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Review - Darksiders: Warmastered Edition

[Platform: Steam] [Control Scheme: PS4 Gamepad]

So Darksiders 3 is a thing apparently. It’s looking... like a game, I guess, but I did quite enjoy its predecessors a fair bit when I played them ages ago. The problem is that I never quite finished Darksiders 2, getting myself sidetracked as I am wont to do, so what better time than with a new entry on the horizon to finally go back and finish up Death’s perilous journey?

As it just so happened, I actually had the Darksiders games in my Steam library, along with upgrades to their remastered editions. In light of this bounty of Darksiders goodness (and the ability to ignore the frankly absurd DLC policies for the original DS2) I figured I may as well check out these “improved” versions and start my journey out at the very beginning, with Darksiders: Warmastered Edition.

Back when Darksiders first came out I played it on the PS3 and very nearly got the platinum trophy for it (missing the trophies for playing on the highest difficulty and that aggravating griffon trophy, which I will get to in a bit). I loved it. It felt like a perfect blend of some of my favorite franchises. Okay, more like a great blend of one of my favorite franchises and another franchise that I think is pretty good. Now that I’ve played through it once again, and in an enhanced form that has largely left the gameplay as it was, I can say that Darksiders is a satisfactory blend of what is still one of my favorite franchises in gaming (Zelda), a franchise that I still like but haven’t touched in ages (God of War), and a bunch of half-baked contributions from other game types I don’t really care about (namely, rail shooters).

Why has my impression of this game cooled somewhat? Well, for one thing, I think I’ve just gotten better at analyzing games over the years and also have less patience for clunky game design and shoddy controls. But if I were to pin down what constituted a majority of my frustration with this title, it would be due to my experience playing games in the Soulsborne series over the past several months.

I actually saw more than a few people trying to compare the Darksiders franchise with that of Dark Souls over the past week, so apparently I’m not alone in making this connection. But for me, the biggest point of contention I have with Darksiders against Souls is just how sloppy the controls feel and how poorly realized the combat is.

You see, Dark Souls and Bloodborne have kind of ruined for me a lot of action games, I think. With rare few exceptions, any failure I experience in those games is clearly my fault. It gives me a very robust set of tools to make my way through their world and its up to me to utilize that toolkit effectively. Every movement has purpose, every action a clear intent, and failing to exercise due diligence in feeling out the situation will more often than not lead to my character bleeding out on the floor. The Souls games are, in a word: fair.

Darksiders is not fair. But I may not have noticed this had I not played on Apocalyptic difficulty. A big part of Souls appeal lies in its (initially) obscene difficulty. Without the game forcing the player to carefully consider their actions and master the systems inherent to the experience, your typical erstwhile adventurer will just throw themselves willy-nilly at any and all threats, powering through on sheer brute force thanks to a lack of consequence for making mistakes. With each Soulsborne game, you don’t have that wiggle room, forcing you to *ahem* git gud (I hate myself for that) if you want to progress. But key to this requirement is the fact that these games give you every possible opportunity to do just that.

I’ve been talking a lot about Dark Souls in this Darksiders review, but I just want to impress upon you the magnitude of how frustrating combat can be in a game that doesn’t finely tune itself like a Souls game does while still having prohibitive difficulty. Because Apocalyptic difficulty in Darksiders is most definitely very punishing; even if it doesn’t present a challenge as intimidating as that of Dark Souls, it still punishes mistakes without mercy, but it doesn’t actually give you the same ability to overcome those mistakes without feeling kind of boring.

The reasons for this are threefold:

1. You take an obscene amount of damage on this difficulty. There are minibosses in the final dungeon that can take out upwards of 5 full health bars with a single hit, and you can only have 10 health bars! This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but combine it with the other 2 points and you have a problem that can only be overcome by playing it safe or keeping a lot of healing items on hand.

2. Hit-boxes are way too big. The amount of times that I could clearly see an attack land miles away from me yet still inflict damage was absurd. This is an even bigger problem when you consider how often you get swarmed by enemies, especially when you can’t keep track of them because this God of War-style action game keeps the camera right on War’s ass for some inexplicable reason. But this wouldn’t be that big of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that...

3. There are NO invincibility frames on War’s dodge! This is by far the biggest issue for a frenetic action game like this because it limits aggressive play by an astounding degree. Being able to dodge through attacks with precise timing is a big differentiator for higher levels of play because it allows you to maintain a steady offensive rhythm, allowing for faster resolutions and more engaging interactions in general.

Due to a lack of iframes, fights against more imposing enemies with long strings of powerful attacks just boil down to keeping your distance and popping in for quick hits when there’s an opening. It’s not exactly thrilling, especially when War’s dodge isn’t very satisfying to begin with. 

It gets worse with enemies like the aforementioned minibosses where you need to bait out a specific attack in a specific area to accomplish anything. For those fights, you need to wait until the very last moment for an attack that comes way too fast (for the enemy’s size) and has a hit box seemingly 50% larger than its effect animation that you can’t dodge through, which will hit you for massive damage. It’s frustrating as hell, and the best way to deal with it is to bait the attack at an awkward angle so you can just pre-dodge directly away from it and wait ages for it to bring the attack down. Boring.

I hate that I’m harping on this so much, but the lack of iframes really did kill a lot of my enjoyment. So much so that I feel confident saying that Apocalyptic difficulty just doesn’t really work in Darksiders. It’s not even like I had an extremely difficult time beating the game; it just felt unfair, despite also being kind of easy at the core of it.

But enough about how this game fails at being Dark Souls (and God of War, ‘cause I’m pretty sure that game had iframes), now it’s time to talk about how it fails at being a Zelda clone!

On the face of it, Darksiders does a lot of things right. It has some fun dungeons to traverse with interesting (if simple) puzzles to solve, and some pretty solid major boss fights at the end. It kind of misses the mark everywhere but the critical path though, missing the spirit of what makes Zelda games so beloved.

For one thing, the combat arena rooms get old extremely fast. There’s just too many of them and it’s much too transparent that they exist primarily as filler. I get that they’re trying to ape God of War at the same time as Zelda, but one of the biggest problems is that they never really do anything interesting with these arenas. It’s just, “Here’s a bunch of enemies you have to fight ‘cause magical barriers won’t let you leave. Have fun!” I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that many of these encounters could have involved puzzle solving of their own, such as requiring use of the environment to overcome the challenge, or even using the fight itself to overcome the environment in some way.

But outside of those arenas, there is an excellent illusion of non-linearity in some areas, even if there isn’t any real opportunity for branching. The worst that can be said for these dungeons is that they’re as straightforward as some of the lesser Zelda dungeons, which isn’t actually that bad.

But outside of the dungeons things don’t hold up so well, with the exception of the Ashlands, which could be thought of as a dungeon itself, in some ways. The biggest issue for me is the means in which you accumulate strength.

In Zelda games, you will find Heart Pieces and the like in simple chests, to be sure. But, many of those upgrades will require a more roundabout series of tasks to uncover or unlock, in a way that helps to more fully immerse the player into the world of Hyrule (or Termina or whatever). In Darksiders, every single upgrade is found in one of those simple chests, usually requiring a specific piece of gear to access, but never really requiring much thought beyond “Lock Meet Key”. I think a big part of this is due to how barren the world is, which makes sense considering it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, but still feels like a missed opportunity.

However, the biggest problem with the Darksiders progression scheme is the weapon experience. Put simply, girinding out XP for each weapon type is pointless busywork that adds absolutely to nothing to the game. Worse than nothing when it comes to one weapon, which, near the end of the game, just automatically levels up fully, rendering all your hard work up until that point completely fruitless. The only meaningful reason for this grinding is to allow the player to unlock new moves in combat, but these moves cost money (souls) to get anyways, so why bother with an extra gate, especially when enhanced moves don’t feel markedly different to begin with!

Actually, both weapon XP and grinding souls feel like some of the worst filler I’ve seen in a game like this. It just costs too much to buy stuff, which means you probably won’t use everything, and it takes way too long to get XP which means you have to go well out of your way to bring your weapons up to par which means you feel obligated to switch instead of actually wanting to. These systems exist purely as grinds for trophies/achievements, which is never a good thing. I don’t think I ever used/upgraded any of War’s Wrath Abilities besides Blade Geyser, which is kind of sad for a highest difficulty playthrough, normally encouraging players to make use of every tool at their disposal

I’ve been shitting on Darksiders a lot, but here’s thing... I still really like this game. I just wish I hadn’t subjected myself to Apocalyptic difficulty. It also shouldn’t come as any surprise that it fails to be quite as magical as a Zelda game nor should it be shocking that tacking on gratuitous progression mechanics does anything other than drag things down. That being said, there is so much to like about this game.

For one thing, it is absolutely gorgeous. Post-apocalyptic Earth has never looked so good (except perhaps in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West). The art direction is stellar, and with the HD facelift for Warmastered, it doesn’t look even remotely dated. Despite being set in barren wastelands and the dilapidated ruins of a bog-standard metropolis, everything somehow manages to pop. It is vibrantly muted in its aesthetic, and some areas (Twilight Cathedral especially) are truly breathtaking.

While it isn’t going to win any awards for storytelling, the plot is perfectly serviceable and the lore underneath it all is extremely compelling. Even if I didn’t care about War’s redemption arc, I still wanted to uncover more and more about this ravaged world.

The characters help here, each of them being clearly motivated (or just as clearly unmotivated, Ulthane) and distinct, with visually striking designs. You’re dealing with demons for the most part and one of the biggest twists in the game is that there is no twist involved with one of your “business relationships”. The voice acting ranges from perfectly serviceable to delightfully camp. War is laughably dour and stone-faced, almost to the point of absurdity, while Mark Hamill’s turn as the Watcher is, unsurprisingly, great fun.

While there are some pacing issues with the cutscenes, especially later on when things start moving along at an extremely brisk clip, the cutscene direction is excellent and makes use of some legitimately inspired cinematic techniques that feel as though they were ripped straight off a comic book page. The only real downside to these scenes is thanks to the Warmastered Edition. For some reason, the audio channels in cutscenes are completely unbalanced, with voices being extremely clear and loud, while everything else (music, effects, grunting voice effects) is almost inaudible. I tried my best to get around this issue, but couldn’t come to any real solution in the end.

And yeah, it does have good gameplay, despite all my griping. The flaws are just that: flaws. They aren’t game breaking or anything, they’re just all the more frustrating because they highlight how much better the game could have been with just a little tweaking. The weapons and movesets are all extremely satisfying to use, with the additional tools mixing things up in fun (if straightforward) ways. The controls aren’t perfect, and War does occasionally fail to grapple correctly at times, but they do the job more than well enough, for the most part.

The boss encounters are all very well done (if you can ignore the iframe issue) and excellent examples of class Zelda puzzle bosses. It’s also just fun exploring everything in your quest to tackle those bosses. Hell, Darksiders probably has my favorite fast-travel system in any game, ever. You don’t just pop into existence at some arbitrary map point, you actually have to travel on paths between worlds, and there are even a few important items hidden away on these paths. I can’t tell you how badly I want to see another game flesh out this fast travel system!

See, I wanted to get through all of those negatives right up front because I wanted to end on a high note. Darksiders is a great experience if you lov-- wait... ah crap, I did forget one thing to hate on...

That goddamn griffon rail shooter experience you encounter early on is the worst fucking shit ever. It control like shit. It throws shit at you with no impact. It’s just absolute chaos and has a bullshit achievement tied to it. It’s just shit. This game does not have good targeting controls, and thankfully you dont have to be too precise with them outside of this segment.

Anyways...

Darksiders is great. Play it if you haven’t. Play it if you have. Spoiler alert: Darksiders 2 is also great (in different ways). Just don’t play on Apocalyptic difficulty if you’re used to games with iframe dodging.

Final Score:

6/10 if you play Apocalyptic

7/10 otherwise

[infraredpenguin]

How To Feel Disappointed

STEP 1: Require music for jamming out whilst programming.

STEP 2: Go to YouTube.

STEP 3: Find and play the OST for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

STEP 4: Remember how stupidly fun and awesome that game was.

STEP 5: Remember the travesty of a follow-up that was Trials of the Blood Dragon.

STEP 6: Cry.

[infraredpenguin]

You know you’ve been watching too much Yu-Gi-Oh when your inner voice is saying your otherwise perfectly normal thoughts in the style of Little Kuriboh’s Malik Blishtar.

[infraredpenguin]

Monster Factory:

Ugh, it looks like Stephen King’s dick exploded.

[infraredpenguin]

I am so fucking done with developers not thinking through their user experiences and making what should be simple, painless processes into agonizingly laborious, often impossible trials. 

[infraredpenguin]

SIDE QUEST SPOILER ALERT FOR TORMENT: TIDES OF NUMENERA!

So I’m in the Bloom, jaunting about in all its icky glory, when I run across a happy little slave auction. Now, this thing is all perfectly above board and all, but just for funsies I decide to purchase a slave (an ex-thief/murderer) illegally, under-the-table dealings and all that. Well, after giving me his life’s story (and after resisting the temptation to order this sentient being to steal stuff for me), I decide I should find him a job to get his life on track.

Enter the Sundermans, or should that be singular?

Anyways, I find him a sweet gig at this little workshop, crafting all manner of dew-dads out of sticky Bloom meat. He’s happy, I’m happy, the Sunderman(s) is(are) happy, we’re all just happy campers. The Freedman quest is officially complete!

But you see, the thing about Sunderman elder and Sunderman younger is that they’re both the same person. Sunderman the young’un finds himself caught in a time stream that sends him into the past where he has himself an assortment of adventures and eventually finds himself back in the bloom, some years older, and willing to teach his younger self the ropes.

The thing of it is, this had all already happened to Youngderman, with his elder self teaching him his trade and giving dire (and cheeky) hints regarding his hapless future. So what we have here is a good ‘ol fashioned time loop. And if that weren’t enough, Sunderman the younger knows all about it (or gets the general gist at least) and is 100% on board for these temporal escapades to come.

But, I get to thinking (and by I, I mean my character, the Last Castoff): what if I just straight up murderized the root Sunderman? I may have also said this out loud... in his presence... directly to him.

Needless to say, Sunderboy wasn’t exactly in the same mindset of discovery that I found myself in, but I assured him that it was just me thinking out loud, nothing to worry about... but y’know, what would happen, d’y’think?

After this further pontification, Sunderkid was all kinds of nonplussed. I mean, why would I even say these kinds of horrible things to him? And I agreed, it was in very poor taste on my part, just forget I said anything... Or at least that’s what the angel on my shoulder was telling me to do. I stabbed him in the heart instead.

I mean, c’mon, you can’t tell me  you weren’t wondering what would happen too!

So yeah, Selderman sees what I’m doing and runs to his own temporal rescue, blah blah blah... he ded. Sunderman falls to my feet, choking on his lifeblood and then, poof! Goodbye Sunderman the elder! Goodbye workshop! Goodbye... slave pal?

Wait, who just updated my journal?

That’s right, doing this actually took a quest that had been filed as COMPLETE, and slipped it right back to IN PROGRESS. This is what the new note in that quest read:

Strangely, I feel as if I already found Coty a job, but that is clearly not the case. The Bloom must be getting to me.

I fucking love this game!

[infraredpenguin]

You know what, Taylor?

I wasn’t a big fan of you after all your “emotional intellergence”, but I really disliked Corrine and still managed to really come around to her in the end, so I’m always willing to re-evaluate and revise my opinions on people.

But you have scorned Corn’s gracious gift of Cheese Pasta and have destroyed any chance of redemption you might have had.

How do you sleep at night?

[infraredpenguin]

First Impressions - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

It’s usually a good sign when you sit down to play a game at 2 in the morning just to get a quick taste, only to look up and see it’s daylight outside. That’s exactly what happened last night when I first experienced the latest entry in the legendary Zelda franchise. Before I continue, I should probably say that I am playing Breath of the Wild on the Wii U, so I can’t speak to performance on that console.

Right out of the gate, I was actually pretty pissed off. Why? Well, because the Wii U gamepad has a persistent notification to switch to playing solely on its screen, and this notification is constantly fading in and out. I have a hard time dealing with stuff in the periphery of my vision, so this was extremely aggravating at first. I tried finding ways of turning off the screen or making use of my Wii Pro controllers, only for nothing to help alleviate this frankly idiotic flaw.

Thankfully, after an hour of playtime, I was so enthralled I completely forgot about my gamepad’s screen.

I will say, however, that I’m sick of companies fucking with their customer-base, doing shit like Nintendo has done here, essentially gutting the Wii U version of the game (a game they were definitely selling Wii U hopes on before) to promote their new console. They definitely had map and inventory functionality on the Wii U gamepad before, as well as examples of this kind of stuff in other games like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD. The gutting of these features for parity with the Switch, is shameful and insulting, but I digress.

Breath of the Wild is a fantastic game, and the degradation of what could have been doesn’t change that. So, here are a few major impressions I’ve had with the game so far:

1. The world is beautiful and awe-inspiring. From the art style to the sheer, terrifying scope of it, this is a world that begs you to explore it, and BotW has provided a multitude of reasons to do so. You’re really not forced into doing anything you don’t want to. Even the starting region, the Great Plateau, despite having a critical path to it prior to opening up the rest of Hyrule, gives you a staggering amount of leeway in terms of approaching your objectives and satisfying your explorative urges. Being a huge explorer-type, myself, I am legitimately fearful of what this game is going to do to my psyche... How will I escape from the lure of the wild?

2. The lack of handholding is refreshing and well executed. With minimal guidance that you almost have to seek out yourself, the game expects you to figure things out. The ways in which different objects react to each other, how Link behaves using different tools, and other elements such as the surprisingly engaging cooking system, all encourage the player to explore in some way or another. Death is a constant companion, or at least the threat of it is if you plan on being truly adventurous. Thankfully, all of this is backed up by a surprisingly robust save system for a Zelda game, ensuring you never lose too much progress and allowing you to dictate the flow of your experience.

3. Combat is dynamic and satisfying, but ‘ho boy, the controls for this game are a battle in and of themselves. Simply put, controlling Link with the Wii U gamepad feels kind of janky, and this is coming from someone who actually quite likes the gamepad. I’ve never felt as clumsy playing the Zelda HD remakes or Xenoblade Chronicles X or any other of a multitude of Wii U games I love as I do playing Breath of the Wild. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something just feels off, feels slightly unresponsive, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the fight against a hidden boss enemy in the starting area.

Beating this stony adversary felt like it required some arcane contortion of my hands, trying to juggle the Z-lock with the camera and jumping, running, and attacking. I blame a great deal of this on the binding of jump and run, diametrically opposed to one another on the X and B buttons. Now sure, once I went into the options and swapped them so jump was set to B and cancel/run set to X, things started falling into place a little better. Just picture trying to fight something by attacking with Y while dodge is either on B or X. One of those configurations is more natural for your thumb, plain and simple.

Unfortunately, even after some hours, I’m still not 100% in love with the control scheme. Using the wrong attack or accessing the wrong quick inventory isn’t exactly routine, but it happens often enough. Ultimately, it forces me to wonder why in the hell you can swap controls between 2 specific buttons but can’t reconfigure everything to your liking. This is nothing new with games, and is just one more way that developers disrespect their audience (especially disabled gamers, but that’s a topic for another day). There’s just no reason for it to be this way when it could be so much better.

4. That being said, there’s so much in this game to love that the janky controls are a comparatively minor concern. Once you leave the Great Plateau for the wider world it’s hard not to feel unbridled excitement for what’s waiting for you out there. This game has so far captured my sense of wonder and adventure better than any open world game I’ve played before (and I’ve played a ton). The best part is how much direct agency you have as a player, and the best example of that is in this game’s version of Ubisoft’s ICONIC™ Map Towers.

Rather than literally every other game with some form or another of a tower wot fills out your map, the Sheikah Towers expect you to do all the hard work. Sure, you climb them and it fills out your map, but only visually by drawing in some actual details into an otherwise featureless dark expanse. It reveals no Points of Interest, no objectives, and perhaps just as important, no other map towers!

Instead, you are expected to either wander aimlessly (a perfectly valid pursuit), or bring out your Sheikah Slate’s scope function, and cast your gaze all around the majestic world surrounding you from your lofty vantage. And if you do see something interesting in the distance, you simply place a marker pin from the scope and can then choose to convert that pin into different stamps on your map for future reference.

You don’t even have to be at a dedicated tower to do this!

I found myself exploring a ruined building at the top of a tall hill, thought it had a clear perspective on the surrounding locale, and decided to take out my scope for some marking right then and there. I sought out visible Sheikah Towers and marked them, as well as nearby Shrines and marked those too. I even saw some imposing foes in the distance and slapped down some skulls for future reference. The Sheikah Scope makes it a painless, and above all else, a satisfying experience.

Breath of the Wild is one of the only open world games in recent memory that actually trusts its players to their own agency, and it is infinitely better for it.

5. Right now, my favorite part of the game is easily discovering my little Korok buddies in the environment? Why, you ask? Because they are adorable, obviously... In all seriousness though, the fact that you have to keep your eye out for strangeness in your travels and solve a few mini-puzzles here and there makes them one of the best incentives for active exploration I’ve seen in a game. There may be some patterns to watch out for, but I’ve discovered at least 10 different ways for these forest fairies to manifest in the world, and I’m sure I’ll stumble across many more. I managed to find 15 of the little scamps before leaving the confines of the Great Plateau, and it was tempting to look for more!

So there you have it, my initial impressions of the latest Zelda game. Obviously it’s not perfect by any means, but I do think it has the potential to be the greatest expression of what an open world game can be if we stop trying to make everything painfully obvious.

I can’t wait to see the rest of this enormous world and how the story plays out, but who knows how long that will take...

[infraredpenguin]

Torment Tip(s): The Tome of Singing Thorns

It’s time for another Torment Tip! Er, that is to say, I ran across another logic puzzle that isn’t solved by leveraging your character skills and figured I may as well share my solution. Originally I had hedged my tipping bets by parenthesizing the “Tips” in the title, but even though I can now officially say I’m giving multiple tips, the brackets are gonna stay.

Anyways, this particular puzzle is much simpler than the Silver Sphere, so I’ll skip breaking things down into multiple stages. I recommend trying to figure it out yourself, but if you can’t, you can find the solution (and the reasoning) right here.

The Tome of Singing Thorns

This tome is a quest item that you can find in a pile of refuse at the Buried Crossroads. It’s involved in a quest called Borrowed and Lost, and all you really need to do with it is turn it in to the quest-giver. But if you examine the item in your quest inventory, you can actually Use it to unlock some welcome rewards...

Upon examination, you will find yourself able to touch symbols associated with the Tides present in the game. The actual nature of them as Tides isn’t important for this puzzle; rather, the sounds they produce on touch, and more importantly the colors of the symbols, are key to solving this mystery.

By further examining an inscription on the tome, you are presented with the following clue:

“Symptoms - Cyanosis, Haemophilia, Spontaneous bruising, Jaundice, Argyria.”

“See her as she was. You do not deserve to forget what you lost.”

At first glance, this seems like complete nonsense, but what it’s actually telling you is the order in which you touch the colored symbols:

Cyanosis - bluish discoloration of skin

Haemophilia - impaired ability to produce blood clots

Spontaneous bruising - purplish skin hue due to pooling blood

Jaundice - yellowish pigmentation of the skin

Argyria - discoloration of the skin due to silver exposure

If you put that all together, the solution is obvious:

BLUE, RED, INDIGO, GOLD, SILVER

As you touch the symbols in that order, the resulting sounds will harmonize before transforming the tome in dramatic fashion. Your reward?

Permanent +1 to Intellect Pool!

But wait, there’s more! Thankfully, unlike the Silver Sphere, all you have to do this time is repeat the original order. This time you get a couple XP and some more exposition. But hey, better than nothing, right?

Once you’ve performed this solution twice, there’s nothing to be done with the Tome of Singing Thorns besides handing it in to complete the quest, Borrowed and Lost.

I’ll be sure to come out with new Torment Tip(s) as I run across them! This game is certainly taking over my life enough to do so anyways...

[infraredpenguin]

Torment Tip(s): The Silver Sphere

Torment: Tides of Numenéra has me utterly enthralled. I had intended to do something resembling actual work today but instead found myself gabbing away with the wacky denizens of Sagus Cliffs all damn day. I’m still bracing myself for some form of disappointment, but so far this game is everything I could possibly want.

So rather than go silent on Day 2 of “Me Trying Not To Be a Lazy Bastard”, I figured I’d share some tips on a puzzle I ran across relatively early on. 

One thing I really can’t recommend enough though: DO NOT LOOK AT GUIDES FOR THIS GAME! 

Not for your first run-through anyways. It’s just so much fun uncovering these mysteries on your own, consequences be damned, and it feels so much more in keeping with the Torment series’ themes of self-discovery and bewilderment. That being said, if you find yourself legitimately struggling with something, there’s no shame in seeking help; just don’t go out of your way to spoil the “best path” or something like that.

Anyways, on to one of my Torment Tips! Well, this may be the only tip I end up giving, so... Torment Tip(s), yeah.

THE SILVER SPHERE

Early on you should come across a location known as the Order of Truth. You may even end up here as part of the main story path you choose. During the course of your exploration of this building, you will likely run across a mysterious interactible pyramid object that contains a Silver Sphere. Now, clearly this is a Numenéra, and that means you gots to mess with it, but unlike everything you’ve probably encountered up until this point, this puzzle can’t be solved by simply throwing Effort at it.

There’s also nothing that I found in the game world that hinted at this puzzle’s solution, forcing me to come up with the solution somewhat more organically. What follows is a breakdown of this (admittedly simple) puzzle, in 3 parts:

A Quick Reference

Puzzle Logic

Solution

As for the reward waiting for you at the end, that’s for you to find out (SPOILER ALERT: it’s ok).

Silver Sphere Option Reference

This puzzle will require selecting from a specific series of directions in order, based on whether you are removing or returning the sphere to its home. This might be tricky to remember as you’re doing it (I wrote it out in Notepad++ while playing), and isn’t going to automatically give away the puzzle’s solution, so I present it here for easy reference. How you access these options is up to you:

REMOVE Front: Deep Violet Left: Lurid Red Right: Dull Orange Back: Brilliant Blue Bottom: Shining Yellow

RETURN Front: Bright Orange Left: Deep Violet Right: Blazing Orange Back: Cool Green Bottom: Indigo

Silver Sphere Puzzle Logic

Basically, you want to find some way of removing the Silver Sphere from its “prison”, but every time you try to do so, it magically returns home. Depending on which side of the pyramid you extricate and restore the sphere through, the sphere will change color.

This being Torment, there are some opportunities to flex your stat pools a bit to get some help, one being required for completion, and the other necessary to understand how the puzzle works.

By examining the base of the pyramid, you can attempt to decipher the meaning of the strange writing on the device. Upon success, you uncover the following inscription:

“The crimson dawn greets the seeker. The violet dusk sees the search’s end.”

This is key to figuring out the solution, but as far as I can tell it isn’t required if you’ve just looked it up elsewhere (naughty, naughty). Normally, playing with the sphere allows you to pass it through 4 different openings, but there is a fifth “bottom” access point that is only available once you’ve examined the pyramid’s frame more closely and passed the Perception check there.

Once you have access to the bottom and understand the puzzle’s clue, you can solve this puzzle by playing with the color or the sphere.

Based on the inscription, it’s clear that the sphere needs to start out crimson (or red) and end as violet, but simply removing the sphere from the left side and returning it via the left side doesn’t do anything special. So what needs to be done inbetween?

Silver Sphere Solution

Think rainbows!

Or, more accurately, think back to elementary school and learning the order of rainbow colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, aka ROYGBIV!

Armed with that knowledge, solving the puzzle is a snap... or you could just follow the following instructions:

LEFT, RIGHT, BOTTOM, BACK, BACK, BOTTOM, FRONT

Bam! Enjoy your new item!

Extra-Super-Special Solution

What’s that? Don’t fancy your reward? Well don’t worry, cause there’s still one more, even better solution to this puzzle! I’ll give you time to figure it out..

..

....

........

Got it? No?

Basically, on top of following the colors of the rainbow, you want to use every color option keeping in mind the intensity of the colors coming from the sphere, like so:

Remove (→) Return (←)

Lurid Red           → Left

Bright Orange    ← Front

Dull Orange       → Right

Blazing Orange  ← Right

Shining Yellow    → Bottom

Cool Green        ← Back

Brilliant Blue       → Back

Indigo                 ← Bottom

Deep Violet         → Front

Deep Violet         ← Left

Once you’ve returned the sphere for the final time, it turns into yet another item. In other words, if you want both items, be sure to save this solution for last!

To be honest, while I knew what I was doing for the previous solution, this one was stumbled on completely by accident, just seeing why there were multiples of some colors. I’m not sure why the Orange options work Bright/Dull/Blazing and not Blazing/Dull/Bright, but that’s just how it is.

Anyways, hope you’ve enjoyed this little tip for Torment: Tides of Numenéra and that you’re enjoying the game as much as I am. I don’t know if I’ll be making anymore of these Torment Tip(s) seeing as I’m playing the game blind and it ultimately depends on whether I can actually figure things out on my own and whether I consider these solutions “obvious” or not.

Please let me know if you liked this though and I’ll seriously consider doing more!

[infraredpenguin]

First Impressions - Torment: Tides of Numenéra

First thing’s first: I helped to kickstart this game at around $150 (gotta get dat collector’s edition) which is about the softest “conflict of interest” possible I think. You see, I’m a huge fan of all the Infinity Engine games, with Planescape: Torment holding a very special place in my heart. Furthermore, I’m a big fan of pretty much anything being worked on by the legends over at Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment, and while this particular game may not be made by Obsidian directly, it does use their excellent Pillars of Eternity engine. I say this because Obsidian is easily my favorite game dev studio.

Long story short, the bias is strong with this one.

Now, I’ve played the new Torment for a few hours, so this isn’t going to be anywhere close to comprehensive, but I can share a few of my feelings and thoughts thus far.

1. 90-95% of my time has been spent reading. And I’m not even counting the reading of skills and such, which would bump things up closer to 99%. So far, the amount of written material in this game is mind-blowing. I’m only in the first “major” map and I feel like I’ve spent more time there getting to know the characters and world than I have in any other game I’ve played before! Considering that PS:T’s greatest strength was the writing, I feel like it’s safe to say that they’ve managed to capture at least some of what made that game so special.

Now, that being said, I don’t know how reactive the dialogue is going to be throughout the course of the game, but I have been experiencing little snippets of consequence for my decisions, even if those decisions are as simple as my lore-hound ways of dragging out every conversation branch getting on some NPC’s nerves. I honestly feel like I’m going to have to carefully consider what I should or should not ask (either that or do a ton of save scumming).

All of these little reactions that I’ve witnessed so far, including their occasional tie-ins to the Crisis system, are giving me a great deal of hope for how things will be by the end of all this.

2. This might be a small thing, but this has the best control scheme for a conversation system I’ve seen. Really, it’s as simple as being just like the IE conversation system I know and love combined with responsive selections, and the ability to progress using the spacebar and select my decisions using both the primary number keys AND the numpad (something that I have seen ignored by so many similar games)! Considering how text-heavy this game is, fucking this up would have had brutal consequences for my user experience.

3. The UI is just pretty slick in general and very responsive. I love how all items have lore behind them, and am so happy to be able to examine the environment all over the place. If I had one big complaint, it would be that while pressing ‘TAB’ to highlight interactive areas in the world was executed extremely well, the highlighted NPC names are just too large, flashy, and easily jumbled together. If there was an option to minimize NPC names during TAB highlighting, I would enable it in a heartbeat.

4. I haven’t done much in the way of combat at all, but ho boy am I glad it’s turn-based. I don’t know how enjoyable it’s going to be in the long run, but at least it can’t be any worse than the sloppy combat in Planescape: Torment. Honestly, just the fact that there appear to be so many varied options available to you during the resolution of Crises will probably make it infinitely more bearable.

5. Which brings me to my final impression, which is that I have almost no idea what I’m doing... and that is GREAT! A big problem with PS:T is that it’s shackled to the AD&D ruleset, which automatically puts me into a min/max mindset. Now, that game turned things on their head a great deal what with making Wisdom the most important stat in the game, along with all the other tweaks emphasizing thoughtful exploration over tactical combat, but everything was all still fairly obvious and it wasn’t tooooo hard to min/max everything in that realm either.

Conversely, Torment: Tides of Numenéra has so many “skills” and “descriptors” and you can’t even see a big list of them all at once, and it’s not immediately obvious what they all do outside of providing assistance in context-sensitive situations. What this means is that I didn’t feel bogged down in trying to make the perfect all-rounder character. I went through the tutorial bits, was told I was a Graceful Nano, looked through some of the other stuff, but by no means all of it, and just said, “Fuck it, I am a Graceful Nano! Let’s get this show on the road!”

This might all be a grand illusion, but it feels like even if I tried min/maxing, I simply wouldn’t be able to cover all of the bases out there, so there’s no perfection to be had, just a unique experience. The stat pool system also seems like it could throttle being able to pull off every single situation you encounter. The only thing that worries me is the fact that conflict resolution seems to center around pushing up percentage chances through skill, stat, and circumstance, potentially leading to judicious save scumming bursting that illusion.

So yeah, like I said before, I don’t know exactly how this whole experience is going to pan out, but I am hopeful as hell. Worst comes to worst, at least I’ll have one hell of a read on my hands...

[infraredpenguin]

Been meaning to get back into writing so much, and I don’t know that it’s because of my back problems or laziness or anxiety (should probably get back on some meds of some kind, really), but I told myself that I would put my foot down come March and ‘lo and behold, look what fucking month it is...

Anyways, I’m still not sure what exactly what I’m going to do to keep myself motivated, but I do know that trying to consistently post every day is going to be a huge part of maintaining that motivation. Stream of consciousness rants? Sure, why not? Game and other reviews? Yup, that’s what I originally had planned. Blogging about developing apps ‘n such? God, I hope I can commit to something after all this time letting myself wallow in self-pity...

I’ve been on a huge Final Fantasy kick ever since starting Brave Exvius mid last year, so you can count on getting some FF action, including a bunch of Final Fantasy x|v stuff. Also, look forward to me simultaneously beaming over and ripping the shit out of Final Fantasy XV and all of its related bullshit.

For now though, I do want to get a proper post in on this first day, and this confessional shouldn’t really count in my eyes, so expect some first impressions on the newly released Torment: Tides of Numenera once I’ve gotten that installed and hung out in that world for a bit.

Fingers crossed that I can stick to some kind of schedule, ‘cause I really need to find myself some semblance of a routine at this point...

[infraredpenguin]

Last year during my summer break I started watching Breaking Bad. Well, “started” isn’t precisely correct as I had actually started watching around the time season 3 was out and ended up losing interest early on in season 2. It’s a tough show to watch, for a variety of reasons, but I can’t deny that it is an extraordinary show as well. But if I was going to try to finish watching it now that it had a definitive ending, I may as well go back to the beginning, so last year during my summer break I started watching Breaking Bad, again.

Why? Two big reasons really. The first one being the 5th season episode “Ozymandias”. Coming off of season 2 of Hannibal and that superlative finale, “Mizumono”, I couldn’t come across anyone gushing about it without someone else mentioning how Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias” blew it out of the water. The general consensus seemed to be that as incredible as “Mizumono” was, “Ozymandias” just took it one step further. I knew that I had to witness this impossible feat myself, preferably before getting spoiled (how I managed to avoid spoilers for this long, I have no idea, but I knew that once I started up again, the risk was ever higher of course), and so I knew I had to Break Bad all over again, ASAP.

The other reason for starting up again was Better Call Saul. I had no idea what this show was outside of being tied to Breaking Bad; in fact, I hadn’t even met the Saul Goodman character yet. But I kept hearing friends at school rave about it and something about the style of that logo called to me. I’m not one of those people who can just jump about all willy-nilly with entertainment though (except for Discworld where I was desperate to get any fix I could). Hell, I remember reading through The Wheel of Time multiple times, then when the final book hit, that was 6 months of my life gone because how could I do anything but start from square one again (square zero, technically, as I had also picked up the prequel novel in the interim).

So off to Breaking Bad I went...

I’ll say again, it’s a tough show to watch, but not for the reasons it might be for most. After all, I count Hannibal as my favorite show of all time, and that one can be deeply unsettling. But I never felt put off by Hannibal. Far from it, I couldn’t get enough of these characters. But I was fed up with Walter White mid-first season.

Don’t get me wrong, Bryan Cranston did a phenomenal job in his starring role, which is probably why I hated him so fucking much. I mean truly despised him. His every action had me desperately rooting for the show to visit untold misery upon him. I wanted to strangle him through my TV screen every time he put on his pathetic shows of bullshit for the people he mistreated as a matter of course. And I’m pretty sure I was supposed to hate him, but it made for a difficult show to watch.

Thankfully, Breaking Bad can be a breath-taking experience, one well worth suffering through Heisenberg’s bullshit for. And most every character surrounding Walt was a character I felt a sincere attachment to: Jesse Pinkman, that sweet misguided boy suffering so much abuse at the hands of his “adoptive father”. Gustavo Fring, a terrifying yet dignified businessman who you could at least respect for his varied acumens, Mike the Cleaner, the consummate professional and the only person that wasn’t having a single fucking iota of Walt’s shit, Saul “Better Call” Goodman, my favorite character the instant he showed up on screen, even Hank, that bigoted asshole, reserved a sweet spot in my heart as I cheered him on in his unknowing pursuit of his brother-in-law. Fuck, just thinking back, there were so many incredible characters to share in the experience with, but when you loathe the protagonist of the story with every fibre of your being, fatigue sets in.

It took me months to get back into the show after stopping a couple episodes into season 5. But I finally finished it this past week, and as thrilling as it all was, more than anything else it just left me feeling tired. I felt like Mike must have in his final scene, just wanting it to be over, wanting to be free from Walter White’s interminable justifications and fabrications.

“Ozymandias” came and went. It was good, sure, but didn’t hold a candle to “Mizumono” in my eyes. It wasn’t even the best episode of Breaking Bad in my opinion, just a solid example of shit going to, well, shit. But when compared to the ticking tension of Hannibal’s masterpiece of television, the fear of what we knew was coming, what couldn’t be stopped, and the twisted love expressed between these characters we’d come to bond with in all their shattered psyches, something about “Ozymandias” just felt kind of, I don’t know, pedestrian I guess...

I’m not a fan of Game of Thrones, I don’t particularly enjoy putting characters through the ringer just for the sake of it, and bombastic earth-shattering events just don’t do it for me the same way that quiet introspection can. I’m not saying that you’re wrong for preferring those things if you do, it’s just something I’ve grown weary of.

Which is why, having nearly finished season 1 of Better Call Saul, I can say that I much prefer it to Breaking Bad. I don’t really feel like getting into any deep analysis here, but I just want to say it’s nice to watch something without feeling weighed down by its characters. I enjoy being able to like characters, and I can say that about everyone I’ve encountered so far in Better Call Saul. Hell, even the characters I “hate” feel like I’m in on some cosmic joke with the show’s creators as opposed to feeling something visceral and disconcerting like I did with Walt.

I’m glad that Breaking Bad exists in the form it does, and it deserves so many of the accolades that it received, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sit through it again. I just fucking hate Walter White so much. But Saul, sorry, Jimmy McGill is a person that I can admire through all of his faults and persistence in the face of world that wants him to fail for not embodying the virgin perfection so idolized by our corrupt society. It doesn’t matter that I know how things turn out for him, I want to see him experience some measure of happiness, some form of victory over the world at large, even if it proves a fleeting one.

It feels good to feel good about Better Call Saul, and I just hope that it continues to stand apart from Breaking Bad in the season(s) to come.

[infraredpenguin]

I give up, I just straight up give up.

I won’t be able to sit back and play FFXIV using my wireless DualShock4 controller cause for some reason the entire bluetooth pairing/connection process is an unmitigated nightmare.

It doesn’t help that there is no clear answer online as to how this problem can be fixed, or what certain error codes even mean or that people seem to be reading-adverse and automatically treat the person in need like a complete moron who needs to be told to turn the computer off and on again.

It should also be pointed out that this very same PS4 was connected to my PC (in a state practically identical to its previously connected state) even before I had a PS4, and that it wasn’t until after I paired it with my shiny new console to jam out with my wife on some Lego Harry Potter HD that it decided that it would no longer see eye to eye with my PC.

And don’t even start with me about unpairing it from the PS4 or installing this DS4 tool or that InputMapper thingy, cause I’ve done it, I’ve done all of it. Well, almost all of it, cause I sure as shit haven’t bothered tearing apart my registry or wantonly uninstalling every single vestige of bluetooth driver that lairs deep within the bowels of my rig (and ho boy, there seems to be no end to the bluetooths that show up in my device manager).

Could I do those things? Yeah, sure... I mean, I used to work tech support, I’m a fairly deft hand with electronics, and I can usually work my way through most technical problems. Oh, and did I mention I figured this garbage out already before?

Here’s the thing...

I shouldn’t have to put up with this shit.

Nobody should have to put up with this shit.

More and more as I’ve gone through school, studying software engineering and its related disciplines, I’ve come to realize just how critically important it is to design and develop our technologies for the people using them. It’s so easy to forget people with lesser (and greater) depths and breadths of knowledge and experience than yourself, and that factor is painfully apparent in software engineering or really anything that relies on pushing out a user experience of any kind.

I feel like we often fail to stop and ask if maybe there’s a better way of doing this, or that we just throw up our hands and proclaim, “DONE!” when really, our work is just getting started.

Sure, there are realities of time and budget to bear in mind, but more and more I see those technically valid excuses as nothing more than a flimsy foundation to prop up short term thinking and greed. We’re so damn focused on just getting stuff out there, and to hell with anything beyond superficial quality.

But then, that’s just the natural result of working within the systems we’ve found ourselves trapped in. A rant for another time, I guess...

tl;dr

Bluetooth can suck my ass

[infraredpenguin]

It has been ages since I last posted, mostly thanks to school, but also mostly cause I just didn’t feel like I had anything worthwhile to say. That last bit probably hasn’t changed, but I am angry, so that’s something.

I’ve actually been considering getting back into this seeing as I’ve been doing a great deal of gaming and have some projects on the horizon I’d probably enjoy talking about. Combine that with what is likely going to be an excess of free time on the horizon due to finding out I have a debilitating scoliosis development thanks to a long-standing injury, and I probably should return to this little outlet of mine.

But before I do any analysis of my recent obsession with all things Final Fantasy, I’d just like to spend a few words discussing something I’ve had to contend with this past night due to my pain rendering me incapable of sleep:

BLUETOOTH IS THE MOST HEINOUS JOKE OF A TECHNOLOGY EVER TO EXIST!!

That is all.

[infraredpenguin]

Ok, Bethesda, you’ve got a low bar thanks to EA, but as far as I’m concerned you’ve got the greatest potential to blow my mind.

Ball’s in your court.

[infraredpenguin]

I suppose I should rate how well EA fulfilled my “prediction”...

I asked for more Pele and they gave us some weirdo doing Shakespeare about a soccer game.

EA Hopes and Dreams Rating:

B+