Valkyria Chronicles 4

Six years to the day after beating Valkyria Chronicles, I've finished off what might as well be its direct sequel, Valkyria Chronicles 4. (Yes, Valkyria Chronicles 2 and Valkyria Chronicles 3 both exist but they were PSP-only games and the third one never even received an American release. Lame!)

Now, six years is a long time and I've beaten (hang on, counting) - oh wow, exactly 150 games since then, so it's very likely I've forgotten more of Valkyria Chronicles than I remember. But it was my favorite beaten game of 2014 and frankly an all time great. I bring all of this up because I want to stress how impressed I am by Valkyria Chronicles 4 and it's no small priase when I say that it improves on the original game in every conceivable way. Seriously, every single one. The gameplay is identical or perhaps moderately improved by the addition of a grenadier class; the art style is identical and as such the PS4's graphic capabilities make for a prettier picture than the PS3's; the characters - from mains to secondaries to villains to troops - were so much more memorable this time around; and the story was more moving.

I dumped 40 hours into this game's main campaign and I've already played three or four postgame missions. I'm debating spending mroe money on the DLC than I did on the entire game just to keep unlocking content. I've been borderline obsessed with this title for two or three weeks straight, playing it almost every night, the type of thing you can only really get away with doing in the dark and lonely bowels of the calendar known as February. How long can I keep going? Who knows! Daylight Savings Time is just around the corner and spring should be right behind it, so another 20 hours of this game might be a bit of a stretch. But apparently there are just as many postgame skirmishes as in-game missions, so I say why stop playing a game I'm absolutely loving?

I'd say more - I have so, so much to say - but no one reads this blog and I'm just as happy to talk about the game with a couple friends who've partaken. Peace!

Battlefield V

Just over a year ago I played through my first Battlefield game - the World War I one, Battlefield 1 - and liked it a great deal. First person shooters have never been my favorite games, but I appreciate a good campaign in a war game, and I really felt like Battlefield 1 nailed it with four or five short stories taking place all over Europe. When I heard Battlefield V would be a spiritual successor, albeit one that took place during World War II like so many other first person shooters, I was on board.

And yeah - this was fine. It scratched exactly the itch I wanted it to scratch. There were four little three-act campaigns here, and all felt extremely by-the-book. There was a "Brits in North Africa" level, a "Norwegian resistance" level, a "Senegalese French soldiers storm Southern France in history's forgotten parallel to D-Day" level, and a "Nazis make their last stand in Germany" level. Yeah, you heard that last one right - Battlefield V has a level in which you take control of literal Nazi soldiers, killing at least two hundred American troops pushing forth over the Rhine into Germany. And yet, for the second straight Battlefield game, the Eastern Front is entirely absent. Come on! Give me Leningrad, give me Stalingrad! Give me a glimpse of the side of the war where 15 million soldiers died instead of a fourth chapter from the Western Front where I play as the goddamn Nazis! Sheesh.

Anyway, I'd love to see more dumb war games with campaigns like this one. Simple little vignettes that highlight forgotten or underexplored chapters from history.

Oh, and what a gorgeous game. Just an impeccable level of detail put into all the environments, be they ruined cities or French farmlands or semi-arid North African landscapes. Beautiful.

Civilization VI: Rise and Fall

Eleven months ago I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing Civilization VI and then for good measure I spent even more time writing up a post about it. It's probably one of my best posts in years, and here it is: https://back-blogged.blogspot.com/2019/02/civilization-vi.html

That post ended like this: "I just don't see myself going back anytime soon. That said, if there's any DLC for this game in the future...  oh man, look out!"

And fam, guess what. We got that DLC. Oh man, look out!

I'll structure this post the way I did the previous one, so...

1. Scenario - Nile (Nubia)

The first chunk of DLC I downloaded was the Nubian civilization and an accompanying Nile River map and scenario. In the scenario, you pick to play as either Egypt or Nubia and there are two victory conditions. One is the standard domination victory which requires you to capture your enemy's capital city. The other is a very specific religious victory that requires you to build seven specific temples before the other player does. Now, I just jumped head-first into this one as Nubia, and I had no intentions at all of starting a war with Egypt; I'd just focus on trying to settle seven cities and proceed through the various science and culture trees in order to unlock that very specific temple. There were two major issues with my plan! One was that this specific scenario only gives you six settler units, but you need seven cities in order to win. Which means the only path toward religious victory requires at least a little bit of military planning. I went to town on some poor city-state to my south - honestly I have no memory of who it was - and eventually found myself owning seven cities the hard way (but the only way). The other problem is that these specific temples that had to be built had prerequisite buildings in each city. And those buildings had prerequisities. This meant I had to build 21 different religious buildings, and all religious buildings required a currency called "faith" to build. But I'd been so focused on fending off barbarians and capturing a city-state with my military that I'd put almost no effort into manufacturing faith until halfway through this 125-turn game. Gah! I'll cut to the chase and say that it worked out and I completed my seventh temple and earned the W somewhere around the 115th turn or so. Close, but not too close! Egypt never attacked me and also never made a single temple, which aligns very well with my previous scenario experiences in Civilization VI - you're not playing against the CPU as much as you're playing against the very specific victory conditions that only get tighter and harder as the difficulty increases. Oh, lastly - I'm glad I picked Nubia here and not Egypt. One assymetry in this scenario was that throughout the game, foreign armies from places like Greece and Rome would arrive on the Mediterranean coast looking to expand their own empires. Apparently, this puts Egypt in a ton of unavoidable conflict, and if you play as Egypt the most important thign to do is to avoid war with Nubia to your south lest you be surrounded by enemies on all sides; meanwhile as Nubia you're actually supposed to rush Egypt early with everything you've got and shoot for that domination victory. So I did it the hard way, apparently. Well, shoot.

2. Scenario - Southeast Asian Religious War (Indonesia)

That last one was super long, so I'll keep this brief. This was a seven-civilization competition with no military conflict; the only path to victory was once again a very specific type of religious victory. Here, whichever civilization had the highest score after 50 turns would win. There were three components to scoring - how many followers your religion had throughout the world, how many total foreign cities followed your religion, and how much faith you were producing every turn. Like I said, I'll keep this brief. I was Indonesia, mostly on a whim. This put me in an isolated corner of the map, which probably helped me avoid an onslaught of foreign missionaries pouring in from all sides. While the six other civilizations fought generally omnidirectional wars, I just kept pumping out missionairies and apostles and flinging them toward Thailand and Vietnam and Burma. No real strategy beyond badgering the closest cities with my religious beliefs as often and as hard as possible. It didn't work! On Turn 49 I was still very clearly in second place to China. And then out of nowhere at all, I won. Turns out China somehow fucked up and lost like fifty points on the final turn, just the biggest choke job you've ever seen. I still don't understand what happened, and I don't care.

3. Free Play - Russia, 133% speed, standard "Europe" map, Level 5

This one's based very heavily on the "one that got away" eleven months ago: my Russian playthrough, in which I intended to eke out a meager "surviving not thriving" existence in the tundra before eventually expanding across all kinds of useless, wide open space and then establishing a totalitarian state with all the good communist perks and then winning a scientific victory by beating everyone else to outer space. You know, like the real Russia did in the version of history that ends in 1960! Back then, I was ravaged by enemies before I coudl expand past more than three or four cities and the whole thing never really got off the ground. This time around, sadly - or honestly, maybe thankfully - things only went slightly better for me, as I wasn't vanquished by AI opponents but by some shitty recurring glitch. The game kept freezing after 175 turns or so, just after I'd established my first city on the Black Sea somewhere in the medieval era. I tried to restart it four or five times and it just kept freezing no more than one turn later. There would be no space race, there would be no communism, and there would not even be a big eastward expansion. But, fuck it - I'm claiming partial success this time. When I was forced to throw in the towel, I had the second-highest score in the game and also an empire spanning from St. Petersburg and Helsinki in the north to Moscow in the east to Riga in the west and down to Kyiv and Crimea in the south. It was almost poetic, really - wasn't that the great accomplishment of Catherine the Great? Expanding Russia to the Black Sea and Crimea? Fuck it, we're done here. Shut it down!

(Be back soon for the remaining DLC, I think!)

Crash Bandicoot

I never played mroe than the first few levels of this in my youth, and now that I have, I realize I didn't need to. Fixed-camera 3D platformers are hard as hell to pull off if you've got wonky edge detection and enemy hitboxes, and let me tell you, Crash Bandicoot has both of those things in spades. Still mostly enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and who knows? I just might hit up the sequels for more of the same madness and frustration.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

This wasn't nearly as good or memorable as Metal Gear Solid 2 was, except for one key aspect: the boss fights. I accidentally and earnestly beat "The End" the cheap way (Google it), and only later on while reading about the game did I realize I had done so. And I absolutely loved the gimmick during the fight with "The Sorrow" where you have to fend off the ghosts of every soldier you've killed thus far. I guess sneaking and stealth really were the way to go here!

I didn't love the new emphasis on healing yourself with specific items on specific parts of your body - a little too much realism and nuance for a game as goofy and convoluted as Metal Gear Solid, no? - but the camouflage patterns were a cool idea (and they seem to be responsible for most of Snake's skins in Super Smash Bros., which is cool).

Luigi's Mansion 3

Beautiful-looking game. The slightest bit tedious and difficult to control. Love how this franchise has come out with three totally distinct types of level design, though.

AI: The Somnium Files

I'm clearly unable to stay afloat on these posts and I know their overall quality has fallen pretty significantly - begging the question, why keep this blog going? - but also, fuck it, I don't play many video games anymore and this one's worth spending some time discussing.

Long time readers, if they exist (they don't) may recall a series of DS and 3DS games called the Zero Escape trilogy. They're more like visual novels than games, but I really loved them, or at least I loved the first two.

Now the creator of those games has made a new visual novel called AI: The Somnium Files. (God, why are video games always burdened with the weirdest and shittiest names?) "AI" here stands not only for artificial intelligence, but is pronounced "eye," because the artificial intelligence in this game is housed in the protagonist's artificial eye. And "somnium" is Latin for "dream," and this game is as much about dreams as the Zero Escape games are about escaping, so, sure, yes, the title works.

But yeah - the framework of the game is that you're a detective looking to solve a murder mystery, and you have two primary tools at your disposal. One of them is the aforementioned eye with AI - it's capable of things like thermal and X-ray vision which can help you find clues at murder scenes and deduce when people are lying. But the other key element is the "somnium" one - a machine that lets you enter the dreamscapes of another person - a witness, a suspect perhaps - in order to kind of sort of interrogate them without interrogating them. Sounds crazy illegal, right? And like anything discovered in said dreamscapes would be inadmissible in court? Well, yes - and the game kinda sorta alludes to this. It's part Inception, part Black Mirror. It works. Mostly.

But it quickly becomes clear as you play through the game that there's a bigger mystery afoot than just the murder case you're trying to solve.Blatantly and ominously, you yourself, as a protagonist and detective, have no recollection of your life before five or six years ago. Coincidentally, there was a spree of murders that took place five or six years ago. And coincidentally, the murder that takes place at the start of the game bears a striking resemblance to the murders that took place back then. Namely, the victim has had one eyeball removed.

There are just enough recurring themes and twists and red herrings here to keep things from being obvious, and that's really what I loved about this game. Like, I had elements of the overall "big story" figured out pretty early on, and a few suspicions where I was on the right track. but then also there were a few things that threw me off completely - chief among them, I think, was the way the game unfolds in a branching fashion. I'd say more, but Sweeney is playing this game right now and if there's a single person reading this blog anymore, it's probably him.

These games aren't for everyone, at all, and I can't even say I liked this one as much as that original Zero Escape trilogy. But I liked it enough to come back for any spiritual or direct successors. Your mileage may vary!

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Third time's a charm!

This was the oldest game on my backlog by a few years, first purchased all the way back in 2002 before I had any idea what it was, honestly. I remember firing up my PS2, starting the game on normal difficulty, and... immediately getting seen by guards, and killed, in the tanker level. Stealth, as a concept, just wasn't for 14-year-old me; that guy had been conditioned to blast his way through action games, killing every bad guy along the way, and as soon as I realized this was a game about sneaking around quietly, I dunno, it just had no appeal.

Flash forward a year or so and I decide to give the game another go. I use easy mode, I sneak around and try not to draw any attention, and still the whole thing just isn't my speed. I quit the game after what I'm later convinced is a couple of hours, but a recent memory card check reveals was only half an hour.

Nine years later, I finally get around to playing Metal Gear Solid, the first one. I like it but don't love it. I convince myself, however, that it'll be the push I need to jump back into Metal Gear Solid 2. It is not.

Seven years later, I do it. I do the damn thing and finally play Metal Gear Solid 2 as a 31-year-old man. As a father with limited free time living in 2019, I play on "very easy" mode and use a damn walkthrough. (Why not? I'm here for the story anyway!)

This game... is a masterpiece. I mean, it's hard to say I even enjoyed playing it, given my history with it. But the plot, the themes, the tricks it pulls... holy shit guys, what a mindfuck. What an eerily accurate prediction, pre-social media, of our "post-truth" world. Smarter and more invested men than me have written all kinds of praise about this game and about what an epic trolljob it was when it came out and about how finely it has aged.

(Still kind of played like ass, though. First-person shooting on the PS2 is an experience best left in the past!)

See you in five to ten more years with Metal Gear Solid 3, I guess.

Super Dungeon Bros

Meh. This is exactly the kind of low-effort co-op hack-and-slash shovelware that phones and tablets do better than video game consoles at this point, and that really don't need to exist at all! I couldn't care less that it's a roguelike - I'm only playing this thing once, who gives a shit if it changes every time? Clearly this game was designed to be played with four players, but bitch I am 31 years old and I don't have four controllers even if I have four friends!

I hope I didn't pay any money for this. I probably did! Fuck!

Gravity Rush

Holy shit, a video game? Yeah, here's my fourth beaten game of the year. I started this one way back when my paternity leave was ending in, oh, April, and then didn't touch it again for four solid months.

Gravity Rush is a title I'm almost positive I boguht back when I didn't have much of a PS4 library. You know how it goes. "Wow, I've got this brand new system and nothing to play on it! Time to buy any game at all with decent reviews." I believe this was a Vita port. It was a fun ten-hour platformer with a unique art style and an incoherent story. The central gimmick here is that you can manipulate the direction of gravity. Now if that sounds to you like a great gimmick for a puzzle game - yes, I agree. So imagine my surprise when this wasn't a puzzle game at all, but a straight-up beat-em-up that takes place in 3D.

Initial genre-based disappointment aside, this was actually a surprisingly fun game. It's just long enough not to wear out its welcome and the missions are just varied enough to keep the game from growing tedious. I spent way more time than I had to exploring the four-part city where the game takes place, but less thn I could have doing side quests.

Look, it was fine! If I were five years younger I'd be putting the sequel in my Amazon cart right now. Speaking of which, what's this? Hey, only $20? That ain't bad. I wonder how the reviews are...

No! No, I can't. I shouldn't. I won't. But this was fun, really.

God of War (2018)

I'm almost a year late here, but yeah, the 2018 remake of God of War was just fantastic. For as much as people raved about the original series on PS2 and then PS3, I never seemed to love it like they all did. In fact when I finally got around to God of War III a few years ago - hailed in its day, 2010, as an intstant contender for greatest game of its time - it just felt so stale and dated in terms of graphics, tone, and gameplay. The graphics part can't be helped, I know, but the fixed camera nature combined with repetitive hack-and-slash combat with QTEs didn't strike me with any "greatest game of its era" mentality and the cartoonish gore and big-tittied naked slave women felt decidedly antiquated even by 2016 for me.

How nice a surprise it was, then, that God of War is as much a tonal re-imagining as it is a reboot that changes the setting from Greek to Norse mythology. There really wasn't a lot of content to wring out of the very dry God of War stone in 2018, so why not go ahead and remake the game along the lines of an open-world third-person adventure game with RPG elements? And while you're at it, go ahead and give the game an excessive "hardened old widower learns to love again, thanks to a child" narrative treatment. This accomplishes a number of things - in addition to pulling heartstrings like, say, The Last of Us or later Uncharted titles, you make Kratos a reluctantly brutal father figure, wise and regretful but still completely capable of unleashing "Spartan rage" to protect his son. Suddenly the gore and brutality are toned down - they're there, for sure, but they're not there for cartoonish shock value, vestiges of old '80s and '90s arcade games accompanied by guitar riffs; they carry weight, they support the tone of the story, they could almost be described as "art!" There's also no minigame here where you just mash buttons to fuck the absolute hell out of some sex slave - a former easter egg staple of the old series. (Although for my money this game should have gone entirely in the other direction with a tender scene and a subtle vibration-assisted minigame in which you patiently and tenderly operate the analog sticks to please a forest goddess, if you catch my drift.)

Gameplay here is also miles beyond what it was in any of the first six games in the series; I died constantly at first, and really had to learn the blocking and parrying system instead of just spamming a "whip your chains around" button. There's armor-crafting. The whole thing's a treasure trove of collectibles and side quests. The NPCs are legitimate characters in their own right. There's just almost nothing not to love. I'll admit the ending snuck up on me a little bit, and so did the lack of postgame content - but the whole thing just makes me much more excited for God of War II or God of War: Ragnarok or whatever they come out with next.

I don't play a lot of games these days, so take this with all the salt you want, but this was seriously the best and most satisfying all around experience I've had with a video game in years. Play it if you haven't yet!

BioShock Infinite

Yeah, this blog's pretty much dead now, right?

It's been nine years since I played and absolutely loved the first two BioShock games. This one left me the slightest bit cold. The story's interesting but it almost directly rebuts a major theme of the first two games, in which decisions you made throughout the game affected the tone of the ending substantially. Here in Infinite, choice is completely irrelevant! Saying more would spoil some stuff, but, yeah.

Another thing the first two games had going for them was the atmosphere - abandoned underwater cities, which were just some of the creepiest and coolest and most serene environments I've seen in gaming. The "up in the air"-based society of Infinite was cool in its own right, but it was definitely a needless addition. The whole thing was a step back from what I remember loving about the first two games. There weren't even any memorable or iconic enemies in this one the way the Big Daddies of the first (and second) game stole the show.

There's a big twist early on that reveals - minor spoiler - that you're actually hanging out in White Supremacy Utopia, but it gets abandoned pretty early on in favor of an under-explained socialist uprising by black folks and Irish people. There's just a lot of philosophy and political science I thought this game left on the table that the first two made some minor hay with!

It's also possible that I'm a few years too late to this party, and that the ending played out a lot better in 2013 before multiverse theory went mainstream thanks to, like, Rick and Morty. (Oh shit, did I just spoil the thing I said I wasn't gonna spoil? Gah! Whatever.) The whole story was left feeling very Looper-esque, very Primer-esque - the ending wasn't satisfying, and if anything was nihilistic. The ending looks you square in the face and says, "that place you just spent ten or twelve hours exploring? Those characters you came to appreciate, and kind of understand? Yeah, none of any of that matters. Nothing matters. Embrace nihilism, eat at Arby's!"

If there's one highlight here, it was the relationship between main character Booker and deuteragonist Elizabeth. It felt an awful lot like the relationship at the center of The Last of Us, and probably 500 other video games about gruff dudes learning to care about young women. So it goes!

Maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually try out the Burial at Sea DLC associated with this game - it's allegedly very good, and brings the story of Rapture full circle in ways the baseline game did not. (More likely, I'll just read about it. Gonna go do so right now, actually.)

Lastly, I thought we were done here, and the game itself kind of lays out plainly that there need not be any new BioShock games (or games of any kind at all, really) but apparently there are fairly recent and very heavy rumors that a fourth title is in development. Cool! I'll play it. Someday.

Anyway, embrace nihilism. Eat at Arby's.

Civilization VI

Aside from a  few sessions of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate here and there, the lone video game I played in January was Civilization VI. And holy hell, did I play the everloving fuck out of it. Civilization is famously and ridiculously addicting - the type of game you can spend hours on end playing, long into the night, pretty easily while watching TV in the background. So over the course of January I spent some 70-something hours playing ten different games of Civilization VI, and I may as well recap them all here.

1. Tutorial - Babylon

I'm very familiar with the basics of Civilization, but playing on a Nintendo Switch I decided to try out the tutorial before jumping into a full-fledged game. The tutorial walks you through several functions of the game you'll need to learn how to manage and master, and then leaves you to your own devices to capture the only other civilization's capital city. Here, I was Babylon, the other civilization was Egypt, and due to my own fuck-ups left and right (part of the learning curve, my friends!) this tutorial took me two hours to finish - wow! Civilization VI does not fuck around!

2. Free play - India, standard settings

After the tutorial I jumped straight into a "quick play" game and was randomly assigned a civilization - India. I was Ghandi. Cool! No war for me! The map I ended up on had two giant continents, one bigger than the other, and four civilizations, two on each continent. I was stuck on the smaller continent with Arabia while China and Babylon shared the larger one. I ran into some trouble right away as Arabia's AI decided to aggressively push its religion (Islam) on my people and resist me for spreading my own religion (Hinduism) to theirs. They declared war on me multiple times throughout the early stages of the game, but I was able to hold them at bay on their side of the continent without losing any cities. Finally, I got to a point where my own army was large enough that I felt I could take on some of Arabia's cities, and so I declared war on them in the mid-to-late game and pretty quickly and easily wiped them out. This left me with control over an entire continent, but I was also lagging behind the other two civilizations in science and culture, which put me in a weird kind of last place as the game headed into its homestretch. I reviewed the various victory conditions again and, weirdly, settled on a religious victory, which requires that all other civilizations in the game follow your religion. I say "weirdly" because at this point my own civilization wasn't majority Hindu; thanks to Arabia's aggressive gospel spreading I was an Islamic civilization and each of the other two civilizations followed a third religion. So I got to work pumping out apostles and inquisitors and missionaries and, in time, converted my own cities back to Hinduism before spreading it across the sea to the other continent. My victory was never really in doubt once I realized I could go down this path - especially since China and Babylon were at war with each other, stalling one another's progress on the science and culture fronts. Cool - not the cleanest path to victory in a Civilization game, but I'll take it after mostly fucking around and playing defensively (and still figuring out certain game mechanics on the fly). I think this took me 350 or 400 turns out of a possible 500.

3. Scenario - Macedonia

After my first foray into free play, I decided to try out one of the game's baked in scenarios - 60-turn games based on real historical situations. In this one, I was Alexander the Great of Macedonia, and I had to capture every city on the world map in 60 turns. This was an all out military game and I can't even remember if culture or science existed - instead it was all about moving an army at maximum speed, with minimal casualties, all the way from Greece to the Nile River and to the mountains of Afghanistan. I restarted this game once, early on, after making a terrible and costly decision in the early game that wiped half of my army out right away. On my second try, I was able to finish it on standard difficulty (level 4 of 8) pretty easily, albeit with a real slog toward the endgame in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan. The thing about playing the military game in any Civilization game is that it's just so fucking time-consuming. If you've got 20 or 30 units, each turn consists of moving each of those 20 to 30 units in addition to managing your own cities and diplomacy and science and culture and everything else. I think this is why I tend to "turtle" in these games, and reduce my armies as much as possible - streamlined turns! Despite being 60 turns, this game probably took as long to finish as my ~350-turn Ghandi game. Yikes.

4. Scenario - Vikings (Norway)

Next up in the scenario pack was a Viking conquest scenario where you had to play as one of three viking kingdoms (Norway, Sweden, or Denmark) and then you got points for pillaging tiles, capturing cities, discovering Vinland, and converting to Christianity. It was a confusing game, to say the least, and even though I never captured a single city I beat the other two AI viking kingdoms running away by discovering Vinland first. In fact it almost felt wrong to me to obliterate the competition despite so many of my own fuck ups; I determined here to play the rest of my games at increased difficulty levels.

5. Scenario - Lithuania (Poland), Level 5

Here's another scenario in which I competed for points with two other civilizations. The gist here is that all three of us were central European allies defending against onslaughts of barbarians. Thus this too was a very military-heavy campaign. I won it in a landslide once again. Why? How? Perhaps these AI teams just weren't optimized to play the scenarios. Whatever, I only had one more scenario after this anyway.

6. Scenario - Australia, Level 6

This was an interesting one! This was an overtly military-free game in which the goal is just to turn an Australian colony into the most profitable colony you can by Turn 60. The default goal was to hit 500 gold per turn by Turn 60; by ramping up the difficulty to Level 6, I had to hit 700 gold per turn. But like I said, this was an interesting one. Once Turn 45 hits, you've entered World War I - this doesn't do anything military-wise, but it unlocks this gold-per-turn enhancement that the game is stupid hard to win without exploiting. And then by Turn 53, it's World War II, and the same enhancement doubles the gold-per-turn bonuses provided by these enhancements. What's all this mean? In simple terms, it means I was all the way back at, like, 50 gold per turn as late as Turn 45, and completely lost as to how you were supposed to beat this scenario. And then this exponential explosion occurred and I started increasing my gold-per-turn output by like 20, then 30, then 40 or 50 gold per turn... per turn. (Gold per turn squared? Whatever.) The arrival of these enormous perks seemed heavily and precisely tuned to the game's 60-turn limit. I would have lost the game, failing to hit 700 gold per turn, had it lasted 59 turns; by contrast, I would have probably surpassed 800 gold per turn had it lasted 61 turns. I can't really tell if this was a well-designed scenario or not, but at least now I'd finished them all, and was ready to return to free play to have some fun with modifications.

7. Free play - England, 150% speed, huge "islands" map, Level 6

Newly emboldened by my success on the scenarios at higher levels, I went ahead and set up a Level 6 game on an "island" map, playing as England, and ready to exploit all kinds of British perks to win (naval power, bonus production on cities founded outside of your main continent, etc.) I went for a "huge map," which includes the maximum map size and 12 total civilizations. I also went ahead and increased the play speed to 150% (so, a 333-turn game instead of the default 500). This combination was a total mistake! It turns out massive maps don't play well with accelerated playthroughs; when you send a ship across the sea, for instance, by the time it gets to where it's going some 20 turns later you're already like an entire scientific era beyond where you were when you sent the ship out! This meant I was virtually unable to wage war with overseas nations the way the actual British Empire did, because by the time my swordsmen got across the world, everyone had moved on to an era of gunpowder. It was just a bad overall fit! And by focusing so much of my resources and early strategy on overseas military, I'd neglected science, which meant I'd fallen too far behind the other civilizations to have any potential path to victory. I spent a lot of time on this playthrough, but ultimately abandoned it once the time between turns (in other words, the time it took for the other 11 civilizations to move all of their units and enact all of their policies) started exceeding multiple minutes. No reason to play out a losing effort when doing so is going to take literal hours, right?

8. Free play - Russia, 67% speed, large "real world" map, Level 6

For what I thought might end up being my final game of Civilization VI, I decided to play as Russia on a large map at a decelerated pace. I had epic visions of struggling through the early portions of the game on production-starved tundra tiles, ruling vast swaths of shitty nothingness while focusing on my science and culture and then ultimately making a totalitarian regime-style space race push to win a scientific victory after what I imagined could be as much as ten or fifteen hours of gameplay. It was a noble idea! Instead, here is what happened. I lasted maybe 100 turns before a raging Babylonian army made mincemeat out of my paltry defenses and took over three of my five hard-settled cities, long before concepts like communism or a space race were anywhere on my radar. I never stood a chance! Seriously, the handicaps associated with the Level 6 difficulty, the shitty tundra tiles I had to work with, and the Babylonian AI tendency to make early and expansive war meant that my mere vicinity to Babylon had me doomed form the start on this map. Oh well!

9. Free play - America, 67% speed, large "real world" map, Level 5

I dragged the difficulty level back down a notch and started my epic playthrough all over again, this time opting for a civilization I figured would have a little more breathing room - the Americans! Unfortunately, one of the other seven randomly chosen civilizations ended up being the Aztecs, and I was boxed in territorially from a very early point in the game. I went to war with the Aztecs right away to try to push them back south after they settled a city in Texas, but it was to no avail. They ended up owning everything on the Pacific Coast from Mexico up through Alaska, confining me entirely to the east of the Rocky Mountains. But! Their fatal flaw was in never expanding southward. To my great surprise, the entire continent of South America was uninhabited when I first landed an explorer there, and so I quickly put everything I had into setting up shop across that continent. I didn't end up owning the whole thing - Greece eventually made its way over from Europe and settled a few cities on the Brazilian coast, and we nearly got into a few wars over our proximity - but with Eastern North America and Western South America under my control, I had more than enough of an overall population to go after my main goal: a cultural victory. See, America's major perks all come into play in the late game, with advanced airplane units and tourism-boosting buildings and perks. Once I'd expanded my empire accordingly I played nice with all other civilizations to avoid wars and just put everything I had into getting as many tourists as possible to visit my cities. Before too long - just kidding, after like fifteen hours - I had triggered a cultural victory. Cool! And exhausting - this took like 600 turns to do, and by the end of the game the inter-turn wait times were upwards of one minute, just as they'd been in the British game I abandoned.

10. Free play - Germany, 200% speed, small "snowflake" map, Level 6

I knew my time with this game was coming to an end, but there were two major things I still wanted to do. One, achieve a scientific victory, the only type I'd been unable to achieve thus far. Two, win a game on that Level 6 difficulty where I'd sputtered out as England and gotten absolutely smoked as Russia. I opted for Germany, a civilization without any science bonuses, but with some very good production bonuses; to win the space race, you don't just have to discover technologies, you need to build spaceships! And I opted for a "snowflake" map, a six-spoked landmass with equal resources and tiles on each spoke for a perfectly balanced game. I also maxed out the speed because folks, I was goddamn sick of wasting hours on this game. A 250-turn game it would be! So I started out and almost immediately I fucked up real bad. One of Germany's perks is a substantial combat benefit against city states - independent, one-city civilizations that exist in every game that mostly just mind their own business. So I decided I'd go to war with one or two of these civilizations early on to try to expand my empire quickly. But on Level 6 difficulty you get so many combat handicaps, and the city states existed on little islands in the sea that made them extra fortified from attack. So I wasted substantial time and effort on a fruitless effort to capture those cities, and waste isn't a something you can tolerate in a 250-turn game on a hard difficulty where every turn counts! Long and short of it, I nearly restarted my game, then thought better of it, then got to a point where other civilizations were beginning to build their spaceports and spacecrafts while I was researching like, flight. But through an absolute concentration of effort onto the scientific research side of things, I eventually caught up on the technologies I needed and got to work building spaceports and spaceships. And baby... I won! I won by like one, maybe two turns tops, as at least one other civilization - Russia? - was one spacecraft project away from winning back when I was, shit, three away. Those insane production perks, coupled with some others I found during my playthrough, gave me the ability to come back from what felt like an impossible hole and to finally win a scientific victory - ostensibly the easiest type of victory to win.

So yeah. Just way too many hours spent on this game, and way too many nights where I'd look at the clock and go "holy shit, how is it two in the morning already?" and then still stay up until three. I've put the game back in its case and on the shelf, and I just don't see myself going back anytime soon. That said, if there's any DLC for this game in the future...  oh man, look out!

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Without getting all mopey-nostalgic, every new iteration of Super Smash Bros. that comes out reminds me more and more of how isolated we are in adulthood, in the "real world." Walk thorugh it with me.

Super Smash Bros. came out when I was in elementary school. I never owned it, so every single time I played it I was doing so with friends. "Friends" is even a stretch here - it's fucking fifth grade, you end up at people's houses surrounded by other people all the time - in a sense, you're playing with strangers.

Super Smash Bros. Melee came out when i was in middle school and remained a staple of my gaming diet all the way into college. This is, of course, the one I played to death, the one I played the living hell out of. I played it with friends, with siblings, with cousins, with siblings' friends, with neighbors, with neighbors' friends, and friends of friends. A quick glance at the name archive on my memory card would be a miles-long stroll down memory lane - I think my old babysitter is on there somewhere. So is an ex-girlfriend (or two). So is a then-ten-year-old kid who my mom would tutor at our house, who refused to leave our house without playing against me a couple times. Oh yeah - and also there are a bunch of college freshman floor-mates on there. It's just... my God, so many people, so many different people I would interact with, in that span that lasted from middle school to college, those crucially formative years where people enter and exit your life constantly and you're just used to it. The golden age, really, of Smash and of life!

Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out in my sophomore year of college. It wasn't as good as Melee - no one denies this! - but it also wasn't a bad game. It was a great way to blow off some steam and fuck around avoiding homework and studying at school, and it was still a social glue for my friends back at home. I didn't end up playing Brawl with the number or variety of people I played Melee with, but it still pulled in its fair share of names for the record book on my Wii.

Super Smash Bros. 4 - the one for the 3DS and the Wii U - came out when I was in my mid-twenties. My friends and I were hyped as hell, but I can't honestly say that we played it very often. There was online play, which was nice, but gone were the days where we'd hang out in person for no reason at all. I was married, I was a full time employee, I was a homeowner, I was taking part time classes - there just wasn't time! I won't pretend to know ho many names ended up in my record book on the Wii U, but it likely wasn't more than like, ten. Just ten core friends who'd been smashing with me for fifteen years or so.

And now Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is out, and it's probably the best game in the franchise yet on a technical level. And it doesn't matter. Because I feel like I've already played more of it than I will going forward. This thing's been out for a month now, and half of that month I was on vacation (staycation) from work, just chilling around during the holidays. And despite all that free time, and despite having this brand new game, I have played it in person with friends exactly twice. When my cousins and sisters visited after Christmas, we did not play Smash. When my good friend Steve tried to set up a "Smash Day" event, almost nobody came. And my good friend Keith, so often responsible for setting up our big dumb convoluted video game tournaments, has two kids and no interest in the game whatsoever. And my good friends both named Matt each live an hour away from me now, and surely aren't coming over just to play video games. And none of this is weird or unexpected; it's just life.

And now we have come full circle, because once again, instead of playing with friends, I'm mostly playing online with - yep - total strangers. It's funny how that works!

I'm looking forward to the DLC, though - that'll keep me coming back month after month for two-hour dabble sessions, I guess.

Anyway, like I said - best game yet in the series, probably.

Octopath Traveler

Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm really not thinking that hard about it, but it's possible that Octopath Traveler is the longest game I've ever played, with the end credits rolling for me after 70 hours and change. I don't mean that it's the game I've dumped the most hours into - plenty of multiplayer games and oft-revisited classics trump it easily on that front. And I don't mean that I've never spent more than 70 hours exploring the nooks and crannies of plenty of other games - RPGs in particular - what with all the optional sidequests and endgame content out there. What I'm saying is, insofar as any video game presents a "story" - a single-player campaign of some sort, whose completion is ostensibly the purpose of playing the game - I cannot currently remember ever spending more than 70 hours merely completing the story.

(Again, some caveats - this is an old-school JRPG with turn-based combat, so it's very likely that my playtime was padded immensely by repeated instances where I'd just sort of put the controller down for a minute or five without pressing pause in order to, I dunno, go to the bathroom, grab another drink, look up something on the Internet, what have you. But then, counter-caveat, by the midpoint of the game I was skipping cutscenes left and right, easily shaving off dozens more minutes of story. So.)

At any rate, it was a long-ass game! And frankly, a bit repetitive and a bit of a grind. I hated it sometimes! But also, I played it for more than 70 hours and generally felt the experience to be pleasant, relaxing, calming. It was a very easy game to play while watching low-stakes television or listening to podcasts

There's a lot I want to say about it, so let's jump in.

Characters

There are eight characters in the game - four men, four women - each with their own job class and skillset. The characterization was, all in all, very good. I got a very specific sense of their personalities and motivations for the most part, even if a few were pretty generic. The lone character I would describe as all-around shitty was H'aanit, a beastmaster of sorts who inexplicably spoke in Middle English (thou, finishedst, payen). Is this some weird-ass translation idea from a distinct old dialect of Japanese that works much better for a character covered in furs and living in the woods? I've got nothing! Beyond that, I mean, the thief was a thief - cocky, smug, prickish - the healer was a priestess with a heart of gold (obviously), and the honorable old knight was noble and courageous and all that jazz. Arguably the most interesting character was Primrose the dancer - and she was easily the bets in battle for me, though that could be because I chose her as my starting character. Primrose is this fallen princess from a sun-baked land - so, you know, "exotic," albeit not explicitly "of color" - who's hellbent on avenging her father to the point where she goes undercover as essentially a sex worker in a brothel just to gain some intel on his murderers. Her story was dark as hell and her character was fairly complex - she's the foil to the healer, basically, but over the course of her arc her anger gives way to more of a sadness, an emptiness. This made for a harsh juxtaposition with, for instance, the young merchant girl who's just excited to see the world and sell her wares. This brings us to...

Story

All over the place! Kind of a mess, honestly, and in my mind a real missed opportunity. See, the eight characters are all pursuing different things throughout the story. Why they meet up and interact at all is really a complete mystery the game never even tries to address. There's not unifying evil force here; each of the eight characters experiences four chapters in their story and their only interaction with each other occurs in these little optional dialogue scenes during stories. What this means is you'll be playing as the healer-priestess, a bastion of good and light in the world, and then you'll use the thief to pick a townsperson's pocket. And the game just never does anything with this. The dancer is running around the world trying to murder her father's killers, and then there's an alchemist who just wants to like, sell potions and shit, and there's no reason whatsoever for either one of them to help the other achieve their goal.

What I would have done, had I designed the game, is something like this. There are eight characters, right? This means that there are 28 distinct pairs of characters. I would have tried to make some sort of plot element revolving around each and every one of those pairings. The scholar needs to gain entry to a library, for instance, so the dancer goes ahead and seduces a guard for the key. The priestess needs to enter an old church, but it's locked - so the thief needs to pick the lock for her, and she gains some newfound admiration for him along the way. This feels like such an easy and crucial aspect of the overall story that was missing - these characters just don't interact with each other, at all. What's the fun in having an ensemble cast if you're doing eight individual and non-intersecting story arcs?

Gameplay

Pretty solid. I absolutely made hay out of the elemental attack abilities, and it's not clear to me that the game isn't broken in that sense - my dancer and my mage could each deal ten thousand damage to every enemy with a moderately boosted dual-casting of fire, ice, or thunder by game's end, without any buffs. Meanwhile, my best physical attacker - the knight? - could deal maybe two or three thousand at a time to one enemy with maximum boosting, and he also missed his attacks like half the time. Did anyone else have a similar experience?

One critique I have is that the random encounter battles were all fairly repetitive. The battle system emphasizes "breaking" enemies by using weapons or spells that they're weak against a certain number of times in battle, and by even the middle of the game a lot of the enemies required four or five hits to "break." Once broken, they're far more susceptible to all damage and generally you can kill them in one turn at that point - but this meant a lot of the battles were extremely easy, but very time-consuming. That feels like a design flaw to me, I don't know!

The boss battles - and in particular, the eight "final" boss battles - were a lot of fun. Plenty of strategy involved, and each one required what felt like a "battle plan" beyond "the healer heals, the knight wails away on this thing, etc."

But, one thing I'll point out is that the difficulty curve was sort of "off" all game. Because each of the eight characters has their own arc, the first Chapter 4 boss you hit is just insanely hard. You're underleveled, or at least not sufficiently overleveled! But by the time the last one rolls around, you're almost toying with it. If there had been a way to scale the difficulty of the final bosses - ramp up their levels and stats, maybe, for every Chapter 4 boss you've already killed - this probably would have been a more rewarding game.

All in All

I mean, it was good! I had my gripes with it, but I don't think there's a JRPG I haven't had gripes with in like, twenty years.

Anyway, glad to have this one finally beaten. Bring on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate!

Battlefield 1

Video games! Video games!

I'm not a huge FPS guy these days - and certainly not an online PvP FPS guy - but I was happy to plunk twenty bucks and six or seven hours of my time down on this World War I game. Five distinct stories - six, including the prologue on the front lines - and one's in a tank, and one's in a primitive airplane, and one's at the Gallipoli landing. It really was just an insane war, World War I, fought on horseback but also in tanks, using both airplanes and carrier pigeons. But what I really liked about this game - the first Battlefield game I've played, and far from a perfect game what with its fair share of bugs - was the diversity of the missions. Some would probably cite the campaign for not being long enough, but y'all know me - five hours spent as five characters in five distinct settings is just perfect, as far as I'm concerned.

Consider me marginally interested in Battlefield V, the new World War II game that follows the same campaign format as this one.

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

Here's a free downloadable title that serves as a prequel or tie-in of sorts to the upcoming Life Is Strange 2. As a standalone title, it's fine. Captures a great deal of the same vibe and tone as Life Is Strange did - nostalgic, whistful, bittersweetly tragic - but it's only like an hour or two long and it ends on a cliffhanger, which I probably should have seen coming but still sucks a butt in an otherwise character-driven game with an interesting story. Worth the dabble though, especially for the price.

Beautiful Katamari

Here's what's almost definitely the last game I'll ever play on an Xbox 360. (Finally!) Not because I've got no Xbox 360 games left on my backlog (I wish), but because all those that I have left are backward compatiable on the Xbox One.

At any rate - Beautiful Katamari. Yeah.  It's Katamari. It's the third overall game in the franchise, the first one I ever played, and the hardest one to find over the last decade.

I played and beat two Katamari games in 2010 and then a third one in 2012. Looking back now at the posts for all three of those, I think it's funny that in each of thsoe I basically say, "this is so stupid and so repetetive, but it's a lot of fun, so whatever." And sure enough, that holds true here, even after a six-year hiatus from the franchise. Roll shit into balls that grow bigger and bigger. Rinse. Repeat.

This game in particular felt repetitive, even more so than the other three, and I'm not sure why. Was there just not enough level variance here? It did feel like I was rolling around in the same exact city with the same exact layout for the entire second half of the game.

Still, any game I can beat in one sitting is a blessing of sorts these days.

And most importantly, RIP to my Xbox 360 - that is to say, retire in peace. This thing is an original white one, pre-HDMI, using component cords and everything, and it somehow never red-ringed. It's sounded clunky and scratchy, like a dying animal, for like eight years now. But it's still here, dammit. And now it doesn't need to be. Thank you for your service, buddy.

Mario Tennis Aces

Some people absolutely love when Mario does sports. I'm largely content to stick to his bare-knuckle brawling and kart-racing, but in a moment of longing for a multiplayer Switch game - no, really, anything at all - I went ahead and bought the latest Mario Tennis game. I liked it! The single-player mode was brief and varied enough that it never grew stale the way I feared it might - this is, after all, a game in which you hit a ball with a racket over and over and over again - but still challenging and frustrating enough by the end to give me a real feeling of accomplishment and relief when I finally beat some of the later levels. And multiplayer-wise, I mean, it's video game tennis, you know the deal, what more do you want?

I imagine I'll revisit this sporadically over the coming months, dabbling in online play every now and again with friends and strangers alike. But I'm just not very good at it, posting an abysmal record so far of something like 5-20 against the world at large, and an even worse, I dunno, 2-13 against Sheridan.

Do you know what sucks about this game though? There are some extremely basic options just flat out missing. Options like "play a regular tennis match comprised of sets and games" and "select the court you wish to play on." What the hell, Nintendo? This is some extremely basic shit you're lacking. I mean in this day and age it's easy enough to patch those options in, surely, but how does a first party game like this launch without having "customization" options in place that existed back in like 1992?

God of War: Ascension

The new and rebooted God of War is earning all kinds of praise, and I absolutely can't wait to play it - which is why I spent ten hours of my weekend finally getting around to the last God of War game, a relatively lackluster adventure with a story I couldn't even begin to follow or comprehend. I mean, this game's so lazy with its own timeline that I was jumping back and forth between "present day" and "two weeks ago" while maintaining all my power-ups and items. Guys - shoddy level design!

It's been a year or two since I last played God of War, but one change I defintiely noticed was to the combat system here. It was just as QTE-laden as ever, but with an interesting new emphasis on grappling enemies form afar and whipping them around at one another. I liked it! What I didn't like, however, was the sheer volume of enemies. This wasn't a difficult game, save for one brutal gauntlet of enemies toward the very end, but holy crap was it a monotonous game. A giant elephant monster - cool! Hours later, three giant elephant monsters at once - holy shit, stop padding this thing!

It could just be that I'm getting dumber with age, but I also noticed a lot of puzzles in this game - more than one of which tripped me up and sent me for a walkthrough. (Though in my defense, at various points my game was just glitching out, not triggering, say, an opening door, for whatever reason. Lots of "restart form last checkpoint," I'm sorry to say. Again - sloppy!)

What's funny is, as always, hype and expectations. I wasn't as impressed by God of War III  as I'd expected to be, but then, of course it's hard for a game to live up to the loftiest of expectations. By contrast, the muted response to this game had me prepared for the worst, and therefore pleasantly surprised for the most part by the experience I had playing it. Like, no question, God of War III is the better game, but Ascension wasn't nearly as far behind as the critical consensus would have had me believe.

Anyway, cool. Now that the six Greek games lie behind me, the Norse reboot lies ahead. Can't wait! (So, expect a post in 2020.)