives you a good chance to punish him, but if you do get nailed by the first hit it combos into the rest and can take out nearly half your health at once. He also has an attack where he hits the ground causing three projectiles to burst out from under you. It took me a long time to figure out how to dodge that one because the interval between the projectiles is shorter than the ending animation to Kratos' roll. It turns out that you can press R1 to do a little shoulder check move at the end of your roll and move even further. I haven't found any other use for this move for the whole game so far, but it does seem to be the only way to consistently dodge this particular attack.

Overall I do think it's a fun boss and definitely one of the game's highlights so far. I probably would've preferred if it were slightly shorter.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

azuarc posted...

I hope you've got these write-ups preserved somewhere for when the topic hits 500 and inevitably purges.

That gets done automatically, as I understand it. I could put them up on Wordpress or something if people really want to go back and find that easier though.

BetrayedTangy posted...

Oh thank god. So my only experience with Civ before was Revolution and to 'beat it' I won games with every civ. I was thinking about doing the same thing here, then I saw the full list.

Winning with every single civ would be a big project on its own, yeah. I definitely wouldn't be willing to put in that much time when I still have another 117 games ahead of me. Beating Deity can be a tall order - I've never done it myself. I do plan to at least attempt it when I play the game for this project, but if I can't manage it I'll move on eventually.

ctesjbuvf posted...

It's mostly in platforming or climbing sections that bother me (I last played the trilogy in 2017, before the new one came). I think the camera is mostly fine though when it's not, it's awful.

The climbing is definitely an issue for me, particularly the climbing combat. I also don't like the parts where they make you balance on thin platforms.

-

In God of War's mythology, Pandora's Box is in a temple which has been chained to the back of Cronus, the last of the Titans. Cronus is a pretty important figure in Greek Mythology. He's Zeus' dad. He killed his father by castrating him with a sickle. So far in the game he's just a big bald guy who crawls around on all fours looking like a turtle. I wonder if the idea behind him carrying the temple was inspired by the story about Atlas, another titan who had to carry the Earth on his back. Apparently that guy does show up later on in the series.

It's not a long walk from Athens to the temple, really - they are mostly separated by a short desert section. There's a wide open area where you have to find and defeat three Sirens to pass through. Their singing is the audio queue you're supposed to use to track them down. They make pretty slippery opponents, dodging around enough that they're hard to get good combos on. I found the most reliable way to deal good damage to them was just to use Poseidon's Wrath. It has enough area of effect and hit-stun that they can't really dodge out of it. After you beat the three scattered Sirens, there's a big battle arena where you have to fight three sirens at once, with new ones spawning to replace them. So many Sirens spawn in that for a moment I thought there was some kind of puzzle I was missing and they would come infinitely until I figured it out, but really there's just a lot of them and they keep to three at a time.

Once that's out of the way you get to the temple. I wanted to finish this whole section in one go but it's quite long and I eventually felt too tired to keep going. There's still a lot of combat in this area but there's a greater emphasis on puzzles and avoiding traps. There's one room with buzzsaws running up and down the floor where you need to pull two levers to open a door and then run through it before the door closes again. When I arrived in this room I had so little health that even one of the saws hitting me would finish me off,, which made it quite a pain to manage.

I'm only barely managing to squeak by on the Spartan difficulty at this point. A lot of fights are pretty easy but then I'll hit a barrier that's tough to break through. There were multiple points when the game asked me if I wanted to go down to easy mode - one was against a room full of powered-up Gorgons, which I eventually got through by spamming Poseidon's Rage and executing them for magic, and another was an arena fight against a Cerberus-like dog and a bunch of puppy versions of it. That one turns out to be much easier if you focus down the smaller dogs and move in a way that prevents them from surrounding you. I unlocked a second weapon option, the Blade of Artemis. It's a two handed sword with closer ranged attacks and a third attack button instead of the grab. I haven't really used it much, partially because I had the Blades of Chaos upgraded to level 4 by the time it showed up and partially because losing out on the grab means you don't get the contextual executions against enemies, which are usually pretty valuable. Most of the Temple is dedicated to finding two keys to unlock a door near the beginning. I have the two keys but stopped shortly after getting my hands on the second. There's a little more backstory for Kratos where we find out that he offered his life to Ares in exchange for winning a battle, and for a moment he expresses guilt which I did find to be a nice change of pace. Also, we learn that the chief architect of the temple lost his son during the construction and dedicated part of the place to his memory, but then he also designed the temple in such a way that anyone who was trying to get Pandora's Box would have to disturb his son's remains and rip the head off his body to use as a key, so that's kind of odd.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

You can also take cities with melee ships like the privateer or ironclad, which might be a little easier than doing it with infantry.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

ctesjbuvf posted...

I still enjoy the trilogy today. Can still enjoy Devil May Cry too. They haven't aged perfectly, but the combat holds up just fine and that's most of it.

Yeah, I might have been overstating the comparison with Bayonetta. I agree that the combat's still good enough and the game remains playable. It's the camera and the character models that show their age for the most part. I probably would've been more impressed with this game if I played it first of the two, though, that's for sure.

BetrayedTangy posted...

So I actually decided to start up Civ 5 early due to my lack of experience with the franchise. I'm wondering what is the specification you're going with for 'beating' it.

In theory, winning any game of Civ V counts as beating it, but at the start of this topic I decided that I will play games without a traditional ending for two weeks and that's probably what I'll do with Civ, partially because I already like it and would prefer to play it for more than one campaign.

-

I completed the Athens section of God of War and started my way down the road away from town. For the most part, the combat and the mechanics didn't really see any shakeups - most of the stuff I did today was just different groups of the same enemies I had already fought. I think the two new enemy groups were a giant whose attacks you have to roll around and a sneaky, shadowy, assassin type enemy. When the giants first show up, you're in an arena with a lot of Athenian citizens running around. Both Kratos and the monsters can kill them, and they don't have much in the way of self-preservation instincts. Sometimes they'll run right into your attacks. At first I tried to avoid killing them, but then I found out they drop health. Worryingly enough, that was all the incentive I needed to start massacring them. I guess that as a citizen of Sparta Kratos wouldn't hold the lives of Athens men in very high regard. There was one kind of annoying part where Harpies keep spawning and harassing you until you slowly push statues in front of two holes in a wall. I also got a new spell from Zeus that lets you chuck lightning bolts. It seems kind of situational. So far I've only used it to take down distant archers that I couldn't reach with my weapons. Gorgon Eyes serve a similar purpose to pieces of heart from Zelda, except in this case you have to gather six to get a health upgrade. I managed to get my first full health upgrade and a few portions of the second.

For me, the coolest part of this whole level was the appearance of Ares as a colossus in the far background, fighting several armies at once. He's so massive that you see him a couple of times from completely different vantage points. It's a nice detail that helps give the character a sense of presence.

Kratos' job in Athens is essentially to find the Oracle of Athens (which I don't think was a thing in classical antiquity, but again, I'll let that slide,) so that she can give him some advice. First she reads his mind and gives the player a little more of his backstory, which was that he used to be a brutal Spartan general so feared that only his wife would stand up to him, and then she tells him to seek Pandora's Box in the desert because it's the only thing that can allow him to kill a god. I left him shortly after that point, fighting a few battles in a sewer area beforehand.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

God of War takes something of an in medias res approach to storytelling. It begins using the same technique that starts out the 2020 Sonic film, where it shows an intriguing event from later in the story and then cuts back (in this case Kratos committing suicide and a cut back three weeks earlier when he's fighting some zombies on a ship,) and then it cuts back even further to explain that he has a traumatic past involving his family dying and is seeking absolution from the Gods to help himself cope with the flashbacks.

This game is essentially a hack and slash akin to Bayonetta. Kratos has light and heavy attacks and can chain them together for different combos. Instead of shooting with the remaining face button he has a grab, and although he has a dodge roll he favors blocking instead (it's more masculine after all.) Out of everything I've played so far, the hardest part was actually the very first combat encounter with a bunch of bottom-tier mooks. Most other fights spawn health pickups but that one never does. I'm playing on the Spartan difficulty, which is the hard setting (it felt appropriate after the last game I played,) but I died enough times on that battle that the game asked me if I wouldn't prefer playing on easy! I got it together eventually though. It seems like the essence of this game is using your attacks in such a way as to stun-lock as many enemies as possible. You can grab the basic enemies right away and one-shot them by doing so, but against most stronger creatures you have to weaken them first and then do a little quick time event to finish them off. This is a core mechanic of the game and is even integrated into the boss fights.

I think the core combat is alright, but any time the game does something else it's really lame. There's a puzzle early on where you have to push a crate to a far wall so you can jump on it, with archers firing at you all the while. They can break your crate and force you to go back to its spawn point and start over. That was pretty annoying. There are also sections where you have to climb up masts and fight enemies at the same time, which are almost comical. There are no combos while you're climbing, just a basic light and heavy attack, so you just sit there poking enemies over and over until they fall off. Or just grab them because it's faster.

The first level is on a fleet of sinking ships and is defined by a battle against a Hydra. There's none of that cut off one head and two more will take its place business from mythology, it's just a three-headed sea serpent to serve as the first boss. You fight a couple of its heads non-conclusively in the earlier sections, and then there's a big final confrontation with it later on. You can block all the attacks of the smaller heads except one, but that one actually helps you rather than the Hydra because you can break out with an easy QTE which does a lot of damage to the beast and stuns it for a while. If anything, you want to get hit with that one! Then you climb up onto a tall mast to fight its biggest head. Its attacks are too powerful to block and you have to use your dodge roll, though sometimes you can just walk out of the way or even stand still as the Hydra attacks in the opposite direction. It took me a really long time to finish off this phase, because it typically stands just out of reach for a lot of Kratos' attacks and only comes closer to chomp down on him. It's sort of broken into multiple phases where you get it to break the mast into a sharp point and then impale its head on that. Then you go into its belly and find a ship's captain, but Kratos just takes a key off him and dumps him down the Hydra's belly for no good reason. Nice to know that he's a total dick from the starting point of his character.

After all that's over, the Gods tell Kratos that they'll forgive his past sins if only he kills Ares, who himself has a strong tendency toward dickery. They send him off to Athens to get this job done and give him a lightning spell and Medusa's head. Both of those are super-moves that use a magic meter. You kind of just press them to get yourself out of a jam or quickly kill an enemy you can't be bothered with. You also get orbs after every fight that can be allocated into either upgrading your weapon or these spells. I've been putting all my points into the weapon so far, since it gets much more consistent use.

Before he leaves his boat, we see two bare-breasted women urging Kratos to come back to bed with them, which made me laugh and think "this game is for 12 year olds." I stopped partway through the next level.

I have a friend who absolutely loathes this series because of the way it adapts Greek mythology. I'm not an expert on Greek mythology personally - I learned a few of the stories in high school and some details about the rest online - but I don't really mind the apparent lack of fidelity to those old stories. But for the sake of completeness I would say so far that its approach is just to use Greek mythology as a grab bag of monster ideas without much consideration for context. Both Medusa and the Minotaur show up as generic enemies completely divorced of their original stories and settings. The same goes for the Hydra. The game would definitely make for an easy way to annoy your history teacher.

So far, I'd say my biggest impression of the game is this: "I probably should've played this one before Bayonetta."

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

Okay, onto the next game:

God of War (2005)
I Will be Playing On: Playstation 2
Previous Experience With GoW: Watched a couple youtube videos
Expectations for GoW: Maximum violence, minimum aherence to Greek mythology

You see, I couldn't cast aside my perception that Kratos was the bad guy. Whenever I saw him in action he was tearing someone's eyeballs out and then shoving his Blades of Chaos down their throat. From the perspective of someone watching Kratos rather than controlling him, I would always be rooting for whoever he was up against. Kratos seemed like the type of person who needed to be stopped at all costs. I couldn't bring myself to play games about him. I would've felt too guilty.

Time goes on and people change. I wonder if the 2018 God of War wasn't designed with such an idea in mind. A kid who had fun with the over-the-top combat of the first game could easily have been grown up with kids of his own by the time the new one released 13 years later, and if so he might find the new caretaker Kratos a little more appealing, and the old killer Kratos a bit more off-putting. As for me, I think my disdain for GoW came from its own brand of immature prudery, and today I'm ready to give the game a shot.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

Oh yes, that forge mode sounds cool. That's a little reminiscent of Warcraft III's custom map builder, which turned out to be the most important part of that game's legacy. Thanks for the recommendation on ODST. I rarely ever hear that one talked about so I doubt I would've thought to go back to it without you.

I've also heard some praise for the Halo supplementary material. Apparently the Fall of Reach novel does a better job with that subject, and oddly enough I've also heard that some of the segments for the Halo Legends anime are actually really good and kind of fall more in line with the type of tragic military stories I tend to like.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 10/129
Currently Playing: God of War (2005)

Final Analysis: Halo: Reach
What I thought of Reach: Underwhelming
Would I play it again? Probably not
Did it deserve to make Round 2? No IMO

Halo: Combat Evolved was a landmark title, not just for the FPS genre but for gaming as a whole. It deserves a major share in the credit for the original XBOX's success and the rise of online for consoles, to say nothing of how it modernized its own genre.

But I can't shake the feeling that the series has kind of stagnated since then. The launch of Halo 2 was a big cultural event, as far as those things go, but it didn't bring the kind of genre-shaking innovation of the first game - the series was already starting to seem iterative. Playing Reach, there weren't really any jaw-dropping moments that made me think "This could never have happened in Halo 1."

Reach is the best shooter I've played for this project so far. It benefits a lot from more dynamic enemy A.I. in comparison to something like Mass Effect 2 or Red Dead. In either of those games, the enemy sit behind their cover and occasionally pop up and down like targets at a shooting gallery. The enemies in Halo will dodge grenades, retreat when their shields drop or their allies die, run around to get the drop on you, and strafe to avoid shots. Instead of sticking yourself to cover all day long you run and jump to make yourself a harder target while simultaneously aiming precise shots. It's still not quite Doom: sometimes you have to hide behind a rock until your health regenerates, but it was fun enough to write about. I found it easy to pick out highlights from any given level. It was also rewarding to learn my way around the game. I felt a certain satisfaction easily taking down Elites in the late levels when they had given me such pause early on. My main criticism of the gameplay is that the ammo management can be a bit of a pain, mainly because I don't like most of the weapons. The way the Covenant guns sound and feel doesn't sit right with me and it was rare to find great uses for options like the pistol and shotgun.

What let me down was the story. Like I said earlier, I think this game had a good opportunity to tell a gripping, emotionally powerful story. The slow death of the Noble Team as Reach gets overrun has that kind of potential, it's just that none of the characters get much development. They have minimal screentime and don't really show emotions - they can watch their friends die and then just kind of shrug and soldier on. I find that boring! It certainly makes it difficult to care about what happens to them.

Of course, not all video games need to tell a great story. You won't see me criticizing Mario for lacking a complex plot (unless I'm trying to justify my nostalgia for Galaxy 1,) because I'm happy to let games just be games, as it were. Reach isn't trying to do that, though. It dedicates plenty of time and effort to cutscenes, lore, dialog writing, and voice acting. All that dedication ends up mostly wasted on such a fundamentally dull narrative.

Looking back on them both, I wouldn't hesitate to say I prefer Mass Effect 2 over Reach. Maybe that says more about my taste than the two games. I think, more than anything else, I'm interested in video games as a young medium for telling stories, and although Reach's epilogue does make use of the form, it's definitely not the sort of thing I'm looking for.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

Aside from being an exercise in male bonding for Nobles 4 and 6, Pillar of Autumn gave me a lot of trouble, mostly concentrated in a few particular areas. There's one arena early on where the enemy are mostly weaker troops but with a Wraith far in the back being very annoying. I died a ton of times to that damn thing, first by getting blown up by it when I was trying to deal with the nearby infantry, and then taking an embarrassing number of attempts to run around everyone else and blow it up with grenades. After finishing that one up and then going through a cave filled with the bug guys, and a cutscene where Carter returns in his burning ship to kamikaze strike and big Covenant walker mech so the other two boys can pass by, there's an area where you fight a ton of elites. I had to temporarily drop my assault rifle to go through that part with plasma pistol + DMR, which lets you instantly blow up shields with the pistol's charge shot and then secure kills with a single headshot from the DMR. There was one particular yellow Elite with a sort of plasma rocket launcher who kept blowing me to kingdom come.

The most brutal section of the whole level is the final skirmish where you're securing a landing pad for the Pillar of Autumn, or at least it was for me. You deal with multiple waves of enemies, but I managed to get all the NPC fighters killed off and most of the best resources used up before the final brute wave even started. This was another appearance of what I like to call the Ornstein and Smaugh of Halo - the buffed-up brute pair with the gravity hammer and a heavy projectile weapon, both of which 1HKO Noble 6. I ended up clearing the last wave mainly using the grenade launcher, which I had ignored up to that point because I had trouble hitting with it. Against the larger brutes, it's not so hard to aim correctly and can take them down much faster than most other weapons. During this whole section, Emile is operating a big anti-air gun, so he's too busy to help you fight. Right as the Pillar finally arrives, the poor bastard gets impaled by an energy sword Elite, forcing Noble 6 to stay behind and take his place on the gun. Emile made it look easy, though, because the second 6 climbs into it every covenant air vehicle within a 10-mile radius sets its sights on him. You have to shoot down a bunch of smaller guys to survive long enough to take your shoot on the priority cruiser that's about to blast Cortana out of the sky. She gets away, but Noble 6 is left without a ride on the surface of the now-doomed Reach.

There's an Epilogue level where your goal is "survive" but you inevitably die in the end. I practically got a speedrun time on that one. It's a cool narrative device, actually, and oddly kind of a common one for 2010, since both Starcraft II and RDR did something similar. I just wish I cared at all about Noble 6.

That's the end of the game, in any case. The Noble Team are all goners except possibly Jun, and as Noble 6's helmet lies lost in the dirt, we hear a monologue about what his sacrifice meant to humanity.

Final Thoughts on Reach in the afternoon.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

Gall posted...

As for Halo, that was a surprisingly non-noble death for poor Kat. I haven't gotten much out of watching this game, but I do like the soundtrack. I knew about the series' use of chorus but I'd never heard it in action, and it works to make things feel epic even when they're not.

lol yeah, I can't play this game without thinking of Yahtzee's joke that the cast are engaged in a "who can have the noblest death" competition, and I agree that Kat has the weakest entry so far. Agreed on the music - before I ever played any of these games, I loved the Halo main theme. I would definitely describe this as a gameplay oriented game and I imagine just watching it would be pretty lame, though that said it's one of my least-favorite games of the project so far even with the gameplay.

---

The package is a mission that gives you lots of nice things. After the very first shootout, which is only grunts although they have turrets and vehicles, you find a "Scorpion" tank lying around, and the next long segment of the level is a joyride where you blow up everything in sight with its mighty cannon. It's an easy but simultaneously unforgiving section, because there's no way to repair the Scorpion and if you fail, it will be just as damaged when you reload from a checkpoint as it was when you saved. The covenant deploy some heavier weapons that can break down its armor, so it is possible to screw up a bit in one section and leave yourself driving a burning tank only held together by crossed fingers. It's possible to leave the tank and walk, but the level is definitely designed around it and fighting your way past all the vehicles and armored, long-range turrets on foot would be a royal pain. I died quite a few times on the last stretch of this section, because my tank had so little health going in. I basically had to memorize the positions of all the threats and blow them up three seconds before I could see them.

Once you get back to Sword base you have to ditch the Scorpion to fit through the doors, but the game gives you something else as replacement: your boys. Having four invincible NPCs by your side does a lot to simplify the coming battles. The highlight of the map is the big battle at the end where you defend Jorge's hard-assed... loved one while she does some science. There are four turrets around the map that you can periodically reactivate and you have access to a large arsenal of human weapons with a lot of ammo for each, which makes the fight about as open-ended as it can be with this game's mechanics. I personally stuck with the Assault Rifle and DMR, which has become my preferred weapon loadout for just about any situation. Shooting the shield guys in the hands to stun them and following up with a quick headshot is more efficient than overloading their shields, and repeated headshots do enough for the elites, and I just like the Assault Rifle as a nice general purpose weapon. The trickiest part of this large battle is dealing with the enemy Ghosts, since you don't really have the firepower to take out vehicles, and there are so many enemies around that it's hard to get close enough to chuck grenades at them.

The whole mission to destroy Sword Base turned out to be a false pretense just to get the Nobles there - we're picking up, not dropping off. It turns out that the dig team was researching buried technology from an ancient alien civilization, and now the Noble team is tasked with transporting the results of that research - Cortana - away from this doomed planet. As a matter of fact, she takes a liking to Noble Six specifically (I guess she has a thing for video game protagonists,) and he gets to carry her around on his lower back for the rest of the game. Everyone takes off to find the nearest way off-planet, but the sniper Jun splits from the squad to escort the scientist lady and the commander sacrifices himself to pull away some Covenant airships that attack the team in transit (the ship crashes and burns with him in it, making for the fastest possible trip to Valhalla,) leaving Noble six alone with Emile, better known as the guy with the skull helmet. This dynamic duo are the only hope of getting Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn.


---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

Yeah I can tell some effort went into the various Covenant designs, and they're definitely visually distinct in ways that improve the gameplay. I think what's disappointing about the story of Reach specifically is that it has some of the ingredients to be really emotionally impactful. I tend to like stories that deal with the harsh realities of war, and this game in particular has the Noble squad make heroic but futile efforts toward a lost cause, going down one by one until it's just 6 making a hopeless last stand with the player controlling him. It's just that their characterization is so thin that I can't really bring myself to care about them.

New Alexandria was the first mission where I felt like I was clearing it reasonably competently without too many deaths (only three or four, I think.) It's heavily based around piloting a helicopter from area to area and then jumping off and fighting some ground forces. I found the heli controls a bit awkward at first but only died in the air once, when I managed to get myself surrounded by a racket of Banshees. The two new enemy types are some flying raptor boys and a floating bug that gives shields to all the enemies around him (I spent a long time whittling down a big group of shielded grunts before realizing this guy existed,) but the biggest threat, as usual, was the hunters. One of the areas you land in has four of the bastards running around. I never died to them today, but they kept me on my toes with their potentially instant-kill artillery blast and they just take so long to drop. Like before, I found luring them away and booking it for the objective to be the best approach, and only killed two of them before shutting down the nearby signal jammer and leaving. Brutes were still the major enemy type, but there weren't any appearances of the gravity hammer, which was quite a frequent sight on the last mission.

Once Noble 6 completes all his piloting objectives, he returns to the tower base where the rest of the squad talk strategy until the building gets blown away by an enemy airstrike. They get assigned to go back to Sword Base from mission 2 and torch it so the Covenant can't get the research there, but on the way Noble 2, aka Kat, gets shot mid-sentence by a sniper. RIP. Unfortunately she won't show up in Valhalla, because girls aren't allowed there. It's up to the remaining Nobles to deliver The Package for their next mission.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

The early sections of Exodus are a low-tech battle for both sides - Noble 6 with his pistol and a few covenant weapons against mostly suicide bomber grunts. This is the Armor Lock ability's time to shine, since you can bunker down with it and just let the enemy uselessly blow themselves up on you. Later on, there's a jet pack section with a lot of platforms designed around the ability and some disposable AI buddies to fly around with. My experience with these guys was that they died really quickly, and their biggest contribution to the cause was that they each had the good old DMR and I could take it from them. Flying up and shooting enemies at the same time was definitely kind of cool. I exploited it against a melee enemy by standing on a platform below them, flying upward and shooting a few times, and then rinsing and repeating. The new enemy type for this level is the Brute, a big boy who wears a helmet but dies to one headshot from the DMR once it gets knocked off. They generally don't have any regenerating capabilities, which I would say makes them a little easier to deal with than the Elites, but they have their own powered-up golden variant who likes the Gravity Hammer, another 1-hit KO melee weapon. There are a lot of one hit kill attacks on this level, actually. I got a little tilted trying to clear the final section while occasionally getting randomly blown up by the artillery attacks from Wraiths. I ended up finding a rocket launcher and taking the fight to them, and I took out one in particular by shooting its driver with the DMR and then doing the contextual "plant grenade" takedown.

Noble 6 re-establishes contact with the rest of his team and informs them of Jeorge's death. They all react very stoically, and I'm reminded of why I have trouble getting invested in the story of these games. With the crew back together, the evacuation effort will continue on the next mission, New Alexandria.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

Yeah, the whole dogfight section is definitely very pretty. That's an obvious strength of the game in general I would say. In comparison to something like Star Fox 64, I also appreciated how you have a more full freedom of movement in just about all directions.

I can see why it's a little polarizing with players because it is quite different from the rest of the gameplay and doesn't build on the same skills you've been learning up to that point, except that you switch weapons to deal with shields and health, similar to ground battles. I can understand just wanting to go back to the usual gameplay if you're not really a fan of those kind of military flight simulators.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

After much too long away, I returned to Reach and took down that Covenant supercarrier. I kind of expected that mission to define the rest of the plot, but it actually just spans one mission. The initial stretch is really easy because you have the full Noble squad alongside you - I think you can just hide behind cover and let your pals do all the fighting for you. Once you arrive at the old research base and pick up the experimental warp drive, there's a section, where Noble 6 shows off the piloting skills that used to earn his paychecks. It took me by surprise a little, but it's actually a gameplay loop I'm more comfortable with since I spent a lot of time with Star Fox 64. You have a similar set of moves in Halo's spaceship level, including the evasive loop-de-loop and a dodge that looks a lot like the barrel roll. I actually did die quite a bit here. I found it hard to get away once I started taking fire and would often get focused down. The enemy fighter jets have regenerating shields that you have to whittle away with machine gun fire before you can blow them up with missiles, so like with Elites on foot it can be frustrating to have to retreat because an enemy receives covering fire after you've overloaded their shields and are about to make the kill.

The big plan is to secretly commander and enemy ship called a corvette, send it to the supercarrier as if it needed to refuel, with the warp drive on board, and then blow the whole thing up. The ship section is about taking out the corvette's engines and accompanying fighter craft, and it gets followed up by Nobles 5 and 6 heading onboard to wipe out the crew. There's nothing too tricky to deal with here - no hunters or energy swords, and no overwhelmingly huge Covenant groups. I mostly used a plasma rifle and the DMR, which is the faster, lower damage sniper rifle I was talking about earlier. I found it pretty good for taking down Elites, sometimes dropping their shields with the plasma rifle and then finishing them up with one or two headshots from the DMR, and the latter weapon's scope was also handy for shooting the hands off of the shield guys.

Once the boys take over the corvette, they activate its refueling sequence with themselves still aboard - they've lost the ride that was intended to bring them back. Noble 5 (aka Jorge) stays on board because the warp drive needs to be activated manually, but he pushes 6 off the ship so he can get back to Reach by surviving atmospheric re-entry in his power armor. See you in Valhalla, Jorge. We hardly knew ye.

The supercarrier is gone but the enemy are still warping in worrying numbers of reinforcements. After that there's a kind of cute sequence showing a slightly wounded Noble 6 stranded with no weapons out in the mountains. He joins a civilian rescue mission, Exodus, starting with only a salvaged pistol and a small number of rounds. But that will be a story for another day.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

BetrayedTangy posted...

So I ended up watching a speedrun of Reach instead of playing it and man do I love how many alternate approaches there are to get through the levels.

Yeah, that's definitely neat. I think it also shows a kind of open-endedness toward how you play even if you just take the regular path, as demonstrated to a certain extent by my lost warthog misadventure.

Now that you mention how the games reward exploration, I'm reminded of one of the few things I knew about this series before I really played any of them, which are those weird semi-humanoid monkey creatures that are hidden in the corners of the maps in one of the games (was that Halo 3?) I still think those are kind of funny.

---

This was one of those nights where I slept in much too late and barely had any time to do the things I need, but I still managed to boot up the game and finish off the spire section of the Tip of the Spear mission. It actually went quite quickly and smoothly, much to my surprise. There isn't a lot of opposition on the Spire itself: it's mainly large waves of Grunts and a few of the Skirmishers. You also start out with the rapid-fire sniper rifle weapon (I forget what it's actually called,) and an assault rifle with a lot of ammo. I was able to get some satisfying headshots on the early waves, and found the sniper rifle pretty effective against the shield guys.

There's also a chance to swap sprint out for a jetpack, which of course I took, but I didn't really end up using it. I had a hard time finding a good time to give it a shot. I got through the whole section without losing any lives except at the very end, where there is an energy sword guy guarded by some grunts who seemed to have some really heavy firepower. The first time I peeked into the room where they were standing I got blown to smithereens in a matter of seconds. I ended up tossing a grenade into the room and then taking out the swordmaster with the old plasma pistol into assault rifle method, and that was the end of the mission.

With Noble Six's mission to disable the spire's shield complete, the army sends a large assault ship after the structure, but it turns out to be a trap: the spire can warp in a massive Covenant mothership that tears the battlecruiser in half like a sheet of paper. The human position on Reach suffers catastrophic losses, and the seemingly lone Noble team have two objectives:

1. Hold out for reinforcements in 48 hours
2. Destroy the mothership using an experimental warp drive in a hidden base, where Noble 6 used to work.

So begins the next mission, Long Night of Solace, which I'll tackle next time I play. Hopefully tomorrow.


---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

BetrayedTangy posted...

So I have some advice on dealing with those enemy types if you're interested.

Thanks. I admit that when I first read your advice my response was "Oh, I don't want to use the plasma pistol." There's something about the feeling of that charge shot that I don't really like. Still, I tried it out and I agree that it's the most effective way of taking Elites down. I tend to keep the plasma pistol and assault rifle on the average day. The first appearance of the hunters definitely felt like a difficulty spike. I was pretty confident their back was the weak point but I found it hard to actually get behind them unless I had an ally distracting them.

---

I finished the stealth mission and what I guess constitutes about half of the next one. The stealth mission starts you out with a sniper rifle and a lot of ammo, which is pretty nice. It can one-shot some elites with a headshot. I tried to make the ammo last for a while, but I got into the whole cycle of being low and having to just grab whatever I could find later on. You have to protect a group of civilians, who later join up and follow you around. None of them made it to the end, I'm afraid. There's one notable section where a bunch of grunts are fighting a large kind of yeti-like alien native to Reach. I decided to just kind of sneak past that whole kerfuffle. The later sections have some troubling Covenant turrets around. They can be manned by most enemy infantry, so you're encouraged to flank around and try to take them out. In the end Noble Six finds out that the Covenant are preparing from a large-scale invasion, and the next mission is where the war begins proper.

This time you start out with a grenade launcher, which lets you just straight up decimate some of those turrets that were such a pain before. Noble Six's job is mostly to take out Anti-Air guns. You just get inside the towers around them and blow up the generators in the middle. The first one is absolutely swarming with guys. They give you a warthog with some rather mighty guns attached and a regular army guy to help you use it. I decided to drive again. I found it pretty easy to deal with the enemy vehicles, but had a harder time getting rid of the mass of infantry around the building. Eventually I did manage to clear things out in a firefight that saw me lose both my car and my buddy - so I had to hoof it to the next area on foot, which the developers didn't strictly have in mind, I suspect. It took a while, and it also led me into a tricky situation dealing with the Wraith (big alien tank) up ahead, since I had no heavy weapons to bring it down with nor vehicle to match against it. Luckily, there's a sort of stealth takedown against Wraiths where you can sneak up behind them and plant them with a sticky grenade, so that's what I ended up doing.

The second AA gun doesn't have nearly as many guards - its commanding officer must have preferred quality to quantity, because it's staffed with two of our old bionicle-like friends the Hunters. You get a lock-on heavy weapon in the area just before, but I wasted all its ammo inefficiently taking down a wraith. Dealing with two hunters on your own with normal weapons is a bit of a rough time, so I didn't do that. A smaller covenant vehicle called a ghost came into play here. You find a couple waiting unoccupied as you infiltrate some enemy positions. It's a faster vehicle that can strafe, but charged plasma shots cause it to short-circuit for a little while, so my first experience with it was the surge of confidence as I picked up an armored vehicle, only to drive it into a group of enemies, get stopped dead, and then die before I realized what had happened. Once I figured out how maneuverable it was, though, I used it to take down most of the enemies around the AA gun, then lured the hunters away from the inside, drove straight past them to the back entrance, blew the generator up, and then got back on the Ghost and drove away. It took a few tries to pull that off without getting shot dead in the attempt. The game didn't quite let me get away with that chicanery, because it declared a defend objective and made me clear the area, but it also dropped some human soldiers nearby and I found it surprisingly easy to shoot the hunters in the back while they were distracted with those fellows.

After that there's one of those standard FPS coffee-break sections where you gun down some enemies from a helicopter, and then you go into an area of electronic interference near what's called a Spire and the copter goes down. That's not technically the start of a new level, but I did notice that Noble Six had different weapons when he got out of the crash compared to what I was carrying beforehand, so I figured it was a good enough time to take a break.

That last section does take off the training wheels to a certain extent, because it's the first time you can't exploit an unkillable ally character to get through the rough bits. I managed to struggle through on heroic, but I expect to resort to lowering the difficulty sooner or later. I suck badly enough at this game that it's causing me to progress very slowly.


---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

LinkMarioSamus posted...

From one military science-fiction game to another!

Yeah, 2010 was really a sci-fi Heavy year, and Reach is rounding up a space trilogy. The parallels with Starcraft in particular started to feel pronounced once Zealot-class Elites came up in dialog though.

Gall posted...

While I'm finishing up Starcraft I'll start watching a Halo playthrough. I have some small Call of Duty experience, but I've never been into Halo, and it should be interesting to compare and contrast the series in what would be the last year of them both being on top.

Yeah, that should be interesting. I don't have much CoD experience either, so I'll be looking at them both from the perspective of a newcomer.

I finished up what are essentially the first two levels of Reach - the first is just the intro where you're investigating and run into the covenant and the second is based around protecting a human base from them. I also started up the third, a stealth reconnaissance mission, but decided to take a break a couple firefights into that one.

There isn't too much story progression to speak of so far, except that this isn't the first time humans have encounter the Covenant although it is the early days of that whole conflict, and that one guy has a wife (or mother, I'm not entirely sure,) who is a hardassed researcher type and involved with the Noble Team's mission. There aren't too many different enemy types in Halo, and what variety there is comes from different area layouts and weapon options. To go over the typical enemy types, there are:

Grunts: Cannon fodder

Jackals/Skirmishers: Light shield guys. You have to aim around their shields, which is a bit of a pain. Grenades are one way around it.

Elites: Basically you but an alien. Regenerating shields, moves around while firing, good at dodging grenades, and a bit more strategic than other enemies. You have to be persistent in chasing them down once they're weakened, since their shields will come back if you leave them alone for a while.

I also got introduced to the vehicle mechanics, particularly through the Warthogs, which are basically jeeps with mounted turrets. The tricky thing about the Warthog is that the same character can't operate the turret and drive at the same time, so you have to pick one and let the AI do the other - something they tend to struggle with. So far, I tend to drive, and once I get to the next area with a lot of enemies around I just get out of the car and fight on foot.

The first major obstacle I came across was an energy sword guy in an enclosed area. The energy sword is a melee instant kill in this game. I really didn't know how to deal with this guy, since it didn't seem like I could do enough damage to bring him down before he caught up to me. I ended up resorting to luring him into one of my invincible AI buddies and letting him wail on that guy while I stood behind and let him have it.

In the next mission, there was an area where you can take out a rooftop sniper and then copy his tactics to pick off all the enemies. While I did this, the Covenant kept taking over my abandoned warthog to try and shoot me with the turret, but that worked as a trap because it led to them just standing still until I killed them. I ended up just waiting for each guy to start climbing up onto the car and then shooting them down.

The hardest part so far was when they wheeled out two really big guys who kind of look like Bionicles. These fuckers just would not die, no matter how much ammo I pumped into them. They wouldn't even flinch if I shot them with a sniper rifle - I wasn't sure if it was even dealing damage. One of them eventually died to a grenade, and I think one of the AI characters took out the other while I wasn't looking.

You can swap your ability to sprint for other powers in this game. So far the options I've encountered are a shield that requires you to stand still, which I can't really see much use for, and active camouflage in the stealth mission, which I gave a shot and seems pretty good.


---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

Started up the game, but didn't have much time to play. Apart from a little stuttering in the cutscenes in runs just fine so far.

The main character in this game is the newly appointed Noble 6, part of a squad of Spartans (which is what Master Chief is) called the Noble Team. The first scene of the game is just him coming into camp and meeting the other five, some of whom have their helmets off, but then they remember that they're in a Halo game and put them back on so they can investigate some kind of disturbance. One guy's helmet has a skull painted on the visor. The captain pulls the rookie aside and tells him that the lone wolf schenanigans that are apparently on his record will not be tolerated on this squad. They walk around the surface of the titular planet Reach (I mostly just followed my NPC buddies to figure out where to go) and then the covenant show up and get into a few firefights with the Nobles. I stopped after the first few enemy squads were dealt with, inside of a building after we split up and I had the captain and the minigun guy with me.

So far it all feels kind of standard, both to shooters and to military stories in general. The biggest difference between this game and the first Halo is that while Master Chief was on his own right at the beginning, Noble 6 has friends to work with. I guess it's slightly closer to real world military tactics in that it usually makes sense to stick with your squad instead of charging ahead into enemy groups. I think the game is slightly easier so far as a result - I'm inept enough that playing Heroic on the first mission caused a ton of deaths in Halo 1, but I've only had one so far playing Reach on the same difficulty.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

And it's high time I moved on to the next game:

Halo: Reach
Release Date: September 14, 2010
I will be playing: PC Version, through Steam
Previous Experience with Halo: Played a few levels of the first one
My Expectations for Reach: Short, well made, but not quite mind-blowing

I've always been a quiet, introverted type of person, a bit on the weak side and not very adept at making friends. I know that sounds like a long-winded way of saying "I post on GameFAQs," but the point is that although I grew up during the height of Halo's popularity, I wasn't really in a position to enjoy it much myself. I would contend that it was primarily a social, multiplayer focused game, and along with Call of Duty I observed in high school that it was mainly played by the more loud, outgoing kids in class. I've never quite gotten away from the preconception, ironically born of my own immaturity, that the series is best enjoyed by rambunctious boys aged 12 to 21.

To this day, I think I've only played the original Halo. I've never made it past the first few levels and my only foray into the multiplayer was a few one-on-one matches with my younger brother. Being the more sociable of the two of us, he naturally handed me my ass.

Part of the reason I missed out on the later Halo games is that I never had an XBOX 360, and the rest is simply that I wasn't too interested. Apart from my inferiority complex, I'd attribute that to two main causes: first, that I'm not terribly into First Person Shooters, and second, Halo's main aesthetic doesn't really appeal to me. I've always found it hard to engage with emotionally: the characters are mostly stoic military or religious types, there's a kind of cold industrial atmosphere to a lot of it, and most people wear helmets, so you don't get the help of facial queues for the sake of relating with them.

As I've grown up, I have developed a certain respect for the franchise. I'm not the biggest fan of regenerating health or two-weapon limits, but it's undeniable that Halo had a huge influence on gaming, and it's still remembered as an excellent single-player shooter on top of its successful online. I hooked up my aging XBOX not long ago to give the first few levels a spin, and in particular I was impressed with the enemy AI, which helped make shootouts a lot more dynamic than they are in something like Mass Effect 2, which came out nine years later.

When it comes to Reach specifically, I don't know a lot about it except that it's a prequel and how it ends. It's the first game for this project that makes me worry about my laptop's system specs - hopefully it will run alright. I don't expect it to go down as a personal favorite, or even make me want to check out more Halo, but this project has surprised me before.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

My bad on the delay for the past couple days. I've been struggling to get my schedule down.

Lightning Strikes posted...

Cool, now onto Halo Reach! The end of 2010 is in sight. I feel once youre through there you really start to see games that are wholly representative of this decade, not either delayed from 2009 or using mostly the last games assets. That might even start at Reach I dont know!

Yeah, that point is coming up pretty soon. I don't know a lot about Reach but I think it is quite similar to Halo 3 and uses the same engine. There's also Fallout New Vegas coming up which was jokingly called an expansion to Fallout 3 back in the day. I guess I'd say it will be a while before the ghost of the 2000s decade is truly exorcised from this project: 2011 has some arguable examples like Portal 2, Dark Souls, and Minecraft which I think was in public beta by 2009, and I'll only be truly clear of it when I finally finish Trails in the Sky, whose Japanese release was in 2006!

Final Analysis: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
What I thought of SCII: I think I liked it
Would I play it again? I might try the expansions.
Did it deserve to lose Round 1? I'd say no.

The 90s were such a different time for video games. Sometimes I think about how the go-to style for movie tie-in games used to be the 2D Platformer. That was kind of the "default" video game genre back then, thanks to Mario Bros. These day's it's a close race between First Person Shooters and "Action Adventure" games with crafting and contextual button prompts. Mario is just about the only big-name platform franchise left - the 2D platformer is now relegated mainly to nostalgia-focused indie gaming. Well, okay, there's Sonic too, be he's seen better days.

That's console gaming, though. The PC had its own distinct set of popular genres back then. The difference arose because playing with a mouse and keyboard is really quite different to a controller. I would hook up a gamepad to play Hollow Knight on PC even now, and I don't envy the poor souls who bought the N64 version of the original Starcraft.

Anyway, the big PC games used to be point-and-click adventure games like King's Quest or Grim Fandango, top-down RPGs like Fallout or Baldur's Gate, and, of course, real time strategy, of which Blizzard Entertainment were the kings. Warcraft III's hero unit mechanics may make it the worst game ever made, but it was also deeply important to the development of indie and PC gaming through its custom map mode, which among other things gave birth to Defense of the Ancients and the now multi-million dollar MOBA genre. And the original Starcraft, without a doubt, was a major turning point in the rise of competitive gaming.

All three of those genres died in the early 2000s. I have a soft spot for the story emphasis of point-and-click games, but I think the genre deserved it. They don't really work as video games - the puzzles are either obnoxiously obtuse or simple to pointlessness. The initial experience of most older adventure games is either hours of directionless bumbling or constant alt-tabbing to check a guide. People like Telltale and Double Fine have brought about a minor resurgence in point-and-clicks, and the same goes for the old "crpg" style with games like Divinity, but I've yet to see that really happen for RTS games.

A part of me wonders if they didn't deserve their downfall too. Oh, they're much more substantial as games than point-and-clicks ever were, but there are definitely some intrinsic problems with them. The biggest one is that they're so technical. Strategy is meant to be the focus, but it often gets drowned out behind things like actions per minute and simple memorization of tech trees, build orders, or unit matchups. The way that matches grow as each player expands can make things feel very slow, drawn out, and exhausting. It's also kind of a limiting genre. Over the last few decades games have pursued variety in game modes and level types - it's hard for RTS games to keep up on that front.

I guess that if this genre had a renaissance, it came in 2010 when Starcraft II was released, and that one game has done all it can to hold down the fort in the decade since. I personally didn't step into Starcraft II's online arena because of those aforementioned problems. I feel exhausted rather than pumped up when alerts start coming up all over the map. I don't really like the feeling of having to rapidly click back and forth to manage my troops on the front lines and my economy at the same time. For the record, the post-game stats told me that my APM averaged in the high fifties, while a top-tier player's should be above 500. I'm sure that figure would rise over time, but I don't really have the patience to spend hours and hours learning to play this game proficiently.

But you don't need me to affirm the legacy of this game's online. Its release was a huge event for esports and although it's waned over time it's still ticking along to this day.

The singleplayer kind of feels like an extended tutorial. Most maps are built around introducing one new unit and training the player on new mechanics. It's only in the last three maps that the training wheels really come off and you have an open-ended game with all its options available. That being said, it was a lot more fun than most tutorials. I stand by what I said about the three different factions being cool to build up as and generally intriguing. I wanted to keep playing just to see the new units and concepts in action. As intimidating as the learning curve can be, there's still a satisfaction to getting faster at your build order or mastering an active skill. The design is mostly on point. It's well-balanced, the difficulty curve ramps up at a good pace, and it does a good job differentiating the maps from one another.

I didn't talk much about the story as I played, but it's actually not bad. Jim Raynor's band of rebels are pretty likable, the central conflict around Raynor's guilt for losing Kerrigan makes a good emotional core to the plot, and it has an impressive sense of scale. I like chaotic stories with a lot of different factions who can't really trust one another, especially when it isn't clear who the good guys are. SCII can be a little unsubtle with its satirical elements and villain characterization, but it does still achieve a semblance of that feeling. Raynor is struggling to fend off both and alien invasion and a corrupt empire at once, and even his old friends the Protoss butt heads with him a lot of the time.

For me, the most interesting character is one who has almost nothing to do with Jim's crusade for freedom: Kate Lockwell. Kate is a reporter for what is essentially the propaganda arm of the Dominion, but she's quite contrary toward their narrative and shows a scrupulous dedication to the truth. The repeated joke with her is that her superior Donny will try to state the party line, she'll contradict him with the truth, and then her feed will cut off as she's speaking.

Kate wins. Even as the Dominion falls apart around her she keeps getting promoted up the ranks and becomes the station's chief anchor. I like the character, and was glad to see her doing well, but there was always this niggle in the back of my mind: there's no way she'd keep her job for long in a society like the one Starcraft II conveys.

Coming in without much expectations for the story, it did win me over to the point where I feel curious to see what happens in the two expansions - I'm just not sure I'm so curious that I'll spend $40 on them. Still, I barely scratched the surface on Starcraft II, and in another life, where I had the time, I can see myself digging deeper.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

Alright, yesterday I spent a few hours finishing up Starcraft 2. I was actually knocking right on the door of the endgame, which is in three parts based around an invasion of a major Zerg planet, with Kerrigan on its surface. You can still buy upgrades between the final missions, but once you've started the first of them there's no going back to do any of the optional levels if you skipped them.

The first map is just a big, open area where you have access to all the unit types and have to push through Zerg-controlled territory. There are NPC units who will join you if you rescue them, but the overall goal is to reunite with the Dominion general under Prince Valerian, the big bad's son who Jim is working with. After a point, I stopped bothering to pick these guys up and just focused on the objective. I built a lot of marines, a lot of banshees, some vultures (they don't use vespine,) and finally gave the ghosts a shot. As predicted, nukes were pretty good for taking down enemy strongholds without a lot of trouble. There are actually frequent Zerg attacks on your base in this one, but you start out with both bunkers and siege tanks, so I only had to add a little more before my defenses were completely adequate to hold them off. The map does feel like a good test of everything you've learned so far.

For the penultimate mission, you can choose between taking out the Zerg's nydus worms (tunnels they use to transfer units across maps en masse) or their fliers. I chose the Nydus Worms because I thought it would be pretty annoying having enemies pop up at random places in the middle of my base. That mission is a no-build one where you have hero units of all the major characters on Raynor's team. It kind of feels like an extended break to let you decompress a little between the last big missions.

The final mission is a long defense map where you wait for the Artifact that's supposed to turn Kerrigan human again to charge up. The zerg attack you with everything they've got. I spent a lot of time at the 200 supply limit unable to build more units, but on the whole the map was kind of tough. I had to restart near the end a couple times.

I think I made the wrong choice by getting rid of the Nydus worms, because the enemy air force was pretty annoying. In particular, they have a flying bomber called the Brood Lord that outranges most defensive structures. It generally works to build missile turrets and bunkers in the more remote parts of the base so that your main standing army doesn't have to rush off when enemies show up there (which also reduces the number of areas the player needs to keep track of at a given time,) but when Brood Lords show up you have to respond. The best answer is to build a lot of wraiths. They can get around quickly and are specialized to taking out air units. The high-powered Battlecruiser also deals with Brood Lords pretty easily, and I did build a lot of those, but they also move slowly and I mostly kept them in the center of the map. Even without the Nydus worms, the Zerg can show up deep inside your base without pushing past your frontal defenses because they have these squid-like air drops. On my first attempt I would just scramble my armies to deal with them, but later on I decided to just build some defensive structures almost everywhere instead.

Kerrigan herself also shows up as a repeatedly spawning and fairly deadly boss. She has a move that can one-shot any mechanical unit for example, even the bulky battlecruisers. That's on top of very high HP and a lot of damage reduction. I would usually just push my main army of battlecruisers on her and accept some losses. Aside from the aforementioned units, I used a lot of marines, some siege tanks, and Thors. I tried out the ghost and nukes on one failed attempt, but didn't bother with them on my successful one.

In the end, the artifact really does seem to turn Kerrigan back, but Jim's buddy Tychus tries to murder her - apparently he struck a deal obligating him to do so before the game began, so that's the final payoff for an arc about his loyalty being questionable. Raynor has to kill his friend to save his GF and by extension, presumably, the galaxy.

The story is very much unresolved as of now, though - for one thing, Emperor Mensk is still in control of the Dominion, and the true threat of the Hybrid has yet to even appear outside of Zeratul's future visions. Those plot lines are obviously the stuff of the two expansions. Maybe I'll come to those in time. For now, though, I think it's time to move on to Halo. I know the online is a big part of the Starcraft 2 experience, but I feel like I'd want to practice against bots for a long time before I was even ready to try that, and I'm behind pace as it is.

Final Thoughts on Starcraft II still to come.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 9/129
Currently Playing: Halo: Reach

I made some decent headway on the game over the course of last night and early this morning, and seem to be nearing the end of the campaign.

First of all, I finished dying in Zeratul's last mission. The main story purpose of this set of flashbacks is that it convinces Raynor that Sarah Kerrigan - who is currently leading a genocidal campaign against all of humanity - is the key to saving the universe, and that he absolutely must spare her life if they end up fighting.

I did a pair of missions based around stealing an advanced Dominion weapon called the Odin and then using it to take over one of their broadcasting stations and using it to leak information about how the Emperor commits war crimes. They mostly revolve around a the Odin as a hero unit which is basically an upgraded Thor, an already very large and powerful late game unit. In its second mission, you get a chance to wreck an enemy base with the Odin on it's own. I chose their airforce, but it might have been a mistake because I lost most of my army to some enemy siege tanks in one of the other bases. Through Protoss research, I had the choice between two stealth-detector units: the Raven, which can drop turrets, or the science vessel, which can heal mechanical units. I picked the second option and I'm glad I did, because this pair of maps made it quite useful - it's a great support unit to keep the Odin ticking over.

But it was even better in an upcoming map, where the Battlecruiser (the Terrans' big flying boy) is introduced. The gimmick of this particular stage was that you're fighting Protoss units inside energy fields which slowly drain your health when inside them. You have to fly into the fields themselves to take down their source and nullify them. High health units like the Battlecruiser are best suited to this, and the Science Vessel is extremely handy for nullifying the damage over time as they carry out this mission. It's an annoying map. The starting position is disconnected from the rest of the map by land, so you have to use medivacs to transport any land units between the two areas. It's also nice to just have your factories and barracks lift off and set down on the latter parts of the level, so that the units they produce can just walk up to the others instead of needing a lift.

I've settled into a standard strategy to a certain extent. I always build a reactor on my barracks and spam marines - I never bother with the tech lab on barracks any more. I remember thinking the reapers and marauders seemed kind of good but I prefer to spam marines because those alternatives can't attack air units. I tend to use medivacs just for their healing capacity, rather than the infantry medics. Their healing is a little more powerful and they're less vulnerable since they have more health and flying status. Then I just build whatever unit the map introduces and a bit of an airforce, particularly banshees. I almost never use the vehicle units at all. This has generally worked pretty well. The marines are cheap and versatile, so it's easy to fill in the rest of my build with whatever the situation calls for, and it frees up vespine gas for upgrades since they don't use any. I haven't even built one Ghost yet, but I think I'm gonna try it out in the upcoming missions just because I think nukes will be kind of busted in the campaign.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

I could only clear one and a half missions today. The first was a quick one, where you take on some Protoss on a planet that is slowly being engulfed in fire. You have to keep relocating your base to keep ahead of the flames. It's fine for the most part, but the annoying part is that if you build attachments to your buildings, they can't take off, so you have to keep rebuilding them. I like to build the reactor on the barracks so I can pump out even more marines. It's also the introduction of the Banshee unit, which seems pretty good. It's a flying unit that specializes in attacking ground forces and has stealth. You can really whittle down the enemy forces on this map with Banshees, by taking out the pylons that power stealth-detecting Photon Cannons and then going to town on the helpless enemies. It's not really necessary on Normal though. I mostly just sent in all my forces and cleared the map with the fire a good ways off. After this one there's a big plot twist where Raynor decides to work with the son of the Dominion leader because he claims he can turn Kerrigan back into a human. Without knowing how that shakes out, it definitely seems like a trick to me.

The second one I started is the last of the Zeratul visions, which shows the dark alternate future in which Kerrigan gets killed. Apparently humanity is already wiped out and it's the Protoss' last stand against the Zerg, who are mind-controlled by some kind of hybrid species. In gameplay terms you have a massive army but can only hold out for so long - it works kind of like the endless modes in Tower Defense games. It's not as desperate as it should be on Normal though. I finished all the side objectives and was just waiting to die, but it was taking so long that I had to make a map save and quit playing so I could get ready for work.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

I played some Among Us with friends today, which cut into the time I had for Starcraft a little bit, but I did at least settle my score with the Hard AI. I noticed that it wasn't very aggressive last time I played and used that to my advantage by going for three bases and building a large force over time. I used a lot of Zealots since they're the only Protoss unit that only consumes minerals, and otherwise built Stalkers, Void Rays, and eventually some Colossi. It ended up in a base race situation once I launched my attack, but my force was stronger and wiped out the enemy base a little faster. I think I only had one probe at the end of the game but one was enough to build a new Nexus and the AI had nothing left to work with.

I also completed one mission on the campaign, where you have to choose between helping the established character of Tosh or a newly introduced Ghost called Nova. I sided with Nova mostly because you get the Ghost unit for doing so, which I prefer to the Spectre. They're almost exactly the same except that the Ghost has a sniper rifle and the Spectre uses a stun grenade. Generally I favor simplicity when I pick my upgrades in this game, and it's easier to just use a DPS unit than an active ability requiring specific timing. Likewise, I bought the upgrade for the Ghost that lets them stealth without consuming energy, since it means you don't have to worry about managing when to use stealth and when to hold it, and can just leave it on all the time.

The actual mission has no production and is kind of restrictive as a result. It's one of those cases where a strategy game kind of resembles a puzzle game. You have to find the right order of operations to get by with the limited units you have, which mostly entails taking out priority targets with your permanently stealthed hero unit in Nova or using her mind control ability on particular units. Through that second thing, you get a chance to try out the Zerg Ultralisks and the more advanced Thor, so that part was kind of cool.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Today I tried taking on the Hard difficulty AI and eventually surrendered. I used my usual Stalker spam strategy but by the time I actually launched an attack the AI had a stronger force and could defend itself pretty easily. It didn't strike back right away and I tried building Immortals, Void Rays, and eventually Colossi to get back into things. It led to a pretty stalemated game where each of us kept repelling the other's attacks but lost so many troops in the process that we couldn't really capitalize on it. One mistake I made was not using any troops that don't take Vespine Gas, which caused me to have a lot of extra minerals in comparison.

In the campaign, I did one mission where you're on a planet that's completely overrun with Zerg and have to use Medivacs to fly around the bulk of the enemy forces and take out your objectives. It was a little difficult to control the Medivacs well enough to land troops close to enemy anti-air without putting them in range, and I lost my medivacs at bad times on one or two occasions. I also used Vikings to defend them against enemy fliers.

There's another mission where you race the enemy team to 6,000 minerals. It introduces the Vulture bike unit, which is a classic from the first game. It's a ground-to-ground unit with high movement speed and burst damage. It can also drop mines, but I didn't really use that. I liked the premise of racing another player to a set amount of resources, though, especially since one strategy is just to charge in and destroy the enemy's mining operations.

I finished up with Zeratul's third mission, on the now-abandoned Protoss homeworld. I guess it was the site of a big climactic battle in the first game. The corpse of something called the Zerg Overmind is lying there and Zeratul's goal is to communicate with it psychically. That one was pretty cool. I liked seeing the hidden observers come to life to help Zeratul out, as well as the idea of Colossi that hid underwater and emerged to fight with him. I failed the mission once by losing my hero unit. I just wasn't paying attention to his health because he seemed so overpowered. You have to alternate between pushing into enemy territory and defending against big attacks, but since the enemy incursions are highly telegraphed (there's even an exact timer telling you how close the next one is,) I just marched my whole army out and then pulled back when there was about a minute before the next attack.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

I played a bit on Sunday and a little longer today.

First, I did a few more vs. AI games, all as protoss. I got up to the point where the game would let me play on Hard, but I didn't actually try facing the Hard AI. Mostly I would just build two gateways and spam Stalkers, which tended to result in quick wins. A couple of times, I elongated the games just to try out the more advanced Colossi and Mothership.

In the campaign, Raynor met an old buddy named Zeratul, who kind of looks like Raziel from the Legacy of Kain games. Zeratul gave him a crystal that lets one relive the guy's memories about gathering and deciphering some kind of prophecy about the end of the universe - in practical terms, this means Protoss missions. The first one gives you control of Zeratul as a super-powerful hero unit - he's invisible to most enemies, can one-shot a lot of units, and has two active abilities. The latter part of his kit is what the level is built around and meant to introduce. For his second mission, you get access to probes and can construct units, including Stalkers, Immortals, and Dark/High Templars. You just have to conquer the map while repeatedly taking down a boss character. Guess which unit made up the majority of my army?

As for proper Terran missions, the first one I played re-introduced Siege Tanks, which I remember using a lot in the first game. They're powerful with high range, but they have to anchor themselves down to get the most out of their attack. You have to use them to defend a big lazer as it works through a giant steel door. In theory, you can use the lazer to attack enemy units, but I just built a bunch of siege tanks on both sides, had a marine mobile force, and let the lazer stay on the door all game. That's the fastest way to clear it. It's another of the many missions you can't speed up all that much, so by the end I got bored and launched a suicide attack against the main enemy base. I lost most of my units and had to pull back, but I still won the mission.

Next was a train raiding map where you get a vehicle called a Diamondback that can move and attack at the same time. I don't feel like this is all that spectacular a power outside of the context of this particular mission, where it's handy for keeping up with the trains as you blast them down. Maybe I'm undervaluing it though. Mobility does tend to be good in RTS games. This map had the same 'problem' where the trains come at uniform times and therefore you can't really speed up the game much. I had to save this one and come back to it later. There's a glitch in this game where if you alt-tab during the loading screen your left mouse button might just ping instead of doing what it's supposed to. I fell victim to this after loading and didn't know how to fix it, but my army was already big enough that I could pull through the rest of the map just clicking "all army units" and moving them around, camping at base when waiting for a train and then going out to kill them. I guess I could use a difficulty setting between medium and hard.

Finally, I did a mission on a planet called Haven with a moral choice involved: Raynor can either side with some Protoss who want to wipe out a partially zerg-infested group of refugees or with the refugees who want to not get wiped out. I chose to fight the Protoss. That was a faster knock-down, drag-out style map where you have to take out a few Protoss bases and then a Mothership. You can start fighting right away. I won in 15 minutes or something, making it one of the fastest maps so far, and lost a lot of units in the process, making it kind of tense. The new unit for this one was the Viking, which can switch between being a fighter jet and a land vehicle. It can only target air units in jet form and land units in tank form - so it's slightly annoying to use, since it imposes more need for APM in a micro-intensive game. Honestly, so far I think the best Terran unit is actually the basic Marine. They have a solid ranged attack, a self-buff, can attack both land and air units, and don't cost vespine gas. My strategy in most maps is just to pump out marines along with a few of whatever unit the map is built around. I never go for the firebats or Marauders any more. It hasn't let me down yet.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

BetrayedTangy posted...

Finally beat Red Dead Redemption today!

I noticed some good gameplay/story mixing with the sandbox too, yes. I think the whole "drive to NPC -> Drive to mission -> Do actual mission -> Drive back structure" is pretty common to Rockstar games unfortunately, and yeah I also consider it a major problem. Even looking at it laid out like that, it's three parts driving to one part actual mission! I try to go easy on fast travel in games. I guess because it's immersion breaking. I'm actually really fond of some games like Wind Waker and SotC that make commuting a big part of the game, but even then I still used the fast travel a lot by the end of RDR. I agree that it's not a very elegant fast travel system.

The lack of mission variety was definitely a problem for me too. I guess one thing that shows is that the normal shooting mechanics aren't all that compelling. While it's not a perfect example, something like Resident Evil 4 probably has an even greater percentage of just shooting sections than RDR, but I never considered it a problem because RE4's normal combat is tense and fun. So I guess either approach would've helped: either working harder on the shooting mechanics to make them more interesting, or adding more variety to the actual missions.

banananor posted...

As someone who hungrily devoured the lore booklet that came with sc1 as a kid, this hurts me

LOL I can imagine. I guess I just saw the flag in the first game and that was what my mind filled in. For the record, I looked on the Wiki while writing that post and realized both that I was wrong about the Confederacy's origins and that Mensk's crew used to be Raynor's pals in the first game, but didn't correct it for authenticity's sake.

Okay, so to conclude my writeup from last night:

The first mission I did was a mining-focused one on a lava planet. The goal is to gather a certain number of minerals. That poses an interesting challenge where you can spend minerals to recruit units, but that means elongating the map. On normal though, there are very few enemy attacks and you can mostly defend just with your SCVs. Lava periodically floods the lower regions of the map, so you have to high tail it out of there when the warning comes. This mainly serves to introduce players to the Terran ability to make buildings take off and fly around. You launch your command centers when the lava is coming and then plonk them back down once it drains. It's also the introduction of the Reaper unit, which can jump. Most units have to go the long way around to reach different areas of elevation, so being able to jump changes things a lot. One trick you can pull is to lure melee enemies over to ledges, jump up, and then safely pick them off from high ground. As a bonus objective, you have to kill a giant monster called a Brutalisk, who has a ton of health and a deadly attack, but it's actually really easy because he's slow and has a huge model, making him really easy to kite. It's not hard to take him down even with a small group of Reapers.

I've clocked in more than my fair share of hours with League of Legends, so kiting in RTS games is one thing I do have some practice in. Still, I've messed up a couple times trying it on really small enemies like Zerglings, because I would accidentally click on the ground close to them rather than their model, which would make my units run up into the enemies' claws instead of moving back and occasionally firing. You'd need to be quite the butterfingers to do that against the Brutalisk, though.

For the second mission, Jimmy and friends raid some special gas from a Protoss religious group. I had to retry this mission because I lost too many troops trying to break the Protoss base, which you do not need to do. I also thought I needed multiple SCVs to extract the gas quickly and was pulling my entire mineral gathering crew off for that purpose. In actuality, you really just need to send one. At first I wanted to use Hellions on this map, but they actually aren't that good because they can only target land units and the enemy uses a lot of aircraft. The map is more built around the Goliath unit, which it introduces. I guess the Goliath is roughly analogous to the Protoss' Stalker, as a ground based ranged unit a couple steps down the tech tree that can target both land and air units. I think it's more specialized as anti-air though. I mostly spammed Marines and Goliaths. It's not too hard to play really aggressively and finish this map quickly, but my successful attempt still took 25 minutes because I elongated it trying to get the optional relics for research, only to still leave without one and fail to get my next bonus from Protoss research as a result.

I think I found the vs. AI mode more fun than the campaign actually, and while I wasn't really feeling the game early on I think that piqued my interest a little more. I've yet to be drawn in by the story however.


---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Alright, played a little more SCII. I tried some VS. games against the AI just for a change of pace, and I chose to play as Protoss just because they have a unit called the Stalker, which is, of course, the title of my favorite Russian film. Apparently the game determines what level of AI you should play against over time, starting you out on very easy. After three games, it fingered me as a player who should be facing easy AI, which I guess might be right since I was floating a lot of resources and didn't know enough about the later parts of the tech tree, so that I could only really spam Stalkers until I won. It worked well enough, though.

I also did two missions in the campaign centered around a smuggler named Gabriel, but I'm running late so I'll have to write about those later.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Well, I tried going up to hard difficulty only to get my ass kicked on the very next mission, so it's back down to normal for now. I cleared two missions, one where you steal a Protoss artifact while a ZvP match goes on in the background and one with a day/night cycle where you have to defend during the night against swarms of zerg-infected colonists but are free to destroy the enemy buildings during the day. That was the same one I struggled with on hard. I got about half an hour into it before realizing I had lost too much and would have to start over. It was definitely demoralizing to lose after such a long time on the map.

That last mission introduced the first mechanical units in the Hellions, a fast-moving vehicle unit with a flamethrower. They're useful for staying out late attacking enemy bases and getting back quickly to defend, since they have much higher movement speed compared to infantry. As a more advanced play, they can kite melee units like the infected colonists and take down large numbers without being hit. It's tough to do that with all the multi-tasking that's necessary in this game though. Being able to do things like that and simultaneously keep your production up to speed is the kind of tech that pro players used to get paid for, before this game died.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Alright, I finally started Starcraft II today. Played the first couple of missions.

Here's my understanding of the first game's story, from the few missions I've played and what I know outside the game: Starcraft is set in an alt-history universe where the Conderacy won the U.S. Civil War and went on to become a globe-dominating superpower. A guy named Jim Raynor was a rebel against the Confederates but also fought against an invasive insect-like alien species called the Zerg. He had a young woman named Sarah Kerrigan in his squad, who got left behind on a planet swarming with Zerg when a mission went belly-up, but for some reason instead of simply killing her the Zerg transformed Kerrigan and made her their queen. There were also some religious aliens called the Protoss running around. I think they were hostile toward humans for a while but then helped fight off the common Zerg threat.

In the second game, Jim is still a rebel, but the main human powers-that-be aren't calling themselves the confederacy any more. They're called the Dominion. I don't know if that was a different faction in the original game or not. In any case, the Dominion are pretty obviously evil and the game on a whole is quite gritty - there's lots of ugly killings of civilians and the like to demonstrate how tough and cynical the world is. Despite the Terran's advanced technology, people are still working as miners for a single meal. Also, everyone smokes and drinks all the time, even when they're wearing power armor with helmets and visors. It's arguably black comedy. I think the original reveal that the Confederates fly a U.S. Confederacy flag was kind of meant to be funny in the original game.

The first few missions are still basically tutorials. The very first one is meant to introduce you to the basic movement and combat controls. The next few give you really simple mining tasks and let you produce a few types of units. The larger tech tree unlocks quite slowly it seems. I'm still limited to exclusively infantry units. I have the basic marines, the medics, and a short-range heavy unit called the Firebat. Incidentally, the only one of these units that's available in the multiplayer is the marine. There are actually a lot of units that are campaign exclusive.

I've been playing on Normal since I found the first game a little overwhelming, but I think I'll bump it up to hard for the next little while. So far I haven't really had to use tactics. I've just made a big circle of units and sent them en masse at anything zerg-shaped. I guess my biggest complaint is that a couple of the early missions are 25-30 minute defense maps with no way to speed them up, namely one where you bunker down and defend against the Zerg before a ship picks you up and another where you have to escort civilian conveys. I had amassed enough troops that I had effectively won within the first ten minutes of each. That got a little boring. I can understand why they're introducing new units and concepts so slowly for the sake of player training, but maybe speeding that up at least a little would make things more fun for me.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

ctesjbuvf posted...

Playing through and beating Grandmaster Galaxy is a peak gaming moment for me, but I understand the decision.

Yeah, it is kind of a shame, because I know that's one of the most iconic parts of Galaxy 2, but I know that gathering the green stars and mastering such a tough level with the rest of the project still ahead of me would drive me crazy. One day!

MetalmindStats posted...

Checking in for the first time in a while to say that I (still) love your write-ups!

Also, count me in among those interested in a B8 Minecraft server, so long as it's the Java version.

Thanks, I'm really glad to hear that! I'm hoping this will be a chance to improve my writing skills as well as learn some discipline. I'll keep you in mind when it comes time for Minecraft.

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
Release Date: July 27, 2010
Previous Experience with SCII: Played the demo, watched some pro games
My Expectations for SCII: Unsure whether to be excited or worried

I didn't have my own computer until I was fourteen, when I got a dinky little used Windows XP Laptop for Christmas. I had to make due with the machine for most of my teens, because I never really had the motivation to work a part-time job on top of school. I wouldn't really say I regret that choice, but one of its consequences was that I had to learn to amuse myself on the cheap. A computer and an internet connection turned out to be potent tools for that purpose, and I got by just fine through emulating console games, streaming anime, and even running abandonware through dosbox, which let me play PC classics like the original Civilization and The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.

I would've liked to play Starcraft II back then, but even if I had bought a disposable credit card and downloaded the game, I don't imagine my laptops 1GB RAM would have been enough to run it. The closest I got to playing the game when it was new was watching Youtube videos of the competitive scene, which made it look pretty appealing. One thing that really stands out about Starcraft is how distinct and cool the three different factions are. I always wanted to play Zerg - the way their workers mutate into pulsating biological structures, or how the Queens lurk in the hive but will rally to defend it from attackers, and how their tech tree comes from organic growth from tiny zerglings up to flying alien monsters - it all does such a good job conveying the idea of this bizarre, invasive alien species in the form of an RTS game. Even the normally-boring Human faction is pretty neat thanks to the Sci-fi trappings of their own tech tree. The way their buildings can take off on jet thrusters or raise and lower to create barriers their own team can pass through, for example, are cool ideas both in setting and gameplay terms.

When I finally upgraded to a slightly-less-shitty laptop in my late teens, I did try out the SCII demo, and I remember wanting to keep playing when I reached the end. Later on, when Blizzard made the original free-to-play, I didn't waste much time in getting it, but I stopped early on in the campaign. As soon as the levels started ramping up a bit, I began to find the game exhausting. It was such a slow build to create an army, and I would always get impatient and try to push enemy strongholds with ill-prepared forces, resulting in major setbacks which would sap my will to keep playing even further. I like the process of building up a base in Starcraft, but I don't like repeating it every single level. Truth be told, no RTS game has really held my interest much. I prefer Grand Strategy games like Civ, where the possibility of diplomacy is open. That tends to make things a little more interesting - potentially even a little more tense when Gandhi is acting friendly but you're convinced he's plotting against you. I'm not sure I quite have the patience that it takes to master a deeply technical genre like RTS either, where I know for certain that one step into the online arena would see me decimated by a guy with three times the actions per minute average I can manage.

If there is an RTS game out there that can change my mind, I'm willing to bet Starcraft II is the one. I think that playing this game entirely offline would be missing out, so I'll probably invoke my two-week rule, play online after finishing WoL's campaign, and see how I feel at the end.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 8/129
Currently Playing: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

"Later" wasn't originally intended to mean "Tuesday," but life caught up with me a little I suppose.

Final Analysis: Super Mario Galaxy 2
What I thought of Galaxy 2: Every bit as fun as the first
Would I play it again? Yes, it's on my list of games to return to post-project
Did it deserve to make round 3? Yes, probably even further

George Orwell once wrote that "All art is propaganda." He was trying to highlight how almost any work of fiction has a set of morals or ideas it's trying to express, but when taken too literally the statement runs a little risk: eroding the use of the word propaganda as a pejorative. Propaganda is a subcategory of art that places conveyance of its ideas above artistic concerns. What exactly qualifies as an artistic concern is kind of complex, but things like subtlety, pacing, and complexity probably qualify. For simplicity's sake, I might propose that propaganda seeks to convey ideas while art is primarily concerned with conveying emotions.

If we do use that definition, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is undoubtedly an accomplished work of art, and the emotion it conveys is pure unadulterated joy. That feeling radiates from every aspect, from the excellent orchestrated soundtrack to the animations and expressions of the characters to the ultra-varied, shockingly well executed gameplay.

3D Mario games are really quite exemplary when it comes to game design. I think there are a few things in particular that should be noted: how many moves Mario has at his disposal from the very start, how much depth they add to the gameplay, and how elegant and precise his movement controls still are is one. I think this partially arises just because it was a huge point of emphasis for the dev team: there's a story thatsays Super Mario 64 was just an empty room for a full year, while Mario's controls and abilities were tweaked to perfection. How intuitive the games usually are is another big one. I've seen a lot of footage of people playing 3D Sonic games and becoming confused as to what they're supposed to do next, because the games sometimes just don't really illustrate it properly. Such moments are non-existent in Galaxy. The game's visuals are so clear and distinct and the level progression so natural that you can pick it up in a second. The challenge comes from precise execution and timing, which is a lot more fun. That it manages this when there are such a huge variety of different power-ups, mechanics, and control schemes is all the more impressive. None of the different elements feel tacked on or poorly executed: by and large, the game is just as fun on any given level, which is to say really fun.

But I wouldn't call it perfect. I can easily think of a few things to nitpick if I really want to. Most importantly, although I've become mostly comfortable with Wii controls, and Galaxy probably implements them better than any other game, I still don't really like them. I wish I could just press a button to make Mario spin or throw fireballs instead of having to shake the wii remote, and I don't really like the process of collecting star bits - it's more of an obligation for unlocking certain levels. There are times when I get a little tired of watching short unskippable cutscenes, especially during the boss fights (which are generally kind of lame.) Although the game is usually quite easy, when some of the harder levels made me rack up the deaths, the long death animations and jingles can drag down the pacing. I'll admit to becoming frustrated with the game in certain levels, which would make me feel resentful toward Mario for the long animations when he gets knocked down or runs around after burning his butt, though that isn't to say those are bad design.

The fact that I have to resort to such tiny quibbles to say anything negative, though, probably says enough about how good Galaxy is. If you have any fondness for the platforming genre, this game is an undeniable must-play.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2

I have Starcraft 2 down as the next game. Wikipedia tells me it released in July while Reach was September. In either case, yeah, I'd be down for that.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Day 13/14
122 Stars, 48 Medals

I may be many things, but it seems a man of my word is not among them. I did play last night, quite a bit actually - well into the morning.

The final level made a good summation of all the challenges and mechanics the game has had so far, but unfortunately the final boss was a bit lame. Again, it kind of shares this problem with a lot of Mario games. At first it's just a slightly beefed up version of the same Bowser fight as the last two times, but then there is an admittedly cute little fake ending screen before he interrupts you and comes back for something a little more reminiscent of the final boss from Yoshi's Island - except without any of the challenge, atmosphere, or presence. Bowser tries to spin his way closer to you while you knock meteors at his gormless head. It takes about forty seconds. Peach joins you for the animation as you collect the final Grand Star, Rosalina shows up to take back the baby luma who gives you your spin move, and then there's a nice little playable credits sequence with a hatless Mario.

Beating the game unlocks a few things, most prominently the ability to freely switch to Luigi and the S-world, which is where the real big boy levels are hiding. The very first level is a silver star hunt on a pixel Mario constructed from the green tiles that fall away when you step on them, where you have to collect the stars while leaving enough ground for you to make your way back to the start of the level with. Then there's a comet variant that's the same thing, but for men: it adds purple coins, a time limit, and cosmic clones just for good measure. Actually I think I beat that one on my first try. I sarcastically said "oh good, my favorite" when I got to the next level and found out it was that remote-tilting ball mechanic, but I got through that one without much trouble as well, even the initially-intimidating purple coin comet level.

The level that really gave me a rough time was Stone Cyclone Galaxy. It's a level full of thwomps where everything is moving back and forth extremely quickly. There are a couple of those switches that slow down time but by and large you have to manage without them. You also have to collect silver stars. That level killed me more than some sections of VVVVVV, lol. It got to the point where the longer death animations started to drive me crazy. I actually had an easier time with the comet variant, which swaps the need for silver stars for a timer.

I got all the way to 119 stars before the missing comet medal from Fleet Glide Galaxy became an issue. I decided to give it another go because I was curious to see what the game would do to add another 120 stars before the Grandmaster Galaxy. It didn't turn out to be so bad. I had been having a lot of trouble flying through the second gate, which requires you to turn a long way off-camera. I couldn't get the controls quite down. I would either turn too far or the gate would be behind me by the time I got in place for it. Once I figured that one out, the rest was relatively smooth sailing.

The final comet level in World S was on the Boss Blitz Galaxy, which is just a bunch of minibosses from the first Mario Galaxy on little individual planetoids. My final time for that level was 35 minutes due to all the retries. Frustratingly enough, the first three bosses are an absolute joke and can be beaten in a minute and a half, and all the difficulty comes from Bouldergeist, that boss from the first game that no one likes, and my personal Mario Galaxy nemesis from ever since I was 12. He's a very slow, methodical boss to take down, where you have to wait for him to use a specific attack that spawns bomb boos you can swing into him - and waste a lot of time waiting as he chooses different attacks altogether. Combining him with a time limit becomes a bit stressful. It's definitely possible to fail on the last guy, a fiery upgrade to the original Petey Piranha, after beating him, which happened to me a couple times. You do have to be pretty precise to take that guy down quickly.

With that challenge finally bested, I could go on to the next half of the game... once I had done the final level again, for some reason. Beat it with Luigi the second time around. It did cause me to notice how Yoshi waves goodbye to you as you climb the pole to the final boss, which is cute.

So yeah, it turns out that the rest of the stars are hidden greenies that repopulate the original levels. I tried out a couple, but even after the troublesome things I went through to reach this point, I think I'll leave Galaxy 2 here. Collecting the green stars seems overall less fun and after dragging Red Dead out so much I'm eager to get on to the next game - I've spent my pace-defining two weeks on Galaxy 2 and I definitely got a full game's worth of fun out of it.

Final Thoughts on Galaxy 2 Coming Later

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Didn't have time to play today. Work has sucked and I've been having sleep problems again.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Gall posted...

There are 242 stars in Galaxy 2, but 122 are inaccessible until you've collected the first 120. And the final 2 are in the final super-difficult level which you can only access by collecting the other 240.

In any case, I do recommend getting that Clockwork Ruins medal, since the comet star there is a good one.

I see. I assumed the rest of the levels would unlock once I beat Bowser, since that's more or less how it worked in Galaxy 1 as I recall. I'm still not willing to do that damn Fleet Glide medal, so I might have to stop just shy of 120.

Day 12
105 stars, 40 medals

I finished rounding up all the stars I missed before. As far as I can tell, I can't do anything else without either taking down Bowser or returning to Fleet Glide Galaxy. I did wind up doing the Clockwork Ruins medal, which was frustrating. I didn't like the comet level there too much either. I think my issue with that galaxy is that you have to spend a lot of time waiting for the clocks to rotate or the walls to shift, which tries my patience a little bit. In any case, I'll be going straight to the final boss tomorrow.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Day 11
100 Stars, 39 medals

I cleared the rest of world 6 except the big boss fight against Bowser, and then took the time to start going back and doing the things I had missed throughout the game up until this point, all the way back to world one. I have a couple hidden stars and comet stars left to go before I've done everything you possibly can without beating the final boss, with two exceptions: the comet medals in Clockwork Ruins and Fleet Glide Galaxies. Clockwork Ruins is just kind of a long level that I don't want to go back through a second time, and I attempted the one at Fleet Glide a couple times and it just seems like kind of a nightmare, so I gave up. I guess this solidifies the fact that I won't be 100% completing Galaxy 2. That would take a long time in any case. I'll probably try to go for 120 stars, which is the same count as the first Galaxy.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Day 10
90 stars, 33 medals

Shorter session today as I slept in a bit late. I wound up forgetting to look for the medals in the clockwork ruins and throwback galaxies and missed them. Throwback was nice. It's a remake of a level from Mario 64 with the music from Bob-omb Battlefield. Of course it doesn't meet the same level of open-endedness that the original managed, but the redone King Thwomp miniboss was pretty cool. I did the secret level on the Battle Belt Galaxy, which I thought was a nice premise (planetoids used as battle arenas,) but I kind of wish the split was a little earlier in the level. I'll go back and finish up that Galaxy tomorrow.

As of now, I can go on to the final level whenever I like.

---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 7/129
Currently Playing: Super Mario Galaxy 2