Board 8 > Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest Part 2 (ft FO:NV, Ghost Trick)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Lightning Strikes posted...

The Aphrodite scene was originally supposed to end with her pulling a knife and trying to kill you. Im kind of glad we didnt get that, but whats left is still embarrassing.

Glad this topic is back!

Yeah, I think embarrassing is a good way to put it. I'm glad they didn't add that too, I thought it was kind of nice that they had at least the one god who didn't try to kill Kratos and who he didn't kill either.

And thanks!

BetrayedTangy posted...

So I beat Dark Souls awhile ago, but kept delaying my write up because I was continuing to play the game, going so far as to actually get every achievement. Which is something I've done with only a handful of games. As you can tell I really liked it!

Glad to hear you liked it! Yes, I definitely agree that Dark Souls is a deeply artistic game. I've always found the "entropy" theme very interesting and emotionally resonant, but I think what particularly impresses me about Dark Souls is how its story is conveyed. It's a game that makes great use of the medium, in part because the player has to dig to get the details of the lore which lends to the feeling of exploring a dying world, but more importantly because Dark Souls is ultimately a game in which your character is being manipulated. It's easy to complete the game and go along with what Gwyndolin and Fraampt want you to do without ever finding out that Anor Londo is an illusion and that they're lying to you. Of all the secrets you mention, I think my favorite is the existence of Darkstalker Kaathe, who is hidden behind really obscure conditions but completely recontexualizes the game's story when you find him. But even though he serves to expose what Fraampt is doing, Kaathe himself is still trying to manipulate you, which is why both of those characters are serpents. It's hard to tell which of the two endings is actually the better outcome.

I do think Dark Souls is a (mostly) excellently well-designed game and one of the rarer examples where both the story and gameplay are awesome. I think my favorite thing is just how open-ended the game is, both in terms of the exploration (it really nails the sort of 3D Metroidvania idea) and build paths. I love just how many different weapon options are viable and how they can change up your playstyle.

The larger "Soulsborne" franchise feels kind of iterative which can make the individual games feel less special, definitely. I think it's okay to skip DS2 but I personally thought Bloodborne was really great and gripped me more than most other games I've played in years, though it may have helped that it had been a long time since I played any of the Dark Souls games when I started it.

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I played a little further into Terraria, mostly spelunking to hunt down life crystals. I did manage to find a few and extend my life meter to a just under twice its original size. I found out that the corruption was beyond the jungle to the far east and that there was a frozen biome in the west, but I still haven't made it to the boundaries of the world yet. I played around a little with the minecart system, which I don't think was implemented last time I played. There's a really long mine track running through the underground in my world, which can be helpful for getting around quickly or navigating cliffs but leaves you a little more exposed to enemy attacks. It's kind of fun. I think you can expand the cart railway but I don't see myself bothering with that, even though I found a ton of iron again today.

There are a lot of significant power-ups just lying around in chests. I found a pair of flippers that let you jump infinitely in water and a cloud in a bottle which grants a double jump, but I think the most amazing thing I got was a Finch Staff, which summons a baby finch to fight for you. It nests on your head when you're out of combat, which is cute, but I wasn't expecting it to be very useful at first. It turns out the baby finch is invincible and does contact damage to anything it touches, and it also stays active for an unlimited amount of time once used. It can absolutely tear apart the otherwise-annoying worm enemies underground because they consist of many components that each get damaged on contact, and it was also a huge help when I went up against the first boss, the eye of Cthulu. You just use the suspicious-looking eye item at night time to summon the boss. I think it's crafted by taking a bunch of lenses to a corrupt/crimson altar, but I just found one in a chest. It's a fairly tricky boss to hit at melee range without getting smacked in return, so most of my damage on it came from the finch and the blowgun I found yesterday. I also made soup out of a mushroom and a goldfish, which apparently gives you an 8 minute buff to all stats. I'm not sure how important it was. It dropped demonite ore, which I used to craft a sword called the Light's Bane.

My base hasn't really changed much since last time. I completed the third room and the merchant moved into it, and then I started on a forth. I think I could be getting NPCs to show up faster if I were to build with more common materials, but I'm not too worried about it because I remember the NPCs not being very important to the game's progression.

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I got up early in the morning and played a ton of Terraria. I think the first thing I did was start exploring the corruption and the underground jungle, both of which were giving me a lot of trouble. The enemies in the corruption aren't that bad in and of themselves, but the place is full of super deep chasms that killed me a couple times through fall damage, which made my items really hard to get back, including one time where they fell even further from the place I died at and I had to retrieve them in three parts.

I made a terrible mistake by going into the dungeon without taking down the associated boss, which I had forgotten is a no-no because an invincible dungeon keeper spawns and one-shots you for doing that. This rendered all my items irretrievable because it would just kill me again the second I picked them up. I even lost some of my back-up items that I took out to try and make it back to the dungeon safely.

So that was all the patience I had for mediumcore mode. Since you can't change the difficulty without creating a new character, Marche is now retired and I'll be playing the rest of the game with a character named Cody 2, in honor of the true hero of Terraria. I looted all the useful items from my chests in the old world and then had Cody 2 run around in a new one for a slightly better chance of finding Life Crystals, and then I took out the Eye of Cthulu again to get my sword back. I found another cloud in a bottle, but have yet to replace the Finch Staff :(

I built the tower of babel out of ropes and then a sky bridge so I could find floating islands, and got the balloon (increased jump height) and fledgling wings (very minor flight and slow-falling) accessories from chests there. You can also convert the buildings on floating islands into useable houses for NPCs just by throwing a torch in one, which led to the Dryad coming to my world. I bought the purifying powder from her which let me transform the corrupted Ebonstone into regular cobblestone, which was really handy since I didn't have a pickaxe that could mine Ebonstone at the time. That let me access some Shadow Orbs that were locked in closed-off areas of my Corruption biome and smash them with a hammer. Breaking three spawns a boss called the Eater of Worlds, who is basically a giant version of one of the worm enemies. There's a cool idea behind him where he's composed of like 80 parts with their own health bar and every time you break one that's not at the very front of the formation it makes the boss split in half, so you gradually end up fighting more and more independent bodies and it's harder to dodge them all. It was a pretty easy fight over all, though, and I took him down a second time to get more of the shadow scales he drops. I made the nightmare pickaxe which seems like it will suffice for the rest of pre-hardmode, and a suit of shadow mail for the movement speed set bonus.

After that I took down a few other bosses in pretty quick succession. I found some rubies which let me summon the slime king and take him down for a solidifier, which lets you make slime-based furniture and blocks, and I've decided my new ambition in this game is to make a giant slime palace, though it's just one room so far. A goblin army spawned and took down a few of the doors in my brick building but didn't do much else, and I went and got my revenge on the dungeon keeper, Skeletron. I focused on his hands and then his head was easy to take down.

When the Eater of Worlds died, it caused a meteor to crash into my world on the border between the eastern corruption (there are two corruption biomes, one east and one west,) and the beach. With a good enough pickaxe you can go and mine meteorite to make stuff with, though you get constantly harassed by flying enemies and you can't stand on the meteor without taking really fast damage over time. I just covered the place in ropes and mined while hanging off them. The armor is actually inferior to the Corruption armor, but I made the space gun which uses mana instead of ammo and have adopted that as my main ranged weapon for now. I went into the dungeon and found the muramasa, and then I poked around in the jungle to get the necessary items for making the Blade of Grass. These two swords are ingredients for the best pre-hardmode weapon in the game.

I'm closing in on the start of hardmode, and I'm considering stopping there, and treating the Wall of Flesh as the final boss for the purpose of this playthrough. I'm still having fun with it, but I just can't shake the thought that it's about a 20 hour game if I stop after WoF but likely to end up being more like an 80 hour game if I go all the way to the true final boss.

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You make the call. Never been particularly interested in those crafting games outside of when Minecraft first blew up.

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When I started playing Terraria tonight I made the Star Cannon, a very high damage ranged weapon that uses fallen stars as ammo. I spent a long time running around gathering fallen stars at night, and I think I have about 200 now. The main intention behind making this item is to use it against the Wall of Flesh, which is hard to fight at close range without getting messed up. I found one crystal heart in the underground jungle putting me at around 15 hearts but I will want to get to the current max of 20 before I fight that boss. I also mined some obsidian and made the Obsidian Skull, which means I'm ready to head down to the underworld if I want to. I think that basically just entails digging straight downward until you find it.

I took down the Queen Bee boss in the jungle. You can break into the hives that are underground there and spawn her by destroying larvae, but the one I found didn't have any so I just gathered some ingredients and made her summoning item. She's the same boss that I had to farm for a bee costume last time I played, and has a really wide variety of potential drops. I got the beekeeper, a sword with comparable damage to everything else I have so far that also spawns bees when it strikes an enemy, and I also used the material she drops to make a staff that summons a hornet to fight for you. I found the Granite biome and the Goblin NPC, who moved into the tiny bathroom of my slime house, which seems to indicate that bathtubs and toilets are considered tables and chairs, respectively, by the game.

As of now, my priorities are as follows:

1. Build a bunch of houses to get more NPCs to move in
2. Find more life crystals until I have max health
3. Grab more fallen stars, probably until I have 500
4. Go to the underworld and dig for hellstone to make better equipment with
5. Find a guide voodoo doll and then fight the WoF

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So Terraria has more of a traditional gameplay focus than Minecraft, with stuff like boss fights and stat and equipment upgrades. It seems like the sort of thing Id like moreso than Minecraft, although I dont really want to get into another another big timesink when Im already neglecting Dragon Age.

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Gall posted...

So Terraria has more of a traditional gameplay focus than Minecraft, with stuff like boss fights and stat and equipment upgrades. It seems like the sort of thing Id like moreso than Minecraft, although I dont really want to get into another another big timesink when Im already neglecting Dragon Age.

Minecraft has its own main questline, but Terraria's is a lot more central to the game, yeah. It doesn't take too long before you don't need to worry about digging for rare metals any more and most of your progress is more based around running through prodecurally generated dungeons, which speeds the game up. For what it's worth, it took me around 20 hours to take down the Wall of Flesh, which is what I'm using as a stopping point, so in that case it's not such a huge time-sink.

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So yes, I managed to complete all 5 tasks on my to-do list for Terraria today. I was actually over-preparing for the Wall of Flesh by gathering as many fallen stars as I did - I had about 450 but he went down quite quickly, after probably about 100 shots. I made a long bridge throughout the underworld to fight him on, but it could've been a lot shorter considering how quickly I won. I remember having a really hard time beating this boss when I fought him on the PS3, but I think that was because I tried to use the Night's Age instead of standing back and shooting at him with a long-range weapon.

Mining for Hellstone was kind of tricky. The underworld is covered in lava so even though there's lots of Hellstone around you can't always get your hands on it safely, and every hellstone block you destroy leaks even more lava out. You have to dig carefully to drain the stuff to somewhere safe and you get harrassed by enemy spawns the whole time. I made the Fiery greatsword, a full suit of armor, and a pickaxe out of Hellstone which took a lot of methodical gathering.

When you take down the WoF, your world turns over to hard mode which makes the enemies much stronger and increases the spread rate of corruption. It's best to get your ducks in a row before you do that so that you can clear out all the hard mode biomes quickly enough that you don't have to dig through your entire world to block off the corruption. I mainly just prepared by making a few more houses so I wouldn't have to spend any time on that afterward. Since I had the extra space, I moved my NPCs around so that the guide was nearby the Clothier and the Zoologist, which made him as happy as possible before I offed him to summon the boss. RIP my dude, your sacrifice will not be forgotten.

Final Thoughts on Terraria coming tomorrow.

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Final Analysis: Terraria
What I thought of Terraria: Yeah, this game is pretty good.
Would I play it again? Eventually.
Did it deserve to lose round 1? I'll have to decide once I play Bioshock Infinite.

I've talked before about how one of this decade's narratives is the rise of indie games. I'm really happy about that - I think I like indies better than AAA these days - but I'm not sure I like the trend that's come with it, which is the rise of procedural generation. It makes sense that the two go hand in hand, because overall it's easier and cuts costs to have an algorithm design maps, but the thing is that robots just aren't that great at game design yet. You can always tell when a level is custom made and when it's done procedurally, and I would contend that all the best indie games of the last few years - Omori, Owlboy, Cuphead, Undertale - are the ones that don't use that technique at all.

But then again you have some games that find some clever way to use it. There's Hades, for one thing, which integrates randomized levels and permadeath into its story, and there's Minecraft, which found a smart gameplay innovation for computer-designed levels: giving every player the power to freely dig up and rebuild the world around them. In a time now lost to history, Bethesda released Daggerfall, a pioneering title in procedurally generated levels, where the randomized quests would often be impossible to finish because the essential item would be cased in on all sides by impassible walls. Such a situation could never occur in Minecraft, because the player could just dig through.

That mechanic was so good that a bunch of other games stole it, which I think is a good thing. People should rip off good ideas more often, I think - I've always lamented how RPGs didn't adopt Chrono Trigger's dual techs or Earthbound's way of skipping battles that were too low-level to be worth it, for example, because those mechanics are so good they should be in every game. As long as you're remixing the original idea with some substantial tweaks of your own, a little bit of copying is fine in my book.

Terraria does a good job managing that. To Minecraft's earth-moving, building, and crafting core gameplay it adds unique NPC types, boss fights, and something approximating a main quest line. It gives you accessories that massively increase your mobility as a marker of your progress, which was probably my favorite change. It's inherently satisfying to go from a small jump and slow walk speed, which force you to extensively build bridges and lower ropes to get around, to being able to walk on water, double jump, and even fly. The building mechanics transform randomized levels that might be terrible or even unplayable into interesting challenges of their own, but they also add fun dimensions to the moment to moment gameplay. You can trap enemies in walls to get around them, build sky bridges to "skip" large portions of the world, or drop sand onto monsters from high above.

But all the most interesting parts of Terraria are still the ones that have been programmed in manually - the giant "living trees" that take up a huge part of each world, the boss fights and special encounters that bring the combat mechanics to life, and the way your quest has you gradually descending until you get to Hell itself. Likewise, it doesn't solve all the problems that come with prodecural generation - for instance, the dungeon in my world was positively tiny, meaning I missed out on a lot of the interesting loot and special paintings you can find there, and it can be frustrating how important features like the more useful accessories and some crafting stations might just never spawn in your world, or how you might play for hours upon hours without stumbling on the unique biomes like the glowing mushroom area.

Although the mobility power-ups do a good job speeding up some of the more tedious parts of the gameplay later on, I wish there was a better solution for the need to place torches every few feet. I also thought the spawn rates for mostly-irrelevant enemies could get kind of annoying. It's a pain to have to interrupt whatever else your doing every few seconds to switch to your sword and swat a bat or something. Maybe it would better if the mobs didn't spawn as often, but were generally more powerful.

Depending on your goals, the game can get quite grindy. You'll spend a lot of time just wandering through caves looking for some rare and obscure resource you need to make a particular item, especially if you want something specific. I like Michelangelo, so I spent a while trying to find the "Creation of the Guide" painting that's basically a pixel-art version of his Creation of Adam, which is a rare spawn in dungeons, but I just got tired of grinding out multiple worlds' worth of dungeons before I came across it, and I'm still a little heartbroken that I never found a replacement for the Finch Staff I lost to mediumcore mode.

So Terraria is not a game without its flaws. It would be remiss of me not to mention corruption spread, which has made some players incredibly angry by essentially destroying their entire game worlds, and although it does have a solution it's unbelievably tedious. All that being said, though, I had a lot of fun playing it. I put over 20 hours into it in 5 days, which only a handful of other games in this project can boast.

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Bastion
Release Date: July 20, 2011
Playing on: PC
Previous Experience with Bastion: Listened to some of the music
Expectations for Bastion: Baby Hades, but thankfully not a roguelike

Bastion has been on my radar for ages. I remember wanting to buy it because Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee placed it in his top 5 games of 2011. As a matter of fact, I have all four Supergiant-developed games on Steam... but the only one I've even installed is Hades. I bought Bastion on sale years ago, probably around 2015, but for one reason or another I just never got around to starting it up.

I have some reservations about the isometric combat because it reminds me of Diablo, but I thought it was well designed and generally fun in Hades, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this much-praised story, allegedly delivered by a narrator with an extremely sexy voice, goes down. I'm excited to finally be giving this game a whirl, and I think the odds I'll like it even better than Hades are pretty good.

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I played the first few hours of Bastion tonight. The white-haired boy from the cover art is just referred to as The Kid, and even though he's the main character the narration is all done by another character, Rucks. I think The Kid is probably in his mid to late teens. The power up system involves him boozing and there's a part where he knocks himself out by smoking a pipe and then has a bad dream about his backstory, where it's stated that he used to get picked on for his white hair, which implies that it wasn't very common in the now-destroyed world he inhabited. Rucks has the same hair color, which makes me think he might be The Kid's dad, but maybe it's still normal for people's hair to turn white when they get old in this world. The Kid spent a lot of his childhood taking care of his sick mum and the rest of it as a member of the Night's Watch from Game of Thrones.

Besides those two, there are only two other characters in the entire game, named Zulf and Zia. They're from a country that used to be at war with The Kid's country. You meet Zulf a little after Rucks and Zia near the end of the first section of the game, which reminds me of the first Mario Galaxy, because you're collecting "cores" from all the levels to power the titular Bastion and unlock more features from it. I played until the Kid finds the last core, Zulf breaks the monument that powers the Bastion and leaves because he read something in a Ura journal, and you start gathering that monument shards instead of the cores.

I'd say I could take or leave the gameplay for the most part. The core combat is okay and it's cool how it has a lot of different options, but I tend to get frustrated when I try to do the optional "proving grounds" areas, which are mostly way harder than the real levels. I also died twice on the very last of the 20 waves you have to do for the Kid's flashback, which was upsetting. I've mostly been playing with the hammer as my melee weapon and alternated between the bow and the musket for range. I don't like the repeater that much and the dueling pistols look cool but don't seem that effective. The musket is nice for clearing out grounds but it sucks as long range which makes you very reliant on the parry mechanic to take out ranged enemies, so overall I find the bow better. When it comes to the different Q skills you can pick there are a lot I haven't tried out yet but I think the hand grenade is really good.

Still, whatever complaints I might have toward the gameplay, I am enjoying it so far. I think it's doing a good job telling a story through the limitation of having only one speaking character, and it manages to have at least some emotional weight behind things like the memories of the world before it was destroyed. It is overall pretty impressive just how many different little things the narrator has voice lines for. He'll comment on things as small as how many hits you took in a specific fight or how often you've fallen off the edges of the levels. It's a charming way to deliver the story and the voice actor is quite good.

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Okay, played a little further, probably to the point where I'm closing in on the end-game now. The shards you start gathering after Zulf leaves let you upgrade the various facilities on the Bastion. I started with the forge, which lets you upgrade weapons five times instead of the previous cap of three, and then I did the lost and found and the distillery, and finally the memorial. I still need to get two shards to upgrade the other two buildings.

The first level I did when I started playing again has the Kid wander into the jungle, get high off some poison spores, and fall into a nightmare, which I thought was a cool sequence. It reminds me of the Tanetane Island sequence in Mother 3, which is one of my favorite parts of that game. The rest of the jungle levels are more traditional, just with a new set of enemies and hazards, including a couple little boss fights against a giant flower and an alligator that lurks in tall grass, possibly a rejected design for fifth generation Pokemon. I found a few new weapons like the spear that you can use for longer melee range or just chuck at people and the carbine which is functionally pretty similar to the bow, but overall I think I still prefer running the hammer and bow. I like the musket too, but it combines better with the machete or the spear. I also did the level where you run through Zia's backstory.

My overall feeling is still that I'm digging the story but I'm not as enthusiastic about the gameplay. It's alright, but not fantastic. One complaint I do have is with the checkpoint and retrying system. You have a few lives to get through each level with and if they run out you have to start the whole thing over, which can mean losing quite a bit of progress and is kind of frustrating. I think a more ordinary system where there were just multiple checkpoints within each level probably would've been preferable. I was running all the available idols for higher difficulty and rewards, but I lost one level right at the very end, got tilted, and turned them all off, so I'll probably keep use of those to a minimum from now on, since the extra rewards don't seem that important anyway.


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I totally agree about procedural generation. It can feel like a real missed opportunity when a game has fun movement/combat/etc, but the level design doesnt properly take advantage of it. I find that I like procedural generation the smaller the scope of the randomness. As an example, I recently played A Robot Named Fight, which is a roguelite based on Super Metroid. That game is made up of a finite (but still pretty large) number of individual rooms, but the way the rooms are connected is random every game. So over time you learn to recognize rooms and develop a strategy for the harder ones, but theres still variety on what rooms youll see.

Anyway, Im glad youre liking Bastion, it's one of my favorites. With regards to the difficulty, getting the weapons fully upgraded help a lot. I certainly wouldnt recommend turning on all the idols before that point. I also dont recommend using the 2 idols that make enemies invincible/intangible at all, I thought they slowed things down too much.

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Gall posted...

I totally agree about procedural generation. It can feel like a real missed opportunity when a game has fun movement/combat/etc, but the level design doesnt properly take advantage of it. I find that I like procedural generation the smaller the scope of the randomness.

I think that's become a very pronounced feeling for me. I was interested in Eagle Island when that was coming out but when I found out it had procedurally generated levels and rougelike elements I felt kind of let down, like the falconry concept had been put to waste because it was connected to those mechanics.

I was running like 5 different idols at my peak, but I stuck with just 2 after I had to restart that one level. My impression is that they really aren't that necessary for the rewards they include and serve more as a mechanism to let players challenge themselves a little more from the second playthrough onward.

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I finished Bastion. The last few levels and ending were definitely really cool. It's revealed that the Calamity was caused by the Kid's country trying to wipe out the Ura, and Zulf was smashing up the Bastion as a form of revenge. It turns out that a decent number of his countrymen survived and they come back to attack the place. I lost my pet blob and bird in the raid, sadly. To get the very last shard, you end up going into the Ura territory, where it's revealed that everything the narrator has been saying to the player has been him telling the game's story to Zia as they wait for the Kid to beat the last level, which explains why some of the references to her were in second person. The function of the fully-upgraded Bastion is to set things back to the way they were pre-calamity, but it also has the option to give up on going back and take the few survivors somewhere new. You're given two choices at the end of the game: whether to save Zulf when his countrymen attack him for leading the Kid to them or to leave him behind, and what to do with the Bastion. I chose to save Zulf and to evacuate.

I thought the whole moment where you're dragging Zulf along and the few remaining Ura fire on you at first but then eventually just let you pass, and the narrative device where you finally hear Zia's voice right at the end were both really cool. The central dilemma about what to do with the Bastion is interesting. On the whole I thought it was quite an emotional ending, and probably the best part of the game.

Final Thoughts on Bastion coming tomorrow.

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Yeah Bastion's ending was really cool. It actually left me thinking about for a day or two after. I also found it pretty funny when Dark Souls sort of went with a similar concept in its endings.

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All these short games and long games juxtaposed against each other must make for some interesting whiplash!

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Dont worry weve got like four big RPGs and open world games back to back now so thatll be a bit more consistent!

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Also DREW MAC was dropping f-bombs on RAW Talk.

Sheamus just making him so gosh darn mad!

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I still think about Bastion's ending sometimes. The sequence that comes from saving Zulf is one of the most powerful moments I've ever seen in video games.

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BetrayedTangy posted...

Yeah Bastion's ending was really cool. It actually left me thinking about for a day or two after. I also found it pretty funny when Dark Souls sort of went with a similar concept in its endings.

Oh yeah, haha, I guess they are a little similar. There's also some parallels in Owlboy, another story-focused indie game I really liked.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

All these short games and long games juxtaposed against each other must make for some interesting whiplash!

I think it's nice. There's a certain comfort to having the short games to almost unwind with in between the long ones.

Lightning Strikes posted...

Dont worry weve got like four big RPGs and open world games back to back now so thatll be a bit more consistent!

That's true, it's long games until the end of 2011 now, between 20ish hour RPGs like Deus Ex and (possibly) Dark Souls and true behemoths like Skyrim and Minecraft.

Final Analysis: Bastion
What I thought of Bastion: A good story-driven game, with some minor gameplay issues
Would I play it again? Sure, it would be nice to see the other ending.
Did it deserve to lose round 2? If anything it should've gone further.

Video games are a young medium, and people are only starting to explore the possibilities they bring to the art of story-telling. A lot of developers still make the mistake of treating them like books or longer films, locking all the character development and lore behind long cutscenes or text scrolls.

The real trick is to somehow integrate the game mechanics and the story, and I think more games are consciously doing that these days. I recently started up Doki Doki Literature Club, for example, and I thought it was nice how the game takes away your save files to help drive home the feeling that its most tragic story moment could not be undone.

Bastion sort of does a similar thing, but what it chiefly accomplishes with its particular style of narrative is that the story and the gameplay can almost always play out at the same time without interrupting one another. There is quite a hefty amount of contextual dialog based on your moment to moment gameplay choices, but it doesn't really effect the broader story. It's still a more elegant approach than most games manage, although the one major downside of it is that you have to go through a lot of repeated dialog if you get a game over and have to restart a full level.

The game's narrative structure is purposely limiting - apart from what we can glean from the visuals as the Kid walks along and fights, all the information we have is from the inherently biased perspective of one of the characters, Rucks. One of the most clever moments comes at the very end, when the game finally lets you break away from that perspective, just for a moment. As purposeful and well-used as it is, that limitation has its downsides, with the biggest one being that a lot of the storytelling is essentially done through exposition dumps. It might have been more effective if the character backstories were shown rather than told to us by Rucks.

All minutia around the story devices aside, the core of this narrative is really very good. There's a lot of nuance to the characters and their feelings - we as the audience can sympathize with everyone, even if Rucks and Zulf have some heavy sins to answer for. One of the major themes is reconciliation, shown in the conflict between the Ura and Caelondia, and how hard it was for them to let go of their past war, but is personified by the characters of Zulf, an Ura orphan who was raised by a Caelondian missionary, and the Kid, who has the most important choices for the fates of both peoples in his young hands.

But I think the most central theme is atonement, which is housed in the idea of the Bastion itself. There are a lot of people out there who have done things they wish they could take back. I have mine. That desire is expressed in the "restore" function of the Bastion, which is essentially a time travel device intended to undo one calamitous mistake, but it leaves the possibility that everything will just repeat itself again, because in truth you don't get to take things back. The only real way to atone is to accept what happened and try to move on, and to do the right things going forward - that's why I picked the evacuation ending.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Release Date: August 23, 2011
Playing on: PC
Previous Experience with Human Rev: Watched someone play a mission
Expectations for Human Rev: Above Average Western AAA

Break out the streamers, the party hats, and the cake, because this is game #20! All I need to do is get through this one and my topic has officially become a resounding success.

Here's a hot take for you: neither Blade Runner film is all that great. They're gorgeous to look at and a ton of creativity and effort went into the world-building, but I'm not really drawn in emotionally by the stories, and they focus too heavily on mostly tired themes about inequality and corruption. Those issues are replicated in most of the cyberpunk fiction I've seen. There are a lot of cliches and the social commentary is way too on-the-nose.

I'm biased since I'm clearly a weeb, but I think Japanese cyberpunk is where it's at, especially Akira and the partial example of Final Fantasy VII. Yes Akira deals with issues of class and makes a concerted point of showing the rot at every level of its dystopian society, but the emotional core of that story is the relationship between Tetsuo and Kaneda, whose lifelong friendship gets turned on its head as Tetsuo loses his mind. It eventually becomes clear to Kaneda that Tetsuo needs to be stopped, but he feels conflicted about taking him out because deep down, he still loves Tetsuo. Likewise, yes FFVII deals with SHINRA enriching themselves by destroying the environment and oppressing the people below them, but the heart of its story is about Cloud's quest for self-acceptance. In contrast, I thought that Deckard's and K's personal journeys could've used more focus - they didn't connect with me on an emotional level.

I fear Human Revolution might be the same way for me. I know it uses body modification as a metaphor for civil rights, but I haven't heard much talk about Adam Jensen as a character. All people really say about him is that he never asked for this. That being the case, I doubt it will cure any of my reservations about his genre.

What I am hoping for is a bit of that New Vegas-style freedom of choice that Western RPGs specialize in. I've heard the original Deus Ex was really excellent in that respect, but I've also heard that Human Rev. was a disappointment to some fans of the original. It does feel a little remiss of me to start this one without ever having played its predecessor to compare - I considered sticking it in as a last minute addition to my extra games list. It would certainly be interesting to try the game so good its fans whined that it wasn't winning by enough back in the first GotD contest. Maybe I'll play an hour or two of it in between my sessions with Human Revolution. As for this game itself, I hope to like it, but I'm not expecting to be floored.

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That doesn't sound like that uncommon of an opinion. That being said, count me as a big fan of the first Blade Runner.

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I love both movies, but I can see them being dull to some.

I intend to join in on Dark Souls and Arkham City, but I sprained my thumb less than a week ago and currently can't use it, which is a big deal breaker for most games, so it depends on how fast you are going through Deux Ex.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

That doesn't sound like that uncommon of an opinion. That being said, count me as a big fan of the first Blade Runner.

Maybe not. For what it's worth, although I have some criticism of both movies (I wish there was more nuance in the character of Wallace from 2049 for example,) a lot of the difference between me and someone who loves the Blade Runner movies is just personal taste. I think it would be possible to argue against the comparison I made between them and those Japanese examples, especially with 2049, because K's character arc is pretty central to that movie - I guess it just didn't really click for me.

ctesjbuvf posted...

I intend to join in on Dark Souls and Arkham City, but I sprained my thumb less than a week ago and currently can't use it, which is a big deal breaker for most games, so it depends on how fast you are going through Deux Ex.

Ah, I see. Get well soon. It's hard to say how long Human Rev will take me, but if you want I can do something to arrange things so that I don't start Dark Souls until a little later, like playing another game early or something.

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It turns out my PC doesn't have the specs to run Human Revolution. Even after turning off all the bells and whistles in the graphics settings I lost so many frames during the opening cutscenes alone that I knew it would be unbearable to go on. I should be able to get the PS3 version in no time, but for now I'll have to make do with only the original Deus Ex, which I've played for a little over an hour so far.

My major impression of the game is that it's old as fuck. Aside from the dated graphics, the enemy AI is really ancient and the core mechanics are rough. I've mostly been playing stealthy, which means quicksaving all the time and quickloading the second someone sees you. You have a really close range stun baton that needs ammo and there are theoretically tranquilizer darts too, but as far as I can tell those are completely useless.

On Steam, most of my friends who tried this game played for less than an hour. I can see why, because it's not a very accessible game. I had to look up a guide to realize that you can't hack security systems without a specific limited use item that you don't start out with even if you specialize in electronics during character creation. It's a pain to try and figure out the core mechanics when you're in a stealth situation and lingering indecisively for even a few seconds, and it seems like you have to be very methodical about looting to keep yourself stocked on lockpicks and multitools. Some of this will get better with more experience, but I'm convinced the stealth and gunplay mechanics will feel like crap the whole way through, so while I'm going to press on for now my guess is that Deus Ex will be an experience significantly hampered by gameplay that's just not fun.

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This is going to sound ridiculous, but if you have a Wii U try to get that version, because they made a lot of improvements.

I love the original Deus Ex but it is incredibly inaccessible.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

Ah, I see. Get well soon. It's hard to say how long Human Rev will take me, but if you want I can do something to arrange things so that I don't start Dark Souls until a little later, like playing another game early or something.

That's very nice of you, but just continue on to it and I'll make it if I make it. It's not my impression Human Revolution is that short, Dark Souls isn't either, so it'll probably be fine and otherwise I'll try to catch up.

Btw, depending on what platform you'd rather play on and what you already own, some of the games you'll eventually play are free on Playstation in the near future as part of their stay home program.

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With Blade Runner a lot of it is more that if you've taken in a lot of media like that then it probably loses a lot of impact. That being said, I only saw Blade Runner for the first time in 2018 and still loved it.

I got Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition and played two quick 1v1 Random Map games against the AI as the Celts and Mongols. The former was played on the easiest difficulty and I won just by training a few Men-At-Arms and a bunch of Spearmen and sending them to cause as much damage in the enemy base as possible - in the end I basically stymied any attempts by the AI to get out of its base and it surrendered very quickly. Then I bumped up the difficulty to Standard for the latter match and while my initial Scout Cavalry raid was stymied by Spearmen, I just trained a lot of Skirmishers to go along with my Scout Cavalry (upgraded to Light Cavalry since I built up strong economies in both games and advanced to the Castle Age very fast), took them to the enemy base, and ransacked it before they even knew what hit them. This time I felt like I had earned my victory, having solidly out built the AI and crushed it fast, almost like the real-life Mongols! Sadly I only trained two Cavalry Archers (the Mongols' specialty) before I won.

Then I played the first scenario of Genghis Khan's campaign and decided to call it a day.

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Tried out the Huns. Went up to Moderate difficulty but I was always slow to get my economy going, and the first time the AI got to the Imperial Age before I got to the Castle Age. Then I went back down to Standard and was again slow to get my economy going, partially due to poor scouting leaving me in the dark about some animal locations, but once I got it going I trained a troop of Light Cavalry to harass the enemy and then followed it with more Light Cavalry plus a few Knights, and that was all she wrote. I don't think I like the Huns much - they lack much in the way of an economic bonus (the best they have is that they don't need to build houses to expand population capacity) and they just come off as a cavalry spam faction to me (their stables work faster and their Cavalry Archers are cheaper). Maybe the problem is that I find the combat a bit lacklustre compared to something like StarCraft so I find much of the enjoyment of the game to come from managing the economy? I do like this game a lot - played it a ton when I was younger, not that I was any good - but I feel like giving it a break for a while before I try out the Indians.

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Tried out the Indians today and stuck with Standard out of cowardice. This time I at least reached the Imperial Age and even built a wonder. I did train a Camel Corps for harassment, which was eventually combined with a bunch of Skirmishers to counter Pikemen, but I won before my troops did too much damage because my wonder stood for long enough. It should be noted that the Indians get progressively cheaper villagers (the basic resource gathering unit) in later ages, making it very easy to get my economy established and build my mighty kingdom.

There's also a new set of "advanced" tutorials in the Definitive Edition that teaches stuff like aging fast and rushing. I tried the Fast Feudal Age one and unfortunately couldn't manage better than a bronze medal. Oh well.

Last I continued the Genghis Khan campaign and finished another scenario. Playing as the Mongols and amassing a large horde is just too much fun, and this time I even got to utilize their Cavalry Archers, Steppe Lancers, and unique unit Mangudai.

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Update, I will join in on the Dark Souls playthrough, being mostly able to use my thumb again now.

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Lightning Strikes posted...

This is going to sound ridiculous, but if you have a Wii U try to get that version, because they made a lot of improvements.

I love the original Deus Ex but it is incredibly inaccessible.

That does sound kind of funny. Unfortunately I don't have a Wii U, so I'll have to stick with the PS3 version. To be fair, older PC games tend to be a lot less accessible. I really like the OG Fallout games, but most of my friends who tried them didn't get past the first couple hours either. I'll stick it out with Deus Ex, I think my first writeup about the game probably came off as more negative than I intended because I was in a bad mood that day.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Btw, depending on what platform you'd rather play on and what you already own, some of the games you'll eventually play are free on Playstation in the near future as part of their stay home program.

Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, it looks like I'll be able to pick up Subnautica and Horizon Zero Dawn through that, at least.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

With Blade Runner a lot of it is more that if you've taken in a lot of media like that then it probably loses a lot of impact. That being said, I only saw Blade Runner for the first time in 2018 and still loved it.

I got Age of Empires II

That might be part of it, sure. I can see Blade Runner being one of those movies that's so influential that it almost seems cliche to modern viewers who are familiar with the imitators. I felt kind of the same way about Casablanca when I watched that recently. It didn't feel as special to me as it seems to have been for a lot of people, but I could tell lots of movies had been influenced by it. I think for me personally the bigger "issue" is that Blade Runner just doesn't quite connect with me emotionally, though.

I've only played a bit of Age of Empires 2. I wasn't that thrilled by the combat either, so I ended up leaving it to go back to strategy games like Civ and Europa Universalis that have more in-depth diplomacy, which I find a little more interesting. I liked playing as the vikings, although they don't seem that good.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Update, I will join in on the Dark Souls playthrough, being mostly able to use my thumb again now.

Glad to hear it! I hope you like the game.

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I found a physical copy of the PS3 version of Human Rev. in my apartment. I must have anticipated that it might not work on my PC and bought it just to be safe. I played a bit here and there over the past few days, up to the point where you can do some sidequests between the first and second larger missions.

Both Deus Ex games start with some kind of shadow organization talking about their plans, and then cut to your mostly-unaware protagonist doing his own thing. In Human Reverend, that's Adam Jensen, who never asked for this. He's head of security at a company that's researching cybernetics. They want to increase people's potential by augmenting their bodies with technology, like for instance replacing someone's arms with stronger metal limbs or implanting a data display into their actual eyes. At the very start of the game some mysterious assassins bust into the place, kill most of the people there including Adam's GF, destroy the research, and injure Adam to the point of death, but luckily he gets rebuilt Robocop-style. Six months later, he's back in commission and ready for some covert corporate missions, starting with retrieving some experimental tech from a lab that's been attacked by terrorists before the cops find it.

The game makes an effort to re-create a lot of the mechanics from the original Deus Ex. You still move crates around the same way so you can jump on them, there's a Resident Evil 4-style inventory system like the first game's, and the emphasis is on open-ended level design with multiple solutions. The level-up system is a bit streamlined since the first game had both skill levels and augmentations and the second one combines them into one system. You gain a resource that lets you move through the skill tree by leveling up but you can also find it lying around or buy it. I've mostly focused all my levels on the hacking skill, but I also got the ability to lift heavy objects, which I used to solve one sidequest where you're looking for a police locker by stacking dumpsters on top of one another so I could hop a fence.

Since I was going for the full stealth and quickload whenever someone sees you approach in the first game, I picked lethal rules of engagement in this one, so I could start with a revolver instead of a stun gun, and although I try to stealth through the areas I just kill everyone once I get spotted. After the first mission one of the NPCs made fun of me for doing too much murdering, and I also failed to save any of the hostages except the very last one that you rescue by picking the right dialog against the boss. One thing that I do appreciate is how the "speech checks" are more complicated than they were in something like New Vegas, where you mostly just picked one option that was indicated by being the one with a speech requirement beside it and instantly convinced the other character. Both this first encounter with the terrorist leader and another one where you have to convince a cop to let you into the police station even though he's mad at you for not shooting a 15 year old boy during your backstory feel a little more nuanced because it's actually kind of hard to talk them down. I succeeded on my first attempt with both guys, so either the system is kind of lenient or I just got lucky. It might become annoying later on if I end up having to keep re-loading to find the right options though.

Playing on normal, I'd say the difficulty is above average compared to most modern games. Even with his augmentations Adam dies pretty fast to any old gun. Ironically the opening tutorial section is the hardest part yet, because you're facing guys with cybernetics and helmets, so they don't die even to headshots, while with the revolver I could one-shot the mooks in the following mission by hitting them just about anywhere. My personal distaste for stealth games aside, I'd say the gameplay is pretty good so far, but I'm not too interested in the story just yet. It's still early on, though. I've heard people criticize the whole central issue of prejudice toward "augs" as not making much sense, and to a certain extent I agree, and I also have a little bit of a problem with the world-building in that at least some of the cybernetic technology doesn't seem very practical. I doubt people will want to graft LED displays into their eyes instead of just carrying a phone or something, for starters.

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Even Oliver Harper noted that about Blade Runner - the only especially emotional moment being Batty's ending speech.

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It's a bit hillarious that it will not be a problem in regards to completing this project that you don't have a Wii U.

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Tried out the Ethiopians in AoE2. The only thing notable about this particular game is that I relied mostly on infantry and archers due to the Ethiopians having poor cavalry - other than that I just got my economy up and running and then conducted a bunch of raids with archers and swordsmen to slow down the enemy. Beginning to wonder if I should give Moderate difficulty another chance.

The 3rd Genghis Khan mission overwhelmed me quickly and then I did poorly at the rushing tutorial.

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ctesjbuvf posted...

It's a bit hillarious that it will not be a problem in regards to completing this project that you don't have a Wii U.

Just a testament to how pointless it is to own one nowadays.

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oh man this is still going, nice

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my favorite part of bastion was always the music

the ost of that game is amazing

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Moderate difficulty kicked my ass again in AoE2 because I couldn't get my economy up and running fast enough. I resolved to go back to standard difficulty to see what I was doing wrong and I think I'll need a few more tries. That being said, when I do get my economy going I can typically just finish the opponent off with a single push. I played as the Britons this time and won even faster than I did as the Ethiopians (still 1v1 against the AI on a standard map), probably because of their faster-working shepherds providing a substantial economic boost in the early game. While an early raid of 10 archers was picked off by skirmishers one by one, they were still able to kill enough peasants to slow down the opponent's economy and that was all she wrote. No need for England's famous longbows this time!

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I took the Vikings out for a spin and while I still kept to the standard (aka very much land-dominated) map script and thus didn't get to make much use out of the Vikings' naval bonuses, suffice to say the fight just got increasingly lopsided as the game went on. The Vikings get Wheelbarrow and Hand Cart techs for free on reaching the Feudal and Castle Ages respectively, meaning IMMEDIATE bonuses to villager speed and carry capacity on advancing to both ages. Needless to say, this is a massive economic bonus and it just turned the whole game into a rout. The Vikings also get additional hit points on their infantry, so after sending in 13 Men-At-Arms in for a suicide raiding run and dealing considerable damage to the enemy's economy, I came back with like 20 Longswordsmen and the enemy cried for mercy before a single building went down. Like with the Britons' game, I had JUST put down a castle and thus wasn't able to utilize the civ's unique unit, in this case the Berserk (what else?). That's fine. If I ever want to explore the Vikings more in this game they have two standalone scenarios I can play.

Speaking of which, I gave the third mission in the Genghis Khan campaign another try. I'm not really sure how to explain it but, uh, it involves going on a rampage throughout China while I did punch a hole in the Great Wall, one of the Chinese factions built a wonder and the clock is ticking. Oh, and then I discover that there's a waterway separating the wonder from me, so I need to build a bunch of transports and a navy (I do have a lot of wood though!). Joy.

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I've been busy getting ready to move and then moving for the last little while, but last night I finally had things sorted out enough that I could play Human Revolution for a couple hours. I didn't make a lot of progress mostly due to my own ineptitude, since I died a few times and also spent a while reloading when I got spotted trying to stealth around. There's a sidequest you can find on the street by talking to an old cop acquaintance of Adam's who is trying to bust another, corrupt cop. Part of it involves infiltrating a gang's turf and finding a weapons cache, but there's a side objective to avoid being spotted at all while you're there. I tried to get it for a while, but ended up losing patience and massacring almost all the NPCs in that area. The need to load a file the second you get spotted was always one of the more frustrating parts of stealth games for me. There's a story-mandatory mission in the same area that revolves around disabling an antenna that's helping someone hack into your company's data storage, so I did that while I was in the neighbourhood and that's where I left off.

I'm reminded a little bit of Dishonored as I play this game, another 3D stealth game that I thought was pretty good. One thing I kind of miss from that game was the short-range teleport, which was nice for getting you through more enemy-dense areas quickly without getting spotted. In this game, if you have to pass over a certain area that's being watched, all you can do is wait until the enemy move away, which can talk a while since they often stand still to chat.


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Tried out the Japanese and Khmer in AoE2, and enjoyed using the former so much I took a peek at both of their standalone historical battles.

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I have since tried out the Tatars and the Malay. The former strike me as a different take on a nomadic horse civ compared to the Mongols and the latter is another spamming civilization which I enjoyed so much with the Huns. Not to mention the Malay's only military bonus is cheaper Battle Elephants, yet they lack a lot of cavalry upgrades so their elephants are pretty awful aside from being easy to spam. The Malay unique unit, which I did not use because I won too quickly, is also a cheap Zerg Rush type infantry unit. Fortunately elephant spam is still pretty fun. I tried an elephant rush with the Khmer as well since their elephants are faster (which is good because they're slow as molasses otherwise!), to much more effective results - here by contrast I had to keep trickling in units as the attack commenced whereas with the Khmer I was able to overwhelm even enemy Pikemen in one go.

Also I completed the Battle of Kurikara.

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He protec

He attac

But most importantly

He never asked for this.

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In Age of Empires II, the third Genghis Khan scenario continues to frustrate me while I lack the interest in other campaigns (want to try the civilizations first in Skirmish mode). In the meantime I tried out the Koreans, Incas, and Malians, and only the middle one of them really stood out to me due to their houses granted additional population capacity compared to those of other civilizations (yet I didn't enjoy using the Huns' lack of need for houses. Maybe I was just not in the right mood when using them?). In all three test games I just mounted some raids with swordsmen and archers in the Feudal Age before upgrading them in the early Castle Age and building a big enough army to overrun my foes (still just playing 1v1s), with me winning too early to reach the Imperial Age (except as Korea since they're a bit of a late bloomer civ) or make much use of each civilization's unique unit (though I did build a few War Wagons as Korea).

Come to think of it, the reason I picked those three civilizations specifically was because of a series of Civ4 AI Survivor games run by Sullla on Twitch where all three of them have distinguished themselves in some way - the Incas and Malians for being among the best performers and the Koreans for their tendency to troll other civilizations and even the viewing audience. I made a list of civilizations I want to try out based on a number of factors (for one thing I set a requirement to watch SpiritOfTheLaw's overview videos of each civ, so the Byzantines, Berbers, and Burmese are left out for the time being), so here's the remaining:

1) Goths
2) Bulgarians
3) Spanish
4) Portuguese
5) Chinese
6) Magyars
7) Turks
8) Slavs
9) Teutons
10) Persians
11) Cumans
12) Vietnamese
13) Aztecs
14) Mayans
15) Saracens
16) Lithuanians
17) Italians
18) Franks

And the ranking of the civilizations I have tried out based on how much I liked playing as them:

1) Mongols
2) Indians
3) Japanese
4) Celts
5) Khmer
6) Vikings
7) Incas
8) Britons
9) Tatars
10) Ethiopians
11) Huns
12) Koreans
13) Malians
14) Malay

Somewhat dreading playing as the Goths since I wasn't a big fan of the two "Spammer" factions I tried out so far (Huns and Malay). I think some interest I had in the era of the Fall of Rome was the reason the Huns and Goths ranked as high as they did, with the former initially taking precedence because, uh, the concept of all these horse-riding steppe nomads and their impact on the "civilized" world intrigues me? I think my problem with the Huns is that they just feel like a generic horse nomad civ to me and don't have much of an identity of their own, which I suppose is kind of appropriate given how they sort of just disappeared without much of a trace but doesn't really make them fun to use, at least compared to the Mongols. Also the Huns are a tiny bit out of place in AoE2 given the game's otherwise focus on the middle ages, though the barbarian incursions they caused no doubt played an important part in shaping Europe for the next millennium or so.

Speaking of civilizations I like historically, my all-time favorite games of Civ4 I played were as the Persians, Greeks, and Egyptians, so maybe ancient history appeals more to me? Just to add, the only two games of Civ5 I could bring myself to finish were as the Huns and Zulus, which only the latter being all that enjoyable. Most of the time I try to play Civ5 I just get bored of it, not that it's all that bad of a game or anything. Just one that feels lacking in meaningful choices compared to its predecessor to me.

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Well

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After an inexcusably long break, I returned tonight to the life of Adam Jensen, the winner of the Michigan state gravellyest-voiced man contest. Thanks to Linkmariosamus and ctesjbuvf for keeping this bumped while I was away.

For the sake of jogging my own memory, let me summarize the story I played through earlier: Adam Jensen is an ex-cop who works for a tech company that makes weapons for the military and experiments with cybernetic augmentations for humans on the side. His ex-girlfriend Megan is the lead researcher for that latter occupation. The company gets attacked by a mysterious terrorist organization which kills Megan and critically injures Jensen, who can only stay alive if he gets rebuilt like the Six Million Dollar Man. He never asked for this.

A few months later, Adam is back in commission solving security crises of his company and trying to find out who killed his ex-girlfriend, and the way I've been playing him he has very little concern for the sanctity of human life or the collateral damage he causes, including the lives of hostages he's been sent in to save.

Last time, I was rounding up the sidequests that you can do in the Detroit "sandbox" area and about to start on the second major story mission, which I played through today. Jensen finds out that someone's been hacking into his friends' database and traces the signal to a military compound, where it turns out the same guys who killed his ex-girlfriend are on patrol. My usual tactics weren't very effective here, because this crew is a serious step up from the gang mooks of Detroit. I found that any time someone spotted me Jensen would be dead within a few seconds, so I resorted to the usual stealth game approach of saving every five seconds and loading whenever I got caught, which made me wish I was playing on PC given how slow the PS3 is at doing those things. It was pretty tough and took me a lot of restarts and a little bit of swearing at my TV screen to finish the mission, ironically being far more merciful to the mercenaries who killed my ex than to the random hobos on the street. I guess that's corporate for you.

One thing I consider a downgrade from the original Deus Ex is how you move bodies. The old game let you carry people over your shoulder in the usual old-school stealth game style, seen also in the Thief games, while in the new one you have to very slowly drag them, which just isn't as cool. At one point, I thought it would be fun to hide one unconscious guy in a vent, but couldn't get him over the "lip" of it. I'm also unsure how I feel about the new hacking minigame. In Deus Ex 1 hacking was just watching a progress bar move forward, which wasn't very interactive, but maybe it was for the best because the hacking minigame this one brings to the table is kind of lame.

I did that whole second mission without any stealth upgrades, because I've been focusing on the hacking upgrades (which seem quest-mandatory at points) and the damage reduction power, because I knew going in that there are unavoidable boss fights in this game. The first such encounter marked the end of tonight's mission. It's a fight against a big guy named Barret. Either my game messed up or it's one of the most laughable boss fights I've ever seen in a game, because all he did was stand in the center of the room and mindlessly unload his gun at me, even if I was behind cover, until it overheated and I had a free chance to shoot at him. This made him easier to deal with than a single random enemy from the area leading up to him. I think I'll get the cloaking device next.

In the aftermath, Prichard, who is Adam's hacker co-worker and kind of a dick, informs him that the boss is hiding information to them about a private back-door he had through company electronic security, which the enemy used to hack them. I managed to talk him into spilling the beans on it, and it turns out that (possibly among other things) he used it to solicit an Private Investigator to find out that Adam was adopted. With that out of the way, Adam is getting sent to China to follow up on something cryptic Barret told him as he died, so before leaving I went and finished up the sidequest involving Adam's old police friend, who hires him to illegally investigate a shady officer she's trying to take down. Once you gather all the evidence, you can choose whether to confront the guy yourself or not. If you do, he bribes you to let him go, which I accepted because I thought it would be funny. He told me the money would be at Adam's apartment, which is when I realized I can't remember where that is.

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Been saddled with exams.

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I sent Adam Jensen to China and spent a few hours clearing out (what I think is) most of that section of the game. I didn't exhaustively search the city hub (to use the game's term) for side-quests, but I found one where you rescue a missing girl and then kill a man for a prostitute, which paid pretty well, one at a bar where you're supposed to convince a woman to keep paying tribute to a gang that paid for augmentations for her, but which I "solved" by knocking the girl out with a stun gun, stealing her augs, and giving them back to the quest-giver, who wasn't very pleased with me, and one sidequest for the woman who chauffeurs Jensen around in a helicopter where you investigate the murder of her girlfriend, because she used to live in China. I haven't quite concluded that one yet. I found all the evidence at the killer's apartment and when I play next I'll go and confront him.

In between all that, I made some progress in the main story. The reason for Jensen's little tourist trip is that the hacker we've been dealing with so far is hiding out in China, so your first big task is to track down his apartment which is being guarded by the local (private) police, in corrupt service to someone who wants him dead. In stark contrast to my first couple missions, I managed to get the ghost exp bonus on this one for never being spotted. That was in part due to the help of the invisibility power-up, which I've maxed by now. It starts out as effective as it will ever be, but the subsequent upgrades increase how long you can use it for, from 3 seconds per energy bar to 7. As of now this means I can sometimes stay invisible for up to 21 seconds in a row, which is pretty OP. That requires liberal use of consumable items though, because your energy only regenerates up to 1 bar on its own.

You don't find the hacker himself in his apartment, since he ran for it as the police were coming in, so you have to track him down at this very depressing-looking group housing where everyone's private space is about the size of a bed. There might be multiple ways to do that, but the method I went with involved smooth-talking the owner of a local bar, who helped him relocate. Once you do find the guy, an brigade of soldiers on the payroll of a rival medical corporation to Jensen's one comes and tries to kill you both. You have the option to give the hacker guy one of your weapons to help him get away. I gave him my machine pistol since I hadn't been upgrading it. Truthfully, none of my weapons have been seeing much use lately, and I can probably afford to sell off some ammo. I'm just saving them for the mandatory boss fights.

Since this game has a bit of a noir tone, I keep expecting the sidequests to be more twisty and I think that would be nice. I'm kind of hoping some time later I'll find out that the prostitute I helped has become some kind of terrifying criminal overlord with the rival I took out removed, and I found myself kind of wishing that the quest about the pilot's girlfriend would resolve with the twist that she was the killer. Now wouldn't that be interesting, Jensen having to choose between bringing the real criminal to justice and making sure he had a ride home at the end of the day. I think I'm enjoying the stealth a little more now that I have the best power-ups and I'm actually being diligent about quickloading every single time I get spotted. I guess my Jensen's story is one of redemption where he got so many people killed in the first mission that he's resolved to spare as many lives as possible from now on.

The AI in this game is kind of funny. At one point I accidentally upset the neutral police by firing off my assault rifle to see how the silencer upgrade I would put on it worked, and I escaped by hiding in a closet with the door closed. Closing doors seems like a good way to confuse them in general. They can tell when you're running past them while invisible by the noise, but they aren't very good at following the sound, so when you're caught it seems easy to get away just by cloaking and making a run for it, which also makes me think I don't need to invest in the silent running power up. It seemed like they knew I was in there, but couldn't open the door, so they just stood in front of it until they left alert status, and then I could just walk out and they ignored me. Neutral characters like this can also turn aggressive if they see you hacking something, but it takes a while, so if you finish the hacking and just walk away they will forget all about it.

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On realizing that the Goths have a hunting bonus in Age of Empires 2, I got a little more excited to play as them since that reminded me of the Mongols. Actually the Goths seem somewhat similar, having a strong Dark Age economic bonus towards hunting (the Mongol hunters work faster while Goth hunters can carry more food and get an attack bonus against aggressive animals that can be hunted for food like boars and rhinos) before kicking into high gear in the Castle Age while their options in the Imperial Age become limited but still powerful. Just the Goths are more of a foot soldier civ and they rely more on raw numbers over the Mongols' faster-firing cavalry archers and more HP on their light cavalry and steppe lancers, which is the part which worries me.

I watch this YouTuber named Hera, who's one of the best AoE2 players, show off how to use the various civilizations in the game through multiplayer matches, with some of those videos even providing an overview of the civ and the best way to use them. In his video on the Goths, the opposing player surrendered the minute Hera got a castle up. The Goths are vulnerable until that point because they don't even get Stone Walls (presumably they're just supposed to spam cheap infantry for defense?) or any Tower upgrades, but once they get there they get so much good stuff. In high-level play, you basically have to eradicate the Goths early on or they'll spam cheap infantry to level your bases - their barracks work faster, their infantry get progressively cheaper through the ages, and their infantry also get an attack bonus against buildings! Sounds like one heck of a barbarian tribe. In real life the Spanish and Portuguese are in part descended from the Goths.

Just to ask Exdeath, what was your favorite civ to use in Civ5?

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

Just to ask Exdeath, what was your favorite civ to use in Civ5?

I've played the game so long that I've had different favorites at different points in my life, but when I first started I had the most fun with The Huns and Mongolia because they had such ultra-aggressive playstyles. I remember thinking it was a riot just destroying someone's city within the first 20 turns of the game with the Hunnic battering rams, and also having that fun feeling of "Okay, this is overpowered" with the Keshiks. My first Mongolia game ended up being a decent replication of how the horde worked in real life, where I just had a huge mounted force that went from city to city looting and burning and then immediately moved on.

These days I'd probably say Venice. You can't build settlers early on so you get to just focus on building up a massive capital and then you kind of recover the benefits of having 4 well-developed cities with your Merchants of Venice, and you have so many trade routes that you get super rich.

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That sidequest surrounding Malik investigating the murder of her friend ends in a pretty cool way. You have to confront the guy pretending to be a blackmailer and get him to confess to the killing by proving that you know all the details of the crime, which you turned up earlier by searching his apartment. I like the more investigative side of this game. It's a nice touch how they get rid of the objective markers at certain points.

That was the last sidequest I did in China before heading off to the next major story quest, which has you infiltrating a base that belongs to Tai Yong Medical, which is connected to the guys who ganked Sarif Industries. It's a medical lab and not a military base, so the mission is pretty easy with most of the NPCs being scientists who won't bother you even if they spot you. You have to break into their server room where the security is heaviest, but most of it is automated with infrared lazers and security cameras being the only threats, and it turns out you can really trivialize those parts with the invisibility because it prevents the lazers from seeing you. I would literally just turn invisible and sprint straight through entire rooms. What you find in that data center is a recording where some of the guys from the evil organization claim that they actually kidnapped Megan and her crew instead of killing them. Adam does not have a very strong emotional reaction to finding out his ex-GF is still alive. One of the higher-ups in that gang is staying in the building you're infiltrating, so you go and confront her. She's wearing a ridiculous Elizabethan ruff. I was hoping for another boss fight but she just badly fails to confront you and then tricks Jensen with the old feminine wiles in a cutscene and then shuts herself into a panic room and calls an army of guards. Unfortunately there are no dialog options to not fall for that trick or anything like that, so all I could do is impotently yell at the screen while Adam sank into the obvious trap.

Then you have to escape while an absolutely huge swarm of guards pour into the room. Now, even one of those guys can kill Jensen with a single spray of ammunition, so I imagine that part could've been incredibly tough with a different skill build, but I once again just turned invisible and sprinted to the elevator, and that was that.

The next part of the game has you going to Montreal, which would've made me very happy under different circumstances, but it seems like there's no Montreal city hub and it's just one self-contained mission to attack a news anchor there.

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Now for another chapter in the life of Adam Jensen, vent enthusiast. The mission in Montreal starts with Jensen wandering through an empty building - the news station he's investigating has been completely evacuated. This gives you a free chance to loot the place and hack everything, but really there's not much there to get.

Predictably enough, the whole thing is an ambush. Jensen meets an hologram of Eliza, the journalist he's trying to get in touch with, who then vanishes and calls a strike force after him. What follows is one of the tougher parts of the game, where you're trying to sneak through rooms that are swarming with mooks. I had to make liberal use of protein bars and invisibility to get by. At one point, you have to call down a slow-moving elevator, and when you press the button you alert the enemy to your position, so theoretically it's kind of like the part in Halo Reach where you're defending the scientist, but in practice I just turned invisible to press the button and then hid in a little alcove in the same room until my ride was there.

It turns out that Eliza is actually a supercomputer built to manipulate the global news. Her AI is starting to gain some kind of self-awareness related guilt over fucking with Jensen and seems sympathetic toward him. The second boss fight takes place in her room, against a buff woman who can turn invisible - hey, that's my trick! There's a lot of "coolant" on the floor, so you use the ripples her footsteps cause to track her down, just like that one boss fight in God of War 2. Meanwhile, the news-bot gives you gameplay tips via voiceover. I don't know if this boss is supposed to be an established character at all, but the computer does share some vague details about her backstory. It's a much more legitimate boss fight than the last one. She can attack quickly enough that you might have trouble regenerating health, keeping the pressure on while she's invisible is tricky, and you have an option to blow up parts of the computer to electrocute the ground, which can hurt both of you - I mostly refrained from doing that and just chased her around with a shotgun.

Once all that's over, it's back to Detroit where some riots are going down, centered on Adam's place of work. Adam's boss has a little chat with him where he reveals that the bad guys of this game are the Illuminati. After that, his task is to hunt down the aide of an anti-cybernetics activist, who also happens to be the brother of the boss from the first mission. As a matter of fact, since I spared him, I bumped into that gentleman on my way through the mission, and had to knock him out, since I didn't want all that effort I spent talking him down earlier to go to waste.

But that's getting a little ahead of myself, because there's one interesting sidequest before all that. Prittchard gives Jensen a new lead that helps him delve a bit into his past, talking to the PI Sarif hired to check him out back in the day and a senile older lady who worked at the orphanage he was in as a kid. The gist of it all is that some kind of experiments were being conducted on the kids there, including Adam, and his birth parents died burning the place down to try and prevent such experiments from being perpetrated on more kids. Adam also apparently has some kind of remarkable DNA, possibly as a result of genetic modification that took place when he was still in utero. For another sidequest, the police hired me to ice some guy who was trying to detonate a gas bomb near their precinct. I did it because I needed a little more cash to fund my body mod addiction.

Anyways, when you do find the younger brother he has been denounced by his activist boss, blamed for a lot of violence, and is feeling really guilty about having participated in the attack on Sarif Industries, given that a lot of people died then. I had to go through speech checks to convince his boss that he was part of that, so I wonder if the encounter is different if you take the other approach and sneak through that part. I had to talk him out of committing suicide, which was the first time I failed a speech check and had to reload to pick different options. Hilariously enough, it's possible to talk him down only to immediately cap him yourself, but I wasn't that mean.

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I was afraid to respond regarding Civ because, well, let's put it one way: I don't find Italian history terribly interesting and you already know I feel somewhat negatively of Civ5 (again, it's not a bad game, just an unsatisfying one IMO as a big fan of 4) so I didn't want to sound too angry.

I'm reading Norman F. Cantor's Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages and I swear I dread any time I get to something Italy- or France-related (with the occasional exception like Charlemagne). I'm even saving the Italians and Franks as the last civilizations I'm testing out in Age of Empires II. The stupid thing is that the Franks (yes, they're called Franks in-game, not simply French, even though their campaign is about Joan of Arc instead of, say, Charlemagne) are meant to be a good civ for those new to the game due to their rather basic bonuses (tougher cavalry, faster foragers, free farm upgrades) and the Joan of Arc campaign being numbered first before the Definitive Edition but uh, I just don't find them very interesting in the game.

Sorry if this comes across as Italy- or France-bashing. I've never played as the French in Civ either (and Italy has never been playable, probably for fear of too much overlap with Rome and Italy not really being a political concept until the 19th century) for that matter. Apologies to any Italian or Frenchman out there, I have nothing against either country. I visited Rome back in 2014/2015 (I think I even spent New Year's there!) and enjoyed how the city of Rome is basically a museum to its ancient forebears (there's even one ruin where lots of cats play!). Also basically every meal I had was pasta or pizza which I did not object too in the slightest! I got cranky at times though due to us being out a few days in a row from dawn to dusk without much rest.

Now I feel like apologizing profusely. I have nothing against Italy or France personally, just don't find either country's history particularly interesting even compared to other European countries, let alone a lot of Asian ones. I REALLY hate how lots of Americans act as if China never existed before the pandemic and the Middle East is a breeding ground for terrorists when both have been major centers of culture and civilization for all of history. Might as well throw in Mexico and illegal immigrants into the conversation too.

Also yeah, some of the Civ names in Age of Empires II are a bit silly just for the sake of old-time language, e.g. Britons instead of English (this is not even correct, Britons were Celts who formed the basis for Wales, plus to add insult to injury in some of the campaigns they're addressed as "British"), Franks instead of French, and Saracens instead of Arabs. I think the idea with the original game was supposed to be leading a civilization literally from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, but that has been less stringently enforced with each new update. Also there have supposedly been edit wars on the Wiki over what the Turks, Cumans, and Tatars are meant to represent - the latter two are also Turkic tribes. The problem there I think is that the Turks were one of the 13 civilizations in the game from the very start and were the designated gunpowder-oriented civ (later joined by the likes of the Spanish and Indians), which leaves the latter two introduced very recently to reflect the more nomadic Turkic tribes, although the Turks do have some cavalry bonuses to reflect their roots. Oh and there's how the "Celts" are a composite of both medieval Scotland and Ireland (units speak Irish, their wonder is the Rock of Cashel, their unique unit is the anachronistic "Woad Raider", they have faster-working lumberjacks, and their campaign is about William Wallace) among many, many other problems. Oh well, I suppose we don't really play the game for historical accuracy!

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