Video game romances

Romances in games nowadays is something we expect, no demand. Look at the recent Bioware games. When Mass Effect first came out there was a character called Tali. Shes this female alien that wears a environmental suit because anything outside of her suit would kill her immediately. People complained that you could only fuck the blue alien and the human chick and wanted to fuck her too. So what did they do next game? In Mass Effect 2 you can fuck her. Yeah it somehow doesn't kill her. Bioware games seem to be really into this whole romance thing. Even during a Bioware interview the writer said something along the lines of, when people think Bioware they think engaging storylines and realistic romances. Realistic? You mean the poorly written few lines dialogue by talking with your companions and then all of a sudden she falls in love with you with terrible terrible terrible lines. Did I mention terrible?

Romance can be done good and it could be done terribly. Its like reading a book. You know which is written well and written bad. A game shouldn't be any different. Lets take some lines from a very terribly written Bioware game, Dragon Age Origins.

"I...have I ever told you I really like the way you wear your hair?" 

In which you must respond with 

"My hair? Thank you." 

If you do not pick it right she will think of you as just friends. Since my Mass Effect character was a male, I decided to try out a female for Dragon Age Origins just to see what its like. Well luckily for you, you can still romance the bisexual red headed French chick as female. She says more creepy things like she likes to watch your eyelashes flutter. You have to keep initiating to a point where she starts falling for you and everything that comes out of her mouth makes you vomit a little in your mouth. Who wrote this shit? Then for some reason this guy Alistar started trying to romance me. I didn't notice at first until I realized how pushy he was being. Like wow keep your dick in your pants asshole. Quit asking about me, I already rejected you so many times you don't have to keep crawling back like a lost puppy. But you know he was actually better written. Unfortunately to pick between a red headed French chick and a virgin man child who won't stop crying about his life and how everything in his life sucks. I would pick the former, but unfortunately the former is this chick who was locked up in a dungeon for weeks getting gang raped with blood shooting out her vagina. I'm serious look it up on youtube. I don't know about you but did this really need to be included in the game? This is what romance means for Bioware.

Is this the path games are going nowadays? Lets look at console games for a second. Japanese console games to be exact. I grew up playing console games and I played through my share of bad console JRPGs. I seen a lot of bad romances. Most console games come with stock cliche characters. The main character is almost always male and come in a few types. The first type is the hot headed guy who thinks with his penis. He would rush into danger going "we have to save her!" when you know its a trap or something and/or hand over the thing that will destroy the world to get the girl back. Unfortunately it never works. The second type is the quiet guy who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets dragged along an adventure, usually by your best friend which usually happens to be the main female interest or jealous female interest. The last one is the apathetic guy who gets bullied by everyone including the female interest. Sometimes the types mix together as well making some sort of hybrid but these are the main ones. 

The main female love interest will be known right away at the start of the game. They are also cliche stock characters. The first type is the soft spoken mysterious girl who happens to be from some weird civilization, the last of an ancient race, or something mysterious. She also happens to be chased by things that want her because she holds the key to destroying and/or ruling the world. This may be an object on her. She is usually paired up with the first type of guy the hot headed guy. They will meet suddenly and the guy will want to fuck her and so chases after her and saves her from the "Evil empire" or monsters. He will keep following her until she gets kidnapped and trades the object that will end the world to get her! The second type is the childhood friend or sister or mother figure. Yes sister and mother figure. These are usually the less annoying types as they don't act like a scared pussy where you have to be a big huge retard and chase after her all game long. But unfortunately they're not great either. It is usually painfully obvious the girl has feelings for the guy but the guy never knows and ends up chasing the first type of girl if the guy if the first type. These are usually matched with the second type of guy. The girl will drag the guy around. If its a sister character she'll usually be a younger sister who you must protect and theres a lot of suppressed incest flying around until you two finally realizes each other's feelings. A childhood friend would be really jealous and/or violent. She'd always be extremely pouty until she finally confesses her feelings and becomes all lovey dovey. The last type is the bitchy dominatrix who is usually paired with the third type of guy. She'll be like a rich princess type who wants you to lick her feet and blushes thinking about it and have wild fantasies about torturing you and turning you into some kind of love slave.

Sounds familiar? If you're a JRPG console gamer I assure you that you've seen at least one of each type. Just being cliche doesn't mean that they're bad. Its the combination of bad writing that makes it horrible to sit through. RPGs are the most story driven games. Combat in RPGs are not innovative. Its the same for almost every JRPG. You have fighters and mages and you have fire ice lightning magic with heals and turned based combat. The typical. If its an action game you can have a shitty story but if they combat is engaging and fun its not so bad. Unfortunately for a JRPG, getting the girl is pretty much the whole story. Every story starts with a kid who meets a girl and then the whole game is spent on trying to get the girl. And probably just as important, save the world while getting her. Square games are notorious for doing this. Every single square game has the same stock characters, same exact spells and same exact summons. All that is different is the graphics. Everything is filled with cutscenes and useless chatter among your companions. With the hot headed guy going "WE HAVE TO SAVE HER!" and the soft spoken girl going "I believe in so and so we shouldn't do this! I will walk foolishly into a trap and then wait for you guys to come save me!" Worst part is they try to innovate the combat but not the story itself. Isn't an RPG's most important part the storyline? However the opposite is true. Like Xenosaga if a game is just all story and 90% cutscenes, then you would fail hopelessly too. A game should be a game it shouldn't be a fucking movie.

The one with the second type of guy, the wrong place at the wrong time guy usually has a more save the world oriented story as the girl is with you all along. You'll go on a errand for your mom or something with your best friend the main female love interest going "hey lets do so and so!" Then something mysterious happens and all of a sudden you're on a quest to save the world! Now the final one is rarer. Usually JRPGs are the first or second or a mixture. The last one is still popular but not as much as the others. You're a pathetic guy with girls walking over you. One big example for it is Okage. I don't think I can find a better example. Its more of a fairytale type game. You're a guy with a bratty sister. No she's not the love interest. At the start of the game your sister falls under a curse and to save her you give up your shadow for the evil shadow king. After getting the shadow king your "girlfriend" breaks up with you because to quote "I don't like what you have become. Going around showing off. I want a guy who would eat whatever I make without question and stand around holding my bags while I go shopping." The whole game you can drag your feet around. You're the slave of the shadow king and then you meet the runaway princess who you accidentally crashed into and she gets pissed off and turns you into her slave. 70% of you belong to her and 30% belong to the shadow king. Anyways as the game goes on you get abused more and more. The game itself isn't so bad, the combat sucks but the story is entertaining. 

What if the main character is female!? Yeah those are rare but its generally either reversed or no romance at all. Lets face it most guys don't want to go around hitting on guys as a girl. Lets look at Valkyrie Profile Silmeria. Its another square game. The main female is a 12 year old girl. You're this soft spoken pussy princess with a bitching dominating spirit of a valkyrie inside of you. The main love interest is some like 30 year old looking guy. He's the wrong place at the wrong time guy and gets dragged along by you. Then shit hits the fan and somehow you have to like save each other. I don't know the game is pretty much a final fantasy clone and its fucked up and I don't want to go into detail. Pretty much its the same story but told in the point of view as the female. You're getting chased by shit and the guy is protecting you the whole time. Then theres games like Rhapsody: A musical adventure. You're a little girl who has the ability to talk to dolls and your dream is to marry a prince and one day you meet a prince who saves you from a dragon. Then the queen holds a contest for all the prettiest girls to compete for a chance to marry the prince. Blah blah then the witch kidnaps the prince and its your job to save him! Its a complete role reversal. The characters aren't stock because well. Its pretty hard to make a stock character from something so weird. Its funny, its cute, its very...ahem...girly?

Western games and Japanese games have very different views on romancing. JRPGs usually focus the entire story on getting the girl while westerns usually have a story with shitty romance tacked onto it. Which would you prefer? Which do people like? Looking at Japan's dying game industry, I'm thinking people are starting to get sick of these. But they really can't be compared as JRPGs are targeted towards the 12-18 age range. You can tell by the age of the characters really, most of them are 12-16 with some stretching as far as 18. Western RPGs are usually targeted towards the 17-20+ range. So I want to ask. Do people relate to the main characters? Do people like the female love interests? Back in high school there was a group of us that liked to play console JRPGs. I don't think any of the guys liked the main character. Everyone thought he was a dumbass. But some thought that the female love interest is good. Why? "Because they look hot." Guys don't care about the character as long as they look hot. Like one guy liked Tifa because she had huge breasts. Another liked Rikku because he's a fucking pedophile. But for the girls they don't like the guy characters or the females in the game. They're like "the guy is a moron he just rushes in and acts like a stupid kid all the time. The girls are pathetic." I remember asking someone what kind of guy she wanted for a main character and she responded with something like "a strong guy, someone the opposite of you." I remember responding to something along the lines of "it'll be hard to find someone stronger than you" and I got smacked on the arm. Ouch tomboys. Stop giving us stock characters.

The question is. Is romance really that important in games? JRPGs focuses the entire game on romance, Western games focuses on a specific task and you as the player can choose to romance the person. The romance here is usually different. I know there are some better romances out there but I'm not here to tell you the good stuff, I'm here to share the terrible. For JRPGs we don't need to be told who loves who so painfully obvious. We shouldn't be able to expect what happens. Good romances you don't need someone holding your hand telling you so and so. You just know. The chemistry would fly. Western RPGs compress everything and you are the one who is out searching for whoever you like. Bad romances would be awkward, be out of place, and completely irrelevant to the story that you can take it out without any consequences. Its a kind of bonus for the gamers. Perhaps I watched too many romance dramas. My expectation for romances are too high? Maybe they should make characters we care about? 

How about something fucked up like this? I never played that game but if thats the romance dialogue then what the fuck? I'm pretty sure that was made purposely because nothing can be that funny and stupid by accident.

I went and looked up on top video game romances on google and all I find are like Mario and Zelda and other stupid shit. What the fuck? Thats good romance? I don't know anymore. Maybe I should stop gaming.

Torchlight - Outdated buggy index finger trainer

Remember the good old days where games all suck? Well now you can with Torchlight. Its made by the same people who made Diablo. So if you played Diablo you pretty much can expect everything in it in Torchlight. There are scrolls of town portal and identify. Also healing and mana potions and skill spamming with health and mana leeching. Pretty much everything that made Diablo is in Torchlight. Including the boring one town system and left clicking everything to death. What you will possibly gain from playing this game is a broken index finger or one that is so fucking powerful you can click 500 times a minute.

Back then when Diablo came out the idea was new. Everyone played it and went "Woahhhhhhhhhh." It was still pretty boring but when Diablo 2 came out that was when it really became popular. Multiplayer play really changes the game. But Torchlight is more like the first Diablo than the second. I haven't gotten very far but I can assure you its boring. Like Diablo your left click if your main attack. Left clicking a target will make you walk over and attack it, unless you have a ranged weapon like a bow then you will shoot at them. Your right click is a shortcut for skills/spells. There is a talent tree for every class. I use tree loosely here because its not much of a tree when there are no prerequisites you need to add. Pretty much a bunch of scattered senseless talents you wouldn't pick up or have no effect on the specific weapon or style you choose to play as. There is the warrior the rogue and the mage pretty much. It doesn't matter what class you choose you would be able to wear anything and use any weapon. You wanna be a gunner mage? Go ahead. A wand wielding warrior. Sure thing. Either way you would be spamming your potion key.

Before starting the game you can pick a difficulty and a pet. Looking around I see a Very Hard mode so I moused over it and it said, "Masochists only!" FUCK YEAH! A game that fucking caters to me! So I picked the rogue. I picked up a bow and started firing my bouncy arrow skill. It was pretty neat it pierces through the enemy and hits a wall or obstacle then bounces in an entirely new direction. It bounces like three times or something with a maximum range of some sort. Unfortunately the other skills in the game are underwhelming or senseless. You have talents to "reduce the requirement of armor by 1!" Oh wow. Why don't I just add a point into defense or strength and put that talent point in something better? The fuck are they thinking. Then you have shit like "lunge towards your enemies with a dagger" Which uses both melee and range damage to calculate the final skill damage. Why do I want that when I can spam the living shit out of the bouncy arrow. By the way, ranged weapons have a maximum range which is like only three characters away. The bouncy arrow can reach like 20 letting you kite indefinitely with it as long as you can outrun your target. It also doesn't have the shooting animation delay and weapon speed limitation of your regular attack locking you in place and letting the boss cast a ice fissure on you dealing 90% of your damage in one shot.

The stats make no sense. You have strength which adds 1% of melee damage per point and it will help you carry heavier items. Dexterity adds 1% of ranged damage per point. Health adds hit points per point. Defense which adds defense per point and is required for better armor. Ok what the fuck. I'm spamming the shit out of dexterity then all of a sudden I need like 16 defense for an armor. I ignore the shit out of that and then a new item drops, I need like 30 strength to put on a leather cowboy hat but I don't need any strength to hold the massive fucking cannon in my hand. WHAT THE FUCK.

Back then when Diablo 2 came out everyone was excited and played the pointless grinding game. Now our standards are higher, looking back at Diablo 2 we can see what a terrible game it is. There are people who enjoy these kinds of games but think carefully for a moment. What is it that you liked? Randomly generated dungeons? The ablility to see your character get stronger? Taking out waves and waves of monsters? I don't know. But I can tell you that this game doesn't get any respawns at all. You can go down a floor and go back up a floor and all the chests would respawn with rare loot but none of the creatures are there. What? Also want to point out that going to a different floor would take up to 30 seconds in load time. Nothing you can do but twiddle your fingers/toes/hair/mouse wire/cat's tail while slamming your head into the back of your seat going "COME ONNNNNN COME ONNNNNNNNNN WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING SO LONG!" After the fucking hour it takes to load you meet a mob of monsters then you just spam the living shit out of your bouncy arrow and they all explode into oblivion. Then you take the next set of stairs down and repeat the process.

It also has stupid shit named mobs like in Diablo 2. These giant differently colored mobs with unique names. They all have dumb shit like Versusius the Vile who has a poison attack, Hamrock the Cold with a freezing attack, Cocknballs the Hard with stone skin. They die just as fast and they don't respawn. Yeah it adds fame for you when you kill them. But what does fame do? I DON'T KNOW! Do you have anyone to play with? No? Do you have quests that need fame? The fuck do I know! This game doesn't explain anything.

What about quests? Isn't there a story or something of some sort? Yeah, if you only like one town with a boring shit ass story. Like this magician chick you meet right out of town with a buff warrior dude beating the shit out of everything. This dude rushes off and the chick stays behind and tells you to help him before he gets into trouble. Obviously this is foreshadowing the horrible death he is about to incur. Isn't this a great way to start off a game? A scantily dressed mage girl and another stronger man that might threaten your alpha male authority. Then he suffers a horrible death by the master of the mage girl who was "turned evil!!!!!" by corruption of some sort and the girl goes "boo hoo my friend is dead please kill my master for me!" Then she stands around in town the whole time while you go back down slaughtering everything. In the end you probably kill the guy and the girl swoons over you and you wander off into the distance carrying her in your gigantic tree arms like Tarzan. Luckily before I could get there I hit a horrible bug where I can't go further.

I was stuck and couldn't move forward. The lever I pulled did nothing and checking on the forums sometimes doors and shit would get stuck if you don't open them in the right position. You'll need to reload the game or other stupid shit. I did that and it didn't work. So I just went fuck it because I don't want to start over again. I kept reading around and noticed how many bugs there were. Its already patch 1.5 or something which is at least 5 patches and they still have these bugs? Why did I even play this? I didn't really want to but hearing people talk about "the best thing while you wait for Diablo 3" I just had to see what the buzz is about. Its shit. Plain dirty smelling shit. You're better off waiting for Diablo 3. I don't really get Diablo 3 either. Its either going to hit or miss. It might piss off the "true Diablo" gamers or make them happy but lose the new players with a boring game. I personally is not looking forward to that game. If you want to play a dungeon crawler why don't you play something like Recettear? Its a short game on steam you can purchase for cheap and you spend your time paying money back to a fairy as a shopkeeper and you can hire adventurers to go dungeon crawling with you fighting bosses and picking up loot.

That game was fun. I didn't mind the grind because it was actually entertaining. You had more shit to do than walk down and left click everything and watch it walk over and swing and spam the shit out of potions. The left clicking games should be banned. Nothing has sucked this hard for me for a long time. Not even Persona can reach this level of suckness. Its a whole new level of suck. And the worst part is enough people liked it that they are making a sequel. Who the fuck liked this game? People who have a time machine from the 1997? The worst part is I can't even review the whole fucking game. My character is trapped by a bug that wouldn't fix itself. After playing the game I went and read the reviews laughing at every single bullshit line they typed out and then at the side I see "Games like Torchlight you might like... The Last Remnant. " That speaks for itself.

Fallout: New Vegas - Finishing games before release is a thing of the past.

Again, little late for this, but I guess I'm catching up on some overdue homework.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you've heard anything at all about Fallout: New Vegas, then you've heard about how buggy the game is. For the uninitiated, here's a taste: Quests break constantly and cannot be continued; NPCs disappear when you leave the area and come back, making quest hand-ins impossible; World entities such as items or even characters get jammed or lost or clipped about a mile below the ground. You NEED the developer console and the respective commands to just PLAY the game. If you're playing on the PS3 or the Xbox, you are fucked. Fortunately, the story is alright, and the setting and events fit together well. You'd expect that the major unification faction of the West (developed in previous Fallout games) the NCR, would eventually make its push eastward and encounter resistance. And the location matters: an invaluable energy source post-apocalypse, the Hoover Dam, and the blast furnace of a new economy, the casinos and resorts of Vegas. Trading companies from all over struggle for control in the area, but are considered insignificant in the highly discerning eyes of Vegas. However, the city needs power (the dam), and the power needs the city (money to operate and maintain it), and everything in FNV seems to fall into the balance in the same way. Fallout 3 wasn't quite as good in terms of seeking that balance in setting and lore, but felt like it had more content and hours of fun regardless. In fact, a lot of my experience in FNV was spent retreading old territory because of the bugs and the constant need to replay a segment to avoid it. Statistically, I made a total of fifty saves in FO3. FNV was near 800.

Bugs aside though, I was also a little disappointed by the lack of a climactic super weapon at the end of the game ala Liberty Prime and the FEV. While Helios One was a very very very cool location, it didn't have the significance and impact I wanted on the outcome of the story. The Boomers and their carpet bombing is pretty awesome though, but was unfortunately just a short fly by and a result of an isolated sidequest.

Hoover Dam, the final battle site, and also the major location talked about from beginning to end, is a popular topic in our reality for conspiracy theorists, who believe it was constructed to house a top secret American weapon. What better location than to put something awesome in an alternate universe storyline where America has plenty of money, no ethical boundaries, tons of robotics and is willing to pulverize their communist enemies in any manner? Disappointingly, FNV doesn't try to explore that at all, and the Dam is just a regular hydroelectric plant. After all that build up, that's all we get? Really? I was really hoping for a result or weapon that would have consequences on the world, not just the west coast, like you know, when in previous Fallouts they were developing viruses to turn EVERY human into a mutant, or maybe in Van Buren, where they were going to control all the nukes stored in the orbital bombardment satellites. That's heavy stuff.

FNV was good enough overall, but next time I really hope the developers actually finish their game before releasing it next time. The industry is already starting to copy their style of 'release first, finish later'. Just look at Age of Conan, or perhaps worse, Magicka.

A MMO for consoles? Disaster meets Final Fantasy 14

Upon reading Kittydog's most recent post, regarding experience caps in MMOs, I was reminded of the appalling experience of FF14 that I had hidden in the far corners of my mind... I can't help but introduce the rest of you to this gem.

MMOs are generally considered to be immune to being plausible ports from PC to consoles, but FF14 reaches out to test this boundary. There have been some console based MMOs like Phantasy Star Online, but that one is not even close to being as pitifully laughable as this.

The YOGSCAST duo has beautifully captured this game in a series of youtube videos, and I won't spoil the surprises this game has in store for potential players/viewers.
You can find the first part here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF7vrQ04_q4

Just for a few highlights, some of my favorite parts involve:
The fishing 'mini-game' in part 3
The map navigation in part 6
The quests and combat in part 7
The hideously painful main quest line that spans parts 9-10 and culminates in a head-bashing journey in part 11.
Part 14 is pretty hilarious at some points too, a strange highlight of everything wrong with the game, all at once: crashes, non-existent navigation, useless skills, and boring uneventful travels to reach quest destinations.

Go check it out; it's way better than anything I could have written here.

Vindictus and limiting game time for mmo gamers

One question I like to ask is. Why? There's always things implemented to limit game time for free to play MMOs. Whether its a fatigue system that limits a person from running dungeons or something like stamina in Valkyrie Sky. These MMOs all call themselves "free to play MMO's" and they limit your game play to like an hour or two a day before you hit your cap. And if you are doing farming runs it can be as short as 30 minutes. The only way is to do pointlessly boring things like fishing which takes like three or four hours just to get one more extra hour. I don't fish. I don't do shitty pointless stuff. So what about those that don't wanna waste their time fishing. Well there's a cash shop where you can buy more game time! Wow! What kind of bullshit is that.

In countries like Korea and China game time is limited by law so there are systems implemented to decrease game time. For example some games will stop your exp gain and drop your stats to 0. You'll have to log off for example, three consecutive hours before it is reset. But hardcore gamers would just make a new account and play while the first one is on cooldown. It just pisses people off in places where you're allowed to ruin your health playing games for five hours straight. If I wanna play for five hours straight after class or work then its my decision fuckers. Plus if you're fishing for five hours whats the difference? You're still letting your kid starve to death.

Lets take a look at Vindictus. It recently came out from beta a month or so ago. So whats it about. Well its a 3d beat em up type of game. It feels like a toned down God of War with up to 4-6 players in a single dungeon beating the shit out of stuff. There are three classes. A rogue with dual swords, a warrior chick with a sword and shield like Sophitia from Soul Calibur, and a mage who can be, instead of standing at the back lobbing magic like a pussy, go melee with an over sized scythe and battlemage it up. The customization of characters itself is pretty big. There are a dozen hairstyles and hair colors, eye colors, eyebrow types etc etc etc. You pretty much have to try real hard to find someone who looks like you. Then there are breast sizes for female characters. The classes are gender locked and my mage is female so there's a slider for height and breast size. Not wanting to be some short person holding an over sized scythe, I pulled the height slider up to like 75% which is taller than the default 50%. Now the default breast size is 30% and it starts at large. Not wanting gigantic ones I lowered it to 20% thinking who the hell would pull it to the right. Well when I logged in I had a friend who was making his sword and shield chick thinking, "breast size? Well then I'll just click the slider hold it down and drag it to the right." Well he has a character with gigantic breasts. Was I surprised? Not really. You should see how huge most of them are in the game.

The game itself is a pretty fun until you realize how lazy they are. The game has boats where you can go to dungeons at. Each boat has about 10ish dungeons. Each dungeon is set on the same map. Yes same map. Its the biggest slack job I ever seen. Each map is split into different sections. Each dungeon is a different pattern of sections with a different end boss with occasional mini bosses and secret bosses in between the start and the end. Now here's the big shitter. Every dungeon after the first boat takes two tokens a run. You get a maximum of fifty tokens which reset every Monday Thursday and Saturday. After seven runs the tokens cost three per run and thirteen runs the tokens cost four per run. You can use up all your tokens in a few hours if you're questing and 30 minutes if you're just farming. Then you wouldn't be able to play. But after looking up some stuff I realized. Who would want to keep playing? Because after the third boat the game ends. The maximum level is 38 and the level of the third boat ends at around 31. Which means you can beat the game in four days pretty much.

There are two types of levels. Your regular exp gives you levels where you can get more quests and learn more skills and get items. Then there are the AP which is exp for your skills. AP has no cap so you can technically farm it endlessly and max all your skills. That is a huge time sink and there is no point to max it all. Stats are gained from skills or from gear. Then there are titles which gives permanent bonuses to your stats such as doing a quest. Killing a boss in a specific way such as smashing it on the head with a broken pillar column or kicking 100 gnolls to death. A quest title can give up to like 30 stats each while kicking gnolls and other pointless ones may give one or two stats at most.

Combat is mostly button mashing. Left clicking on your mouse does a hit and each consecutive click does a combo up to a maximum of four hits. Hitting the right button at any part of your combo does a smash attack that uses up your stamina and deal bonus damage. Smash also adds up more damage to the stun counter on bosses making them get stunned faster. Classes like the sword and shield chick have bonus stun chances. Hitting space is a dodge move and you can see who sucks at this game by how often they hit their space bar. The dodge gets you pretty far away with the exception of the mage who can't really dodge very far but her dodge doesn't cost stamina so there is no reason to not be spamming that when you feel the boss is going to swing at your direction. Bosses can take down someone with a few swings of their paws or weapons. There are also secondary weapons that suck shit with their aim. You go into like a semi first person view of a spear in your hand and you let go and it flies nowhere near where you "aimed." You can throw spears that does damage and sometimes stun, bombs that bomb stuff, and chain hooks. You can hook stuff over or hook a boss and make them trip. Or get dragged by them.

Here's some combat of difficult bosses in Korea that we haven't gotten yet. Clicky

However, outside of combat there is nothing. And the game limits you to a few hours every three to four days. So half the time you have no reason to log in. You can't farm AP in the earlier dungeons. You can farm exp if you want. But why do you want to farm exp when you can just stay off for a few days then log in and quest and get MASSIVE amounts of exp for questing.

Overall the game itself isn't bad if you can overlook the repetitive dungeons but it can't hold your attention long enough. I hear the Korean version has 6 boats of dungeons. Which means the maximum level is somewhere about 60-70? Its still a pretty short game.

Divinity 2 - Charging at the speed of light

Divinity 2 is a game that uses the gamebryo engine, which the same games oblivion and fallout 3 is on. Its another obscure German game. German RPGs are usually known for their "hardcore" RPG games and their extreme difficulty curve. This is one of them. I didn't really care about this game but hearing people talk about it and hearing that an expansion is coming out for it I decided to check it out. Reviews were mixed, word of mouth was mixed. This was a game that some enjoyed immensely and others hated. Divinity 1 was a Diablo 2 clone and was considered a good game by many. Then I read on IGN giving it a 4.8/10 saying "I can't recommend this game to anyone." Now you know you're in deep shit. If Fallout New Vegas was as bad as people say and it scored a 8.5 going "A few technical problems aren't enough to sully this enjoyable and sophisticated adventure through the western wastes" then what the fuck did Divinity 2 do!? Well it sucked that's what.

You start off the game as a dragon slayer initiate and first thing you notice is the terrible lag. After fumbling around in the options for a bit you lower the resolution and lower quality to low you notice that everything looks like huge ugly blocks that are uglier than a 10 year old game. If this game makes Diablo 2 graphics look good then something is fucked up. Either way it still lags so giving up I just went and played on. I am using a welfare computer from many years ago but I can run most of the recent games without having to lower the default visual quality. The controls are terrible the jump is awkward and doesn't feel smooth at all. I can't explain it but it feels very wonky. You also need to jump a lot in this game to solve "puzzles" which makes it even more unbearable. You go around talking to people and do your "test to become a full fledged dragon slayer" by erasing your memories and training. What the fuck? Then you can focus on what class you want to start as. You can pick skills from any class you want but they give you three out of four to choose from. You can be the warrior the archer or the mage. Then there's the priest which is a summoner.

So I picked a warrior since I was lazy to run around waiting for mana and stuff. So you go around wacking stuff with clubs or slashing with swords. The typical hack and slash RPG stuff. One thing that was funny was a skill called Charge Attack. Instead of walking around like a snail you click charge and fly halfway across the map at the speed of light. The first time I clicked it I was laughing my ass off. Its so ridiculous that its funny. You can fly over rocks obstacles rivers everything. Its pretty much the warrior charge in World of Warcraft on steroids and crack. All other skills are pretty lame. You get a skill like whirlwind where you spin and do 1 + weapon damage on a 5 second cooldown. Lame. Skills that doesn't scale will be useless at late game. Skills that do scale will be useless early game. Skills like whirlwind are useless forever because it sucks even when fully upgraded. You can pick up caster skills like fireball and magic missle and stuff. But as a warrior you won't have much mana until you learn the mana leech talent. Yes this is like Diablo 2 shit. One point in mana leech would give you endless mana. You have a 80% on dealing a physical melee attack/skill to leech 4% of your damage as mana. Even so the game is hard as shit. Not literally.

This game has an insane difficulty curve that I'm not used to. The quest giver tells you that the dragon memories are going to kill you and you have to "quickly" head to the graveyard and kill some undead for some odd reason that its going to save you. So you go there and realize you're getting the shit beaten out of you from the first skeleton you see. Then you meet a boss of some sort like five steps in that one shots you. So you go what the fuck? Again. Here's what you do. Don't give a shit about what the quest giver says. Fuck your commander. You go outside of the town and start killing boars and goblins. Get some exp. Note that you have the ability to read minds but this also costs like 33-300exp per person depending on how strong their mind is. Yes costs exp to read their mind for useless shit like "oh i think so and so is a bitch" or stuff like "my dick hurts from fucking that whore in the stable." Sometimes you get some extra info but that doesn't do much. Anyways all this exp is taxed. As in you kill a boar for 18exp and it will deduct it from your tax until it is gone then you can start actually gaining levels. Monsters don't ever respawn in this game so you're fucked if you don't hunt down every single boar in existence.

So I'm going around wacking boars and goblins and eating the occasional food and drinking the potions when I walk accidentally into a goblin chief that looks like every other goblin. Not knowing that it was the chief I flew towards it at the speed of light and got two shotted in the process. So now I lost all the time I wasted on killing boars and goblins. I have no idea how to brew potions, it never tells you. I wanted to get more potions so I went on gamefaqs and found that it was down. So I went and downloaded a trainer then turned on invincibility then went around seeking revenge on everything that shit on me earlier. Going around like a god I met a wounded dragon knight, human servants of the dragons that you were trained to kill. Anyways she shows you some kind of weird vision then you got turned into a dragon knight and she appears in your conscious kinda like Xana from Dark Messiah except shes not cool like Xana. And you don't have conversations with her. She will comment on stuff throughout the game. Then you meet your old commander who sees the "taint" in you and decides that you should die so instead of killing you herself she leaves three untrained losers to fight you and you kill them all and take their gear. Then the main bad guy comes and kicks you down and steps on your face and goes "I'm letting you go this time blah blah blah" then laughs and disappears into the distance. Then you go around killing more dragons and dragon slayers and necromancers and spirits and other shit and the main bad guy comes back and goes "You are being annoying I should have killed you earlier." So he walks away and sends a few bad guys at you that you kill easily. What the fuck is wrong with the villains? Can they act more retarded and cliche?

Anyways I turned off the game and uninstalled it at that point because it just became a pointless walk around in circles listening to stupid idiotic conversations with skills that doesn't make sense like single weapon mastery where you get bonus damage if you are ONLY holding one weapon. If you are only holding one weapon why not use a two handed weapon for longer range, bigger splash, and more damage? Or dual wielding for even more single target damage? Or a weapon and shield combo for MASSIVE damage bonus and a shield? Single weapon master adds like what 30% more damage while a sword and shield adds 86%. Why? How does that work? If you think you can play this game be my guest.

"Instead of rewarding player skill in terms of the abilities you've selected, combat is often more about exploiting AI glitches and slamming potions as rapidly as possible to stay alive until you're at a decent enough level to steamroll everything in your way."

"Even worse, at one point a door disappeared from the environment so I couldn’t actually exit and had to reload a previous save (which didn’t solve the issue), and in multiple instances save files I overwrote multiple times didn’t load correctly"

I'll end it with those two quotes. This is what to expect when you play this shit.

Blade Kitten - I told you so

Well most games I play people tell me is good so I get my hopes up and play it and it turns out shitty. Well this game is pretty shitty and people say its shitty and I played it expecting to be shitty and it turned out shitty. Should I feel disappointed that it was shitty or should I have expected it to be this shitty. Well, its shitty so there's no point in arguing if it was as shitty as I thought it would be. What is Blade Kitten? The name itself would tell you it has something to do with cats and probably a blade, so we can come to the conclusion that it might be something like a cat cutting simulator or some cat getting revenge on people tossing cats into bins and shit and going around beheading people. If you thought those then you'd be mighty disappointed. Its a game based on a web comic. What the fuck? I didn't know that when I started.

I don't read web comics, I don't read Blade Kitten, but from what the game tells me you're playing as Kit Ballard some pink cat girl who goes around chopping people with a blade. The game doesn't tell you much. Characters come and go with lame jokes and lame dialogue. Its kinda like a web comic I suppose. I saw the game as a 2.5D side scrolling platformer game and I immediately wanted to play it since I was craving side scrolling platformers. The blade flies around near you and you can use it as a boomerang which costs stamina or just swing your sword around for a melee attack which doesn't cost any. So your typical enemies are dumb red soldiers called the Sollers who shoots laser or run at you with swords swinging. You get occasional dinosaurs and robots and stuff but the majority are the Sollers. They don't get upgrades or anything so the game is incredibly easy. There's a shop where you can buy stuff from money you found throughout the stages. What I find weird is there are four different blades. The one you start with and three others that you can buy. So on the second stage you just buy the best blade and you go around one shotting everything through the game. I don't see a reason to buy any other blade but I bought it anyways since they're cheap.

Think of the game as a tree branch. There's only one finger that reaches the end of the branch and a million that doesn't. This is what the game is like. You have a straight linear path and a billion dead ends with secrets that you get treasure boxes from. Whats treasure boxes for? Well you get money, and you also get completion %. If you collect every single treasure box and other shit like that you get to unlock a special costume. Yeah you can also buy costumes like the flying cat suit, pajamas, dresses, goth dresses, etc etc. You're a cat girl so you are super agile you can jump across stuff, climb up walls, do backflips. You're pretty agile which is fun, but the controls are shitty so you're always flying or having seizures all over the place. I even had a bug where I dash leaped and I missed my landing and went through a wall then started flying around through the sky and towards the end of the stage. I skipped half the content of the level and it was buggy as hell.

The story itself is confusing, makes no sense and you meet people that disappear and come back and you're going "who the fuck is this again?" So shit happens and then you go around chopping people and you're not even given any background or anything. You go "Oh the magasse sisters? I hope they're not still mad at what happened" WHAT HAPPENED? I shouldn't even be complaining since its obviously made for people who read the web comic or wants to read the web comic but no I'm not one of those. Instead I wander around confused and then the game ends suddenly, "continued in part 2" WHAT THE HELL!? THERE'S A PART 2 FOR THIS SHIT?

I am already haunted by the constant "I TOLD YOU SO!" I had enough of the shitty controls, annoying characters, lame dialogue, and dumb jokes. Like "This is is fishier than tentacle pr0n!"The fuck! Who uses Pr0n? Game sucks.

Dying Japanese video game industry

I'm hardly surprised looking at the things they pump out month after month. Its the same shit over and over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/technology/20game.html?_r=2

From the article we can see how they are trying to westernize their games. Yeah you can tell from games like The Last Remnant that Cent ripped apart. Even games like NIER that I never played and just read about. Apparently there is a she-male but that has nothing to do with it. The thing is in the Japanese version you get a girlyboy but in the English version you get a muscleman.

The problem is not the characters, the problem is that over the years there isn't much change in game play or storyline. That's not the biggest reason though, the biggest reason would be that Japan just can't compete with the amount of games coming out of the west. Even if sales of Xbox360 sucks balls over in Japan there is a huge market of games in the west. That's why the market for Japanese games seems small.

Overall many Japanese game companies are seeing loss of sales in their games. Maybe if they stop making games with some spiky haired anime boy trying to save the world and get the girl then people would be more interested in playing them. You get lame dialogue stories and two dimensional characters with a cliched plot. At one time pumping those games out one after another worked but the gamers of today has higher standards for their games. Western gamers pump out similar games over and over too, just look at the sports titles. But since I don't play sports games I can't really comment on those. The games I play are action games, RPGs and Shoot em ups mostly. So those are the games I will talk about.

How many times have you seen a Japanese RPG main character save a world? I started gaming playing those games and now I can barely touch one without puking with blood as you can see from the posts I posted. There are games that try new things like Persona and a lot of people seemed to like it. I didn't. I felt it was a step forward from the cliched RPGs but it included many new horrible things. The western market isn't so full of RPGs. You see a lot more FPS, hell I don't think I even seen a Japanese FPS. They really need to expand on their games, they need more online play, they need a lot more. The old Nintendo and Playstation days are over. Competition has arrived, you can't pump out the same crap and expect to sell when better games are coming out everyday. Most hardcore gamers today are older now. I grew up playing SNES and Playstation. I don't want to play the same shit I played so many years ago.

Here's another article on Japanese gaming clicky!

In 2009, Japanese games have dropped 24% in sales. The western market is huge. They can't really make games that the Japanese want to play and westerners want to play as well. Its just too different. Japanese gamers seem to be closed off from the world. You might not agree with my views and I may sound pretty biased but we'll see in the coming years. The gaming industry is still rapidly changing.

Kuon - Pissing off English gamers with Japanese puzzles

Kuon is an obscure horror game. Its not exactly bad, but there are a lot of things that does nothing but piss you off. To quote wikipedia, "Kuon is based on an ancient type of Japanese horror story called Kwaidan." In other words its an old fashioned horror story. The game takes place in a mansion during the Heian Period of ancient Japan. The game in split into phases. You can either pick the Yin or Yang phase. Both phases of the story goes on at the same time but each centers around on a different character.

I picked the Yin phase which centers around a girl named Utsuki who went to the mansion with her sister to find her father an exorcist. If you picked the Yang phase you are Sakuya an exorcist who is the disciple of the father of Utsuki. If you picked the Yang phase it'll teach you how to play but since I picked the Yin phase I was wandering around blindly for the first part of the game. Different places that are locked off for certain characters are open in the other phases and other places that are open are locked off. If you beat both you open the Kuon phase. I haven't finished the game but so far the story is a little confusing.

This game is somehow oddly familiar with Rule of Rose. Most of my gripes with that game can be found here as well.

http://theorycrafting.blogspot.com/search/label/Rule%20of%20Rose

This game you run around blindly searching for stuff. Its almost another virtual scavenger hunt. There's no horror. Occasionally Gakis will come and start attacking you. Then you pull out your trusty knife and stab it. Not exactly stab, you awkwardly wave it around like you're scared and they sorta fidget around. When they do that they can't really attack so you keep tapping the X button until either they die or you get attacked. When you get hit you have to keep tapping the X button to push them off. After you push them off you keep tapping the X button to hit them and kill them. That's basically your combat for this game. Sometimes you meet enemies that kill you in two hits and come in packs. These ones you need to fight with range. Of course the first time fighting them you wouldn't know so you run in and get killed and turn the PS2 off in a rage as you wasted all your time. There are spells which uses magical paper with a drawing of a spell on it. There's your usual fireballs and summoning spiders and demon hands and the puppet lady and other bloody magical ghosts and shit like that. After a single use the paper is gone so spending it on regular gaki aren't very wise. You save it for bosses and then spam the shit out of them because you'll get killed in two hits. One thing I hate is you're allowed to use both the square and triangle for these paper but if you put both on you can't use your knife. You can only equip one if you want to use your knife.

About taking hits, you don't have a health bar. Why? I don't know. You have to listen to the heartbeat of the character. If you're scared it goes up, if you're hurt it goes up, and if there's gaki around it goes up. So what the fuck!? If your screen starts to blur it means the next hit will kill you. So eat up some medicinal powders or elixirs. You can meditate to recover your health, but that takes like 10-15 seconds so you can't do that in combat. One thing that annoys me is if you get scared by something you lose health. If you run you lose health. Yes if you run you lose health. Running also alerts gaki so they'll come out of nowhere and kill you. So do you want to waste your health or waste your time? Here's a trick though, if you keep tapping the O, which is the run button, you'll be able to run while walking. You don't move as fast as running but you don't lose health and won't attract gaki. You sorta have a seizure while moving. This really tires out your thumb though.

The good thing about this game those is the ambiance of the game. The mansion is dark, there are a lot of scratching and crying and sounds everywhere. There's also enough blood to make Dragon Age Origins jealous. When you see shit you can't help but wonder when something will finally come out and attack you. But, it rarely comes.

Now the most annoying part of this game is translation. It's not that bad, occasionally you have errors such as "you shouldn't believe everything you here." The characters never move their mouth when talking and the voices are all in Japanese. Some parts are never translated at all. Suddenly you run around and hear Utsuki going "Nee-sama! Nee-sama! Random Japanese shit" and you don't see any translations and you're there going what the hell is happening. Then you realize its probably something but you're never really sure. Then there are parts where Japanese were never translated and they are part of a cryptic puzzle. That's just brutal. You have a puzzle that you must do to get an item to continue on the game but you have puzzles that's entirely in Japanese? Fuck you. Something like something something in the East something something. Luckily for me I can read a bit of Chinese so I sorta got it. Unfortunately I still didn't get it, so off to Gamefaqs I go. There I found out you can keep randomly clicking until you hear the right sound and then you finish the puzzle. Great. Thank god for Gamefaqs!

Overall, this game isn't that bad but there are much better horror games out there. If you like the old style Japanese horror games with body crawling around like an upside-down crab with their heads twisted back and second faces popping out of their necks then you might enjoy the game. Don't expect a lot of horror though, and the storyline itself isn't that great. The ambiance is awesome.

Pros and Progression, Starcraft 2

I've been playing Starcraft 2 for a few months now, and while I was more excited near the early phases of beta, I became more and more disheartened by the trend of behavior exhibited by pro gamers and their feedback. Their influence has caused Blizzard to revert many of the new innovative interface features in SC2, and returned the game to a more clunky and primitive state. I've made many posts here before about the pitfalls of catering to the casual players, but sometimes even pro gamers are ignorant and misguided.

In the beta relaunch patch, the rally system was changed to move, rather than attack move. This is already on top of a slew of other intentional interface deadweights in SC2, such as the 1 second delay before off-screen alerts are audibly sounded. I know the arguments on both sides for this, but ultimately, this is a game built to test a specific set of skills, namely strategy and tactics. While pro players will demand for a higher skill ceiling to separate themselves from the common group of players and to make their territory more well-suited to their niche, I feel that they are misguided and... frankly, they don't even know what they want.

A well designed program, or game, or any function that has an interface, seeks to minimize the distance between the user's will and the effective outcome. A car with good handling does exactly that: delivering the driver's intent to the vehicle's movement. But would sports racing be more competitive if all drivers were forced to drive vehicles with staggeringly poor handling and had to wear goggles that only allowed them to look backwards? Does intentionally impeding controls and the intentions of the user exhibit meaningful skill?

If it was true, then why do we not see highly competitive and skill-dominant sports where chains were shackled to the feet of the players? Funny that a game like a three-legged-race where poor control is an established feature is not considered to be competitive or impressively skillful at all. In fact, the opposite is true: competitive sports at a globally-presentable level involve attitudes that continually strive to decrease the gap between user will and outcome. Simply put, intentional flaws of the interface are not a characteristic of professional sports (or sports with high skill ceilings, whatever).

Taken to either extreme, there can be problems: a sport with perfect control interpretation would be purely a thinking game (although that's what TBS are); a sport with poor control interpretation would be as tedious as having to move every individual component yourself. But in former, you have competitive, strategic play, and in the latter, you'll have no one willing to play, and nobody to consider it skillful.

Pro players and Blizzard alike need to realise that the skill of the game is beyond the ability to sift through the muddled controls and interface disabilities. The objective is to always design a system that enhances the players intent as much as possible, and then allow players to flourish in their ability from there. If the game is truly one of skill and mastery, then champion players will only have their abilities further maximized by the new capabilities at their hands.

Pros want a game that requires constant immediate attention to even menial tasks that are repetitive and simplistic in nature, and have instead a continued sequence of commands inputted by the player, when one simple constant command would have sufficed. (Specifically about the Rally Attack Move.) Pros are misguided in their reasoning, as a game with tedious manual controls in every facet is unreasonable, unrewarding, and never seen as 'skillful', and thus, unworthy of reaching a grand level. If Pros want to give SC2, or any game, a higher skill ceiling and more global acclaim, they would not choose to impede the improvement of game interfaces.