Game Log Archive
Game Log is dedicated to the games I've been playing recently that encourage some degree of thought that I'd like to share. I cover games by their mechanics, narrative, and all other manner in which a game evokes emotion and engagement from the player.
I was having a blast for roughly three-quarters of the game. Then the game decided it hated me.
I gave Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice a bit of a try when it first released, only to be driven to such depths of anger as to find myself ranting to a whole crowd of fellow players about how “bullcrap” it was. This discussion ultimately led to claims of all From Software games being “tough, but fair” despite cheap tactics to the contrary, and whenever character-action games were brought up, they were regularly referred to as “button mashers”. This sort of comparison would consistently drive my eye to twitch, and I ultimately sold the game off to someone and ejected myself from the conversation for the sake of everyone’s temperament and mood.
Now that I’ve successfully played through Bloodborne multiple times, I can better understand the appeal of the From Software games as well as what elements they offer that other games do not – one of them being the ability to avoid a lot of combat, as opposed to character-action titles that frequently lock you in a room with your foes. Or rather, they’re locked in there with you.
If there is any character-action title that epitomizes how silly it is to call these games “button-mashers”, it is Ninja Gaiden ...Sigma. I mean, any iteration of the original Ninja Gaiden on Xbox, really, but Sigma is what came in the Master Collection released this month, and so Sigma is the version I am specifically discussing. It is a game that demands the player study the habits of the enemies, allows you to receive a rocket to the face just by turning a corner, and is not afraid to take away half of your health bar, even when that health bar itself is half the length of the screen.
If we return to that “tough, but fair” assessment of the From Software games, I would still disagree that the sentiment is wholly true. Any game that causes enemies to swivel and spin, magnetized to the player position, rather than force them into the same commitment as the player is intentionally designed to be unfair. Nevertheless, I understand the sentiment behind the claim, though the words chosen are certainly poor. Nevertheless, no one of sane mind or objective consideration would try to claim that Ninja Gaiden Sigma is fair. It is quite frequently unfair by design and by accident… or at least, I think by accident.
It's not often I fall for a game as much as this one, but I have. It's not perfect, but it's a very special kind of great.
Resident Evil Village is a different kind of mostly great. That was the planned title for my essay right after I beat the game. Then I immediately jumped back in for another playthrough. Then a third. The only reason I haven’t dove in for a fourth playthrough is so I don’t burn myself out on the game. So while I originally planned to be “clever” and reference the title of my Resident Evil VII write-up, I’ve found that doing so would fail to illustrate just how much I’ve fallen in love with Village.
It certainly is a different kind of mostly great from its predecessor, and depending on your tastes it may even be worse. If Resident Evil VII was a course correction for the franchise, Resident Evil Village is a “regression”. It not only focuses far more on action-packed gameplay, but explodes into the excessive camp of prior games without the wonderful self-aware nature of Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil IV. Only the primary antagonist hams it up like the games of old, feeling oddly out of place with the otherwise straight-faced acting and delivery of the rest of the cast. Where the strength of Resident Evil VII was its focus on the small world of the Baker family, Resident Evil VIII sacrifices screen time belonging to its own bizarre family of freaks for the sake of a bombastic and epic conclusion with implications for a larger scale ninth entry in the franchise.
To summarize, Resident Evil Village betrays everything that made Resident Evil VII’s narrative work so well and made players care again.
As a modernized reinterpretation of Resident Evil IV, however, Village succeeds in much the same way as Resident Evil VII drew inspiration from and freshly envisioned the very first game. It’s so effective that I may actually like playing Village better than IV, even if I’m not sure it’s a better game.
So many of the characters in Arkham City seem to be motivated by their obsessions. All but the two that matter most.
In my previous essay on Arkham City, I noted how “distraction” was as much a theme of the gameplay as it seemed to be in the narrative. Batman’s attention seems to be pulled anywhere but the primary threat throughout the length of the game. Be it Catwoman strung up by Two-Face in the courthouse, Joker injecting his infected blood into Batman’s veins, Penguin imprisoning Mr. Freeze and torturing a group of previously undercover cops, or the various scattered diversions throughout the city, Batman just cannot seem to sit down and focus on the matter at hand.
I feel as if this is the result of two conflicting desires. The first is to tell yet another story centered on the Joker and his relationship to Batman. The second uses Hugo Strange to justify the existence of the rather implausible and titular Arkham City. While similar open-world superhero games like Marvel’s Spider-Man or the inFamous franchise are more than happy to include civilians in their city settings, Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Montreal seemed insistent on creating a game world where only thugs, criminals, and the occasional political prisoner exist. This is why future spin-off entry Arkham Origins takes place during a snowstorm where all the innocent, law-abiding citizens remain sheltered in their homes, or Arkham Knight’s Gotham takes place after the civilians have evacuated the city. It wouldn’t make sense to have civilians wandering the streets when so many armed criminals are on the loose. Why are so many armed criminals on the loose? For the sake of the gameplay desires and ambitions of the developers.
As such, Hugo Strange is used to contextualize Arkham City. As outlandish and “comic book” as the concept is, it works for the sake of the gameplay. However, once the context of the setting has been addressed, the game developers seem to just shrug it off in pursuit of the Joker storyline. Or, perhaps, the story itself only exists in order to string together set pieces. Someone had a cool idea for a fight against Mr. Freeze, but there needs to be a reason for that fight to exist. Ah! How about Penguin’s has trapped Mr. Freeze in the Iceberg Lounge, and in order to fight Mr. Freeze you must first defeat the Penguin? Oh, and we can throw in that shark idea while we’re at it! Wait, why is Batman rescuing Mr. Freeze?
This seems like the simplest explanation for Arkham City’s scatter-brained story. A series of set-pieces created first, stitched together by a desperate attempt to contextualize the whole lot of nonsense during the late stages of development. Unfortunately, there’s a key moment towards the game’s end that leads me to believe the writers – which included Paul Dini, one of the lead writers of the 90’s era animated series – had something a little more substantial in mind.
Note that the rest of this post will be heavy on spoilers.
Fitting to the narrative, one of my issues with Batman: Arkham City is just how... distracting and unfocused its game world can be.
I recently decided to revisit Batman: Arkham City the other day, inspired by rereading many of Shamus Young’s excellent analyses and essays regarding the caped crusader’s most popular game franchise. That it would be one of Shamus’ favorite game series, one in which he devoted hours to mastering and perfecting its combat, has always fascinated me. Don’t ask me to explain why, as I don’t think I have a suitable explanation. It just doesn’t seem to be a “very Shamus-y” title, and yet it’s one in which he is frequently comparing other games.
I myself have played the original Arkham Asylum several times – including a recent trip back last year to help ease the pain of unemployment – but I’ve only taken maybe two trips around the generally favored Arkham City since its release. I’ve always favored the former due to a preference for the linear gameplay design, taking inspiration from personal favorites such as Metroid Prime or – intentionally or coincidentally – the original Resident Evil. Smaller worlds and environments that you explore more intimately are more my cup of tea than sprawling cities or open-worlds behaving as obstacle-courses.
It’s that very open-world design that I imagine made Arkham City a favorite among the fanbase, however. Having played through the game again, I feel even more confident in the assertion that the sprawling urban playpen is what curries such player favor and fervor. What I also came to realize, however, was the nature in which this expanded scope would impact not just my enjoyment of the game’s world, but also its narrative.
Are games better when they shove the experience grind onto optional quests? Or does it continue to be a tedious consumption of time?
Some years ago, back when I was still in my twenties, I had discovered all of my efforts to grind in EarthBound had been a waste of time. During my youth I thought the occasional level in which only one or two stats would see an insignificant boost was just poor luck. During my adulthood, however, I realized that any significant level gain typically coincided with a large jump in required experience points to reach the next level.
Rather than pace back and forth in specific dungeons and hazardous areas, coaxing foe after foe into a brawl so that I might slowly climb towards greater feats of strength, I decided to… just play the game. To progress linearly, tackling all foes that came my way and gritting my teeth in preparation of getting my flattened posterior handed back to me inside a Mach Pizza box. While my first assault on the arcade and climb up towards Giant’s Step – the first dungeons of the game – were a bit more troublesome than usual, EarthBound typically leveled me up to the strength necessary to take on each location’s challenges. The experience rewarded for defeating enemies was already calculated by the developers to match the amount required on an unknown “table” that defined the ideal level for each section of the game. While a player could certainly grind in a dungeon’s entrance for a few levels, they’d fail to gain many – or any – substantial new levels on their way towards the boss.
As I progressed towards the game’s end, I found my characters and their levels were approximately the same as I’d grind them to in prior playthroughs. I always found the game to be so challenging that you “needed to grind”, but the reality was that the game minimized the benefits of grinding in order to maintain a challenge. It would require an immense amount of patience – an amount I certainly did not possess as a child nor had the time for as an adult – to perceive any benefit.
It was this experience that encouraged me to approach all my prior childhood role-playing games without grinding. No more pacing back and forth in forests on the overworld map, sailing across the world to the perfect spot with the most rewarding foes to fight, or sticking to the ideal corner of a dungeon to get some farming in. The more of these games I play without grinding, the more I realize I never needed to do so. At best I’d simply be overpowered for one or two dungeons, gaining almost nothing until smacking right back to where I was supposed to be. Alternatively, avoiding the grind encouraged me to explore each game’s mechanics more deeply, developing a deeper appreciation for its design than I had before.
For this reason, I find The Witcher 3 and Xenoblade Chronicles’ “solution” for grinding interesting yet flawed, while having a begrudging appreciation for Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s inclusion of this trope in an arguably efficient manner.
Resident Evil VII makes a case for itself as the best entry in the entire franchise... save for one or two minor exceptions.
Destiny was my calming chaser to follow every nerve-wracking session of Alien: Isolation. I felt jittery down to my fingers and my toes, too alert and nervous to head to bed and get some sleep. I loved the game, but the first-person perspective would gradually become too much for me to bear. I never completed it. A couple years later, Capcom would release the Resident Evil VII: The Beginning Hour gameplay teaser. Despite there being no proper risk throughout the demo, I felt that same sense of frightened nervousness as I had playing Alien: Isolation.
As a result, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard was the first mainline entry in the franchise I had not purchased since discovering Resident Evil Remake on the GameCube. I had concluded that first-person horror and I just did not mix.
Yet I could not hold back my excitement when I saw the trailers for Resident Evil Village. Just as VII: Biohazard seemed to call back to that old mansion of the first game, Village seemed to be beckoning back to the rural European hamlets and castles of Resident Evil IV. There was no way I could avoid this one. However, I felt it necessary to go back and play through Resident Evil VII and familiarize myself with fresh-faced protagonist Ethan Winters.
I’m glad I did, and I’m just as glad to have done so on stream. The crowd of viewers peering over my metaphorical shoulder provided a calming effect to what would have been a dreadfully nerve-wracking sense of isolation. Though they often mocked my decisions or frightful yelps, it allowed me the courage to creep forward through the Baker household… even if it was on the easiest, most cowardly difficulty setting. Nonetheless, Resident Evil VII captured so much of what I loved about the earlier games in the franchise while carving new, gruesome and terrifying territory for the survival horror franchise.
...mostly.
For a psychological horror, The Medium can't withstand much intellectual scrutiny.
I can’t remember the last time I played a video game whose ending burned up any good will I had for it. There are plenty of games for which their endings left me either apathetic or dissatisfied, but rarely has a game concluded in a manner that just upset me to the extent that The Medium had.
Perhaps if there were more to the actual experience of playing it, I’d have been more forgiving. I don’t mean that as a dig towards its lack of combat mechanics or anything, either. This is a psychological horror game that is clearly inspired by the earlier entries of the Silent Hill franchise. Clumsy combat mechanics were never their strong suit, so it makes sense for an independently developed spiritual successor to cut out what the franchise did poorly in order to focus on its strengths. With Silent Hill, those strengths are the narrative, atmosphere, characters, and puzzles.
Unfortunately, The Medium failed to measure up to just about any of those categories for me. I’m tempted to at least claim it was an “interesting” game, but this would either imply I’m trying to kindly call it “bad” – which it really isn’t – or that any deeper contemplation would do anything more than further confound. The game’s conclusion could have saved its otherwise forgettable nature had it ended on a strong note. Instead, The Medium became my very definition of a “Game Pass game”.
Keep in mind that I believe games ought to be replayed, and I fear that services like Game Pass turn them into disposable pieces of basic consumption. No rumination, no consideration, no savoring of the experience and really contemplating the developer’s intent. Just consume and move onto the next product in line. So to claim The Medium is the very definition of a “Game Pass game” means that it feels like a game that you consume once and then forget about.
I might have come away feeling differently if it only had a better ending.
The most boring thing a Souls-like can do is be exactly like Dark Souls.
Last year I pompously declared Bloodborne an action-horror, abandoning the silly trend of defining a game’s genre by a very rigid set of mechanics. Today, I’m going to be a hypocrite and stick to the term “Souls-like” for both the sake of convenience, as well as to make a point regarding the rigid nature by which these genres are treated.
I’ve been playing Salt & Sanctuary of late. Streaming it, even. However, I’ve found that the frustration it fills me with makes for cranky commentary. I’ve continued to play it, but I’d rather my stream time be more pleasant and less griping and growling.
While the game may “prepare” me to better understand Dark Souls itself – much as Darksiders 3 helped better prepare me to enjoy and comprehend Bloodborne – it has also helped me appreciate the creativity of Gunfire Games and even From Software as they explored beyond the base mechanics of the progenitor game. Mechanically speaking, Salt & Sanctuary is Dark Souls (or Demon’s Souls) re-imagined as a side-scroller and little more. The greatest deviation is that there’s no “Humanity” component.
What a wasted opportunity.
The Witcher 3 was almost the best Dad game since season one of Telltale's The Walking Dead.
It’s been almost eight years since I wrote The Walking Dad, my first essay for website GamersWithJobs and basis for my video analysis of Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season One. I opened that essay with an illustration from my life, where I, as a full-grown adult, felt completely unprepared and out of my element. This moment of fear and embarrassment spoke to the thesis of Telltale’s first mainstream success: that protecting one’s child from adulthood will fail to prepare them for adulthood.
Without going into too much detail, the game’s conclusion was left perfectly ambiguous so as not to take away from the player’s choices throughout. They don’t “matter” in that the ending is the ending regardless of your decisions made throughout each episode. However, the player will be able to call back to earlier choices and conversations as the music swells during a highly emotional moment, only to leave the player wondering at the end if they had done enough. It was pitch perfect.
The Witcher 3 had, for a time, felt like the next best execution of this idea. Many of its dialogue choices seemed to ask me to consider Ciri’s personality rather than what was the canonically “correct” choice. I did my best to listen to Ciri and read her body language rather than go with my own instinct. Even if I believed one choice was “correct” in a pragmatic or ethical sense, I might have chosen a different one for the sake of Ciri’s emotions.
In the end, however, the nuance is lost as the game’s three endings suggest there was always a “correct” choice. This sort of reduction of meaning comes across as more insulting than the simplistic binary morality presented in BioShock 2. At least that game was obvious about its complete lack of sophistication towards “good” and “bad”. Even if The Witcher 3 does not profess to believe in a “right” or “wrong” resolution, one of these endings is far more sweet and uplifting than the other two. Even though the narrative up to this point were to suggest there is no “good” or “bad” in this universe, the mood and tone of each ending suggests a good – and therefore “correct” – ending, a bittersweet sort-of-good-but-not-really ending, and a blatantly bad ending.
The rest of this essay will be going into detail regarding the game’s narrative and conclusions, so reader beware if you’ve yet to play and complete the game yourself.
A lot of words are dedicated to the irritation found in the repetition of just a few words.
The sheer volume of unique dialogue and voiced lines in The Witcher 3 is amazing. It may be old news to many of you by now, but I’ve only been making my way through the game for the past month. I’ve played a number of huge, open-world games over the past decade, but it’s pretty obvious how much effort went into making CD Projekt’s fantasy opus feel like a lived-in realm.
I’ve come to recognize different blacksmiths in different towns based on their greeting of me. “Top notch swords!” comments the armorer in Novigrad, admiring the work of the two blades strapped across Geralt’s back. He’s a bit huskier compared to the others. The smith in Oxenfurt is always pleased to see the White Wolf stroll into his abode, preparing to commission a far more interesting work order than the rote, copy-paste desires of the invading Nilfgaardian army. The armorer in Midcopse smugly tries to sell me a crossbow of supposedly high-quality, despite dealing strictly in defensive garments as opposed to hostile armaments.
That I can recall my interactions with each of these professionals of The Witcher 3 is indicative of the attention to detail placed into this world. Rather than giving each armorer or smithy a generic greeting with the exact same voice, they are each separate character models with different voice actors speaking different lines. Such a small detail contributes greatly to the depth that inhabits every corner of The Witcher 3.
I wish they’d just shut up and take me right into the shop screen already.
The remaining games this year that I've dabbled in, but either didn't complete or did not have enough to say to justify a dedicated blog post.
BIOSHOCK
I’ve been thinking about making a video for Bioshock: Infinite ever since my first completion in 2013. When the trilogy collection released on Switch I figured it’d be a good opportunity to replay the whole series, catching myself up on the franchise and determining whether I ought to tackle each game in a separate video. Unfortunately, this plan swiftly fell through once I discovered how poorly the combat of Bioshock had aged.
Some of its flaws have already been addressed in the sequels, such as tying plasmid powers and weaponry to separate triggers on the controller rather than restricting the player to using just one or the other. Others, however, persist even in the sequels. The constant spawning and wandering of Rapture’s citizens comes to mind, interrupting efforts to explore every nook of the city or to take in the most minute of details within the scenery. The first two titles of the franchise possess this problem, emphasized in the second as a randomly generated Splicer would walk into a room filled with my carefully laid traps just before I began an ADAM harvest.
In the context of the first game, these interruptions and other scripted encounters kept pulling the game’s focus from exploration. The level design was more open, lending itself to a slightly more linear Metroidvania or survival horror approach. Exploration rewarded the player with weaponry and Plasmid powers, some of which were optional. Voice recordings provided additional clues as to Rapture’s downfall, each from a different perspective, lifestyle, and philosophy. These are the areas where Bioshock excels, and yet at every corner it feels as if the game sought to interrupt these activities with its far weaker combat.
It is likely a result of the era in which it was released, which goes to show how far my own gaming tastes have changed approximately fifteen years later. I had played through Bioshock multiple times and even completed it on the hardest, patched in difficulty. Now, however, I cannot help but wonder if the game ought to be remade with its narrative intact, but a greater focus on exploration than on the combat. Or, perhaps, it is my preference for the Metroidvania genre leaking out.
Played a lot of games this year, but finished very few. This is my first quick rundown of games I've played but don't have enough to discuss for their own entries.
It feels like an annual tradition to gripe about how the current year is the worst ever. It’s a social media trend as predictable as the immediate outrage to the latest Facebook interface update. As melodramatic as I find the ritualistic whinging to be, however, even I cannot help but feel 2020 has been uncharacteristically depressing. Much of that has to do with the social isolation inflicted by Covid-19, but there are several other factors that have regularly dragged my mood down throughout the past several months.
As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to seek solace in video games, just as I’m sure many others have. Unfortunately, the vast majority of games I’ve dabbled in have been met with some degree of apathy or disinterest. Even if I enjoyed playing them for a little while, few had legitimate staying power.
For that reason I decided it might be worthwhile to collect what thoughts I have on those incomplete games, feigning a sense of productivity rather than acknowledging that time could have been better spent doing something else. 2020 is evidently the year in which I’m a gaming tourist, taking the occasional trip into a title before bouncing off into another fictional world.
What better place to kick such tourism off than with a visit to the underworld itself.
The strength of Ghost of Tsushima lies in its blend of mechanical freedom and emphasis on adaptability in its narrative.
I can see a version of Ghost of Tsushima where a player’s combat preferences and dialogue choices alter the direction of the narrative. A conclusion decided not by one singular choice at its final confrontation, but an accumulation of smaller decisions throughout.
I can see it because that’s how the development studio Sucker Punch designed each of their inFamous games to operate. Ghost of Tsushima instead shucks away the shallow morality system of its predecessors, allowing access to all combat abilities regardless of play style or preference, and as a result granting the player true freedom in mechanical expression. Conversely, the narrative becomes more linear, rail-roading protagonist Jin Sakai onto a specific, predetermined path regardless of the player’s actions in game. Gameplay freedom comes at the cost of narrative control.
There are some players I’ve seen object to this, yearning for a more adaptive story that would be influenced by their decisions. Even if a player decides to fight honorably in each encounter – disregarding the mandatory tutorials forcing the player to act dishonorably – the Khan antagonist will still speak as if Jin has abandoned the samurai’s code of honor.
While I empathize with their disappointment, I think this division of mechanical freedom and narrative linearity has ultimately resulted in a better game. Though I can see the same duality present in Ghost of Tsushima’s cast as I had in every inFamous game – such as the opposing philosophies of Shimomura and Yuna acting as a refinement of the conflict between Lucy and Nix from inFamous 2 – the end product is better than if it had attempted to accommodate player preferences through shallow moral choices.
A not-so-super combination of mechanics and presentation result in what would better be titled Marvel's Adequates.
Over the past several years I’ve written a lot about Destiny 2, and spoken even more words when recording the podcast. I’ve had a love/hate relationship that has finally achieved a peaceful acceptance. The grind will never be perfect, but the combat is so solid that it’s enjoyable enough to just dive back in with friends every so often.
Without that top-notch satisfaction of popping the skulls off of Fallen troopers or melting strike bosses into paste with my Hunter’s damage enhancing void tethers, it wouldn’t last. There would be no debates about whether Destiny 2 is worth returning to because the gameplay wouldn’t sustain the over 500 hours spent on it. Though my friends and I gripe about having to slaughter the giant Worm God thing for the umpteenth time, or being slotted into running Savathun’s Song yet again, the repetition is less a problem and more an inconvenience due to each individual skirmish remaining exciting, engaging, and, for lack of a better word, fun.
I did not get to sit down and co-op a mission with Steve during the beta for Marvel’s Avengers, nor did I truly get to experience the majority of multiplayer content on offer. I plan to do so during the Open Beta this weekend and the next. My time with the Closed Beta was spent completing the single player missions, the first “multiplayer” mission, and then the first HARM room exercise – a sort of practice arena that allows you to experiment with character move sets while simultaneously tackling challenges. When I had completed that first multiplayer mission, I leaned back in my seat, looked at the screen, and asked myself a simple question:
Could I repeat this same mission as often as Savathun’s Song or the Giant Worm God in Destiny 2 and have a good time?
There's just no fun in playing a game that you feel no good at.
I’ve started DOOM Eternal twice now. Once on the standard difficulty setting, then on the lowest. I do not find it a bad game, nor do I think I’m necessarily “bad at it”. Considering that I have roughly twenty extra lives stocked up in my easier run-through, I’m pretty sure I could, with enough patience, tackle this game on its standard difficulty.
There’s a lot of stuff here that I like, or at least enjoy on paper.The platforming and navigation elements of its levels are far more engaging than those in DOOM (2016) (henceforth referred to simply as DOOM). Unlike its predecessor, Eternal relies less on a labyrinthine structure to encourage player exploration and more on leaping and mid-air dashing sequences to test reflexes and environmental awareness. I find such activities far more satisfying and refreshing than simply sticking my nose into every nook and cranny, wondering where the heck I’m expected to find the button that opens the secret door several combat arenas back.
Speaking of combat, id Software has also expanded upon the health regenerating nature of glory kills, additionally distributing ammo and armor supplies through the judicious application of violence. While all of these resources can be found scattered around each combat arena, the most efficient way to keep the Slayer topped off is to light foes on fire, chainsaw them in half, and rip and tear their huge guts until the colorful resources burst from Hell’s spawn like candy from a piñata.
These ideas are all great. They ensured that I did not wholly dislike my time with DOOM Eternal.
So why do I groan at the prospect of playing more as I might express exasperation at the thought of working overtime? Or mowing the lawn in 90° fahrenheit heat?
