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[pants-jones]

Im just posting this to let it be known to the 0 people who read my blog, my header does not mean i like trump. i have a pic like it with obama, but since trump sucks and Funny Valentine was a villain in jojo, i thought it fit more than obama.

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Ultrakill: Greed Update

I haven't posted in a while but when I beat Layer 4, I will talk about this game. Unfortunately I wasn't aware that V2 was gonna come back to kick my ass. Gimme like a week.

[pants-jones]

Cyberpunk 2077 needed more time and people need to accept that

This is probably going to be a shorter post, because I haven’t finished the game yet and I would like to before making a review on it. People are complaining to CD Projekt Red about Cyberpunk running like shit on the base PS4 and Xbox One. Because the game was going to be made for those consoles but now it came out in the next gen. People are actually complaining that their base PS4′s, the ones they got LAUNCH day in 2013 or some shit, isn’t running their 2020 Triple A game right. Asking for that is like asking to run Fallout 3 on a Leapfrog from 2004. The company saw how ambitious this game could be and they went for it. It took them seven years but thanks to people sending actual death threats to the developers because of another delay, they released the game with bugs.

I’ll admit some of them weren’t that bad. A couple npc’s T-posed when I killed them but that was it. But then there was a gamebreaking bug that wouldn’t let me progress because it kept prompting me to speak to a character that had nothing more to say to me. And I’m sure there will be more. What makes me the most angry about it is that people are gonna say that the game is bad or even awful now, because of bugs that could’ve been fixed if there was only a bit more time. People treated this game like it was an actual miracle, like it would fix their relationships and heal all their traumas. The hype for this game got way too big. And whenever anything gets hyped up way too much, people get dissapointed when the game fails to meet their impossible expectations. I wish this game got more development time. 

Speaking of games that didn’t get enough time in the microwave, apparently around the time the Cold War beta came out, activision had Sledgehammer and Ravensoft (idk if thats their name) start working on the new CoD2020. But because they kept fighting over what the game would be, they scrapped everything and had Treyarch make a brand new game 6 months into development. Which explains why the game came out with so little. But nobodies gonna hear that. It came out how it came out. Same with cyberpunk. These games need way more time in the oven. 

[pants-jones]

Black Ops: Cold War came out half baked

Everyone who’s played Call of duty knows that Activision releases a new one every year. They’ve kept this pattern up for as long as I can remember, and now with the new game out, they’ve gotten a lot of criticism because of it. Now, nobodies really blamed them specifically because of the yearly releases, but I think it’s clearly why their games have been so... meh. There hasn’t been a CoD game that’s been all around praised since Black Ops 2, in 2012. everything after that has had some sort of problem or was just total garbage. Modern Warfare 2019 wasn’t exactly my favorite, and I will forever despise Warzone (really bad BR 2/10 if you play solos 3/10 otherwise), I was actually really excited for Cold War. The live event they did for the trailer was really cool and got me super hyped for the game, but now it’s out. and ignoring the campaign, there are eight multiplayer maps, around 8-9 game modes, 20 guns with only a few of them being actually viable, and one zombies map. That’s ignoring all the bugs, server crashes and glitches the game suffers through. This game has 3-4 more maps than it did when the beta and alpha were playable. The lack of content is so obnoxious that I haven’t played the game for a week and I probably won’t until they add some more stuff for me to do. This game flopped so hard on release, and now zombies is the only thing carrying the entire game. And zombies has just as many problems as multiplayer.

The gameplay for the most part is the usual CoD gameplay- point and shoot. Boots on the ground. The usual. But see, Modern Warfare made a change to how CoD worked. The movement and the way you played felt so different from any other CoD, and the game had plenty of content from the start. Plus, they kept on adding to that. Infinity Ward actually did pretty good with Modern Warfare, which is good because their track record recently hasn’t been the best. But now we’re at Cold War. and it’s way too disappointing. The game plays a bit more like older CoD’s but with some newer mechanics. Killstreaks don’t reset when you die, which I like a lot. and that’s pretty much all the praise I have for it.

The thing that I dislike the most about Cold War (and I’ve disliked this since the beta came out) is the throwables. Not the throwables themselves, but how you through them in the game. I have never played an FPS where a character uses throwables with their left hand. I’ve never even seen it.  Even in CoD, they always throw grenades and flashbangs with their right hands. But after 20 years of making these games, they’ve decided to change it up for no reason and make everyone in Cold War left handed. I’m slowly getting used to it, but when I started playing I fucked up throwing grenades and stuns so many times that I shouldn’t have. I don’t know why but it throws me off so hard that I’ve almost stopped using grenades. 

On top of that, I feel like stun grenades in this game have way too much range. I’ve stunned myself way too many times because I mess up my aim because of the left handed throwing, but even when I think I’m far enough from it I still get stunned. I admit I like how getting stunned actually stops you from being able to aim for a second. In MW, as long as someone was facing you it didn’t matter how many times they got stunned, they could still put you down. 

They brought back shotguns as secondary weapons which I think everyone likes. I think I’m speaking for everyone when I say that we’re all sick of the fire shotguns. I don’t mind that there’s only two either, because what other kind of shotgun would they put in? There’s a full auto and a semi auto, just pick and choose. They’re both pretty good, so there’s no problem from me. One problem I do have is how they murdered all the snipers. In MW, most people used the Kar98 to snipe, or maybe the AX50 or the HDR (whatever your taste was I personally like the Kar98) and usually a good body shot was a kill, and you had pretty good ADS time even with bigger snipers. But in this game, I feel like I could write this entire review before I can finish scoping in. And most body shots just end up in hitmarkers. Nothing but hitmarkers. I don’t really bother using the snipers for range anymore because of this. A good substitute is the Type 63 (unless the enemy is like... really really far). It’s a DMR and once you get a scope on it, it’s way easier to use. 2 shots for body shots and one shot for heads. 

I’ve heard a lot of people saying that the game looks like “PUBG combined with CoD mobile” and I have no idea where they’re coming from. They complain about how all the realism is gone and how the movement is so “clunky” when Treyarch has never been the ones to make realistic shooters. Every single old CoD game had movement more like this, and they’re complaining about it. It’s so stupid to me. I like how the game looks, I think it looks amazing personally. 

Now, moving on to zombies. I’m not exactly the biggest zombies fan but I’ve spent many an hour on Kino Der Toten, so I know some stuff. I don’t have many complaints about the new zombies really. The map they have is Die Maschine, which I’ve heard is a remake of an older map. It’s not a bad map in my opinion, not too many weird enemies like with Shadows of Evil and it’s weird flying booger wasps. (I fucking despised those wasps so much). I do get annoyed at the poison dogs but that’s not that big of a deal. I’ve only ever encountered a bug once, and it just wouldn’t let me accept the exfil request. But my least favorite part is that you don’t get points for damaging zombies anymore. You have to kill them to get around 90 points. It adds a weird layer of difficulty to the game, making it a bit more difficult to get more points when you really need them. 

Overall, I think Cold War should’ve been in development for about 3 more months. There simply isn’t enough to play, and the stuff they will be adding soon probably wont be enough either. As of right now, I’m rating it a 5/10, but that’ll probably change in the future.

[pants-jones]

Bioshock

 The title of this is simple because Bioshock is a game I almost forgot that I played, but as soon as I remembered it a truckload of Bioshock stuff came flowing into my mind, and I decided to write about it here so I can finally seal all the stuff about these games in my brain vault forever. The Bioshock series consists of three games, Bioshock, Bioshock 2, and Bioshock Infinite. Around when Infinite came out, I heard a lotta talk about how amazing it was, but I was like 10 at the time so I never got to play it until it was free on PsPlus a couple months ago, along with the other two. The first two Bioshock games are fairly simple, in story and in gameplay. But Bioshock Infinite took the entirely new level that thinking about it now, almost a year after playing it, still blows me away. I feel like Bioshock doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, the way that games like Portal and Half Life do. But when I say that Bioshock blew my expectations out of the water (that is a pun) is a huge understatement. 

So first, let’s start with the first Bioshock.  This game came out in 2007, and it really shows with very dated mechanics. The game feels old, and for me that made it way more difficult than it needed to be. Bioshock 2 on the other hand, came out in 2010, and while the story isn’t nearly as good, it’s definitely way more streamlined. I could definitely see myself going back and playing it again. Let’s start with the first game.

Bioshock

Bioshock starts with you on a plane, examining a letter, when the plane suddenly crashes in the middle of the ocean. You’re the only survivor, and the closest thing you can see besides the burning plane parts, is this strange lighthouse. 

This lighthouse is made of stone, and it’s tall and menacing but you enter since you have no other option.  The door closes behind you and the first thing you see is this.

As you go down the stairs behind it, you enter a pod with the door open, and pull the lever inside. The pod takes you deep, deep underwater, while playing you a small video from a projector. This is 1960, so it’s very old styled. This is the first time you hear the voice of Andrew Ryan, while he tells you his philosophy and why he hates the world as it is. His initial speech is the rule he will live by for the entirety of the game. He hates government, and religion, because as he says in the speech, they all believe “a man isn’t entitled to the sweat of his brow”. I’m probably phrasing it poorly, but he means the mans hard work. You then get the first view of his creation- Rapture, the city on the bottom of the ocean.

When the pod lands, you are met with the main enemy of this game- Splicers. I think this goes without saying but Rapture has some pretty advanced technology. They’ve learned to manipulate peoples DNA to extreme levels, giving them pyrokinesis and other things. These abilities are distributed in really cool looking bottles and are called Plasmids. There are many different types of Plasmids, but you’ll start with lighting in the beginning of the game

Splicers are the results of splicing your genes way too much; they’re like crackheads, but instead of cocaine they was gene splicing. Their faces are usually cutup and they’re usually absolutely insane. But after escaping the first one you meet, you get in contact with a man named Atlas. He tells you he wants to get the hell out of Rapture, and that Andrew Ryan is the reason it’s gone to shit. He tells you that he needs to get his wife and child out with him, but when you get so close to rescuing them, Ryan bombs the submarine they were going to escape on. 

Throughout your gameplay you will hear about the way Rapture used to be, before it was a warzone. You would hear about the power struggle between Ryan and someone named Fontaine, and you will learn about how Ryan killed his mistress who was pregnant with his child. This game is full of information explaining how things went down before your arrival. Unfortunately, I’m not the best with this kind of exposition. This is a personal thing but I always mess up the story when it comes to this form of story telling. 

Now I’m gonna try my best to explain something a bit weird. If you’ve ever seen anything bioshock, you probably know about their mascot, the Big Daddy. 

This right here is a Big Daddy. They’re not robots, more like giant brainwashed people in bit suits. Their voices are altered so they sound deep and menacing, and they’re by far the strongest enemy in the game. They’re made to protect the Little Sisters- the little girl next to the Big Daddy. Little Sisters are practically little blood suckers, they can sense where a dead body with some Atom (the substance they use in plasmids) and call them Angels. They’re children turned into indestructible mosnters that are just there to get Atom. They always travel together. You can kill the Big Daddy and either free the sister, or take the Atom from her body which would kill her. There’s a limited amount of Big Daddies and the game marks how many are left in each section. Obviously killing or saving these girls changes the ending you get. You team up with some german(i think) doctor that pretty much sees these girls as her daughters to stop Ryan and Fontaine, who wants to use them for more Atom. 

The rest of the story is a bit fuzzy for me, so I’m just gonna briefly explain it here. Fontaine wasn’t a good guy, and he faked his own death and turned out to be Atlas. He and a doctor (whos name I don’t remember but she was important) pretty much took you and wiped your memory, brainwashing you so that you’d always listen to the trigger ‘would you kindly.” This twist was the biggest mind fuck, because you realize that Atlas (now Fontaine) would say those words all the time. They planted fake memories of a family in your mind and sent you to the surface, and even the letter you were examining in the start had the trigger in it. You kill Andrew Ryan before this (forgot to mention it), and you move on to get rid of this brainwashing and kill Fontaine. And to fight you Fontaine fills himself with Plasmids and Atom and obviously this doesn’t work because video games. You end the game, saving all the little sisters and bringing them to the surface, and live out your life sort of as a father figure for them. Or if you didn't save them, you just bring a bunch of splicers with you, but I don’t think this is a canon ending. This game is a solid 6/10 for me, only because of how dated it is. 

Bioshock 2

Bioshock 2′s story is pretty much the same but with a twist this time- You get to play as a Big Daddy. Unfortunately this games story felt a bit too much like the first one so I don’t remember anything big about it. You play as a Big Daddy looking for his Little Sister. The game starts with a cutscene, showing you protecting her from splicers until you get murdered by Raptures new dictator- Sofia Lamb.  She takes your Little Sister and turns her into a normal girl again, raising her up to be Eleanor Lamb. You revive yourself years later (i don’t remember how) and go off to find her. The biggest difference between Andrew Ryan and Sofia Lamb is that the splicers seem to worship her. But at the same time Sofia uses Eleanor as some sorta messiah figure, so they could be worshipping her I don’t know. In this game you get to go through newer parts of Rapture, and even get to see the new variant of Big Daddy- Big Sisters. These aren’t like Big Daddies and I’m not even sure what their purpose is, but they’re just as difficult to fight against. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to steal Little Sisters from their male counterparts and bring them to Lamb. Towards the end of the game, I’m pretty sure Lamb ends up destroying Rapture, and you escape with Eleanor, a bunch of Little Sisters, and depending on your ending you also save Sofia from drowning. This game was a 7/10, because the gameplay was much better but the story was sorta lackluster. I’m not even sure if this game is canon in the story.

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is the most different out of the three. I get the feeling that the devs got sick of the underwater aesthetic, so they said fuck it lets make a city in the sky. 

This is Columbia. A city in the sky. It’s the literal opposite of Rapture. It’s bright, it’s colorful, and it’s gorgeous. This was my favorite setting in the whole series. Plasmids are now Vigors, and it takes place in 1912 (I know, surprising). This games story is extremely complex, so if I get lost explaining it I’ll link a video explaining it clearly. In this game you play as Booker Dewitt.

Booker Dewitt is a former member of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, scarred from the events of the Battle of Wounded Knee. When his debts from gambling start climbing too high, he is sent to Columbia to rescue a young woman named Elizabeth, who’s been trapped there since childhood. She’s kept in a giant statue protected by the Songbird, a giant bird with similar looks to the Big Daddies of Rapture. 

(This is Elizabeth btw. We never see Booker’s face except for some official art.)

All of Columbia is run by one man, Zachary Hale Comstock, He’s revered as some “Prophet”, and he seems to know everything about Booker.  He’s turned the people of Columbia into a sort of cult reminiscent of the KKK, based on Christianity and white power. Which makes him and all the enemies very easy to hate. Which is good. 

This cult is opposed by the Vox Poppuli, led by Daisy Fitzroy. She was originally the housemaid of Comstock’s home, but she fled when she was accused of murdering Comstock’s wife. She took her never ending hatred of Comstock and formed the Vox, a symbol of hatred for all of Columbia and men like Comstock. 

The story begins in July 1912, when Booker is taken to a lighthouse off the coast of Maine by two very odd twins, Robert and Rosalind Lutece (they are important later), being told “bring the girl and wipe away the debt.”  This lighthouse is very reminiscent of the old stone lighthouse from previous games. But this lighthouse doubles as a rocket silo, and Dewitt is sent to Columbia from here. 

The first thing that I personally noticed is Booker’s disdain for religion, because when he’s forced to be baptized to enter Columbia he’s extremely uncomfortable.  Soon he’s chased down by the authorities, since all of Columbia has been told by Comstock that any man with a scar on his hand in the shape AD is the devil, just like the scar on Booker’s left hand. 

After evading a lot of cops, we finally meet Elizabeth. She’s never really known anyone besides Comstock and the Songbird, and she’s missing a pinky. Besides that, she has a strange ability to create these tears in space time. The first time we see this is when she creates one to 1980′s Paris, a place she's always been desperate to go to. So they make a deal- She leaves Columbia with him and he takes her to Paris. 

After multiple shenanigans, Elizabeth ends up taking Booker and herself to a reality where Booker was the martyr of the Vox Populi. Booker sacrificed himself for Daisy here, and this started an all out war between the two factions. Fitzroy believes that the Booker we play as is either an imposter, or a ghost, and she sets her forces on him. With Bookers help, Elizabeth kills Daisy, and they try to escape via airship before Songbird forces them to crash.

At this point they learn a few things about Comstock; Comstock had the Luteces build a siphon device into the tower Elizabeth lived in to inhibit her powers, and he killed his wife and then the Luteces to hide the truth. Plus, Elizabeth is actually Comstocks adopted daughter. 

Elizabeth is kidnapped by Songbird. When Booker pursues, he needs to cross a bridge that happens to have a cloud passing through it. In the brief moment that clouds pass over the bridge, it goes from a bright sunset to a cold, windy dark snowstorm.  You fight through an old building filled with Comstock’s men, and learn that Elizabeth has already been tortured and corrupted by Comstock. She believes you left her there to die. And then, you learn that Comstock’s been dead for years now.  Then you finally meet Elizabeth, she shows you that you’ve been brought to 1984, and that she is using Columbia to attack New York. 

In that cloud over the bridge, you were running for what felt like a short time, but was really 72 years. Elizabeth sends you back, because she still doesn’t view you as an enemy, and she tells you how to save herself from Comstock, by controlling the Songbird. 

After freeing young Elizabeth, the pair assault Comstock’s airship, where Comstock and Booker argue about Booker’s knowledge of Elizabeth’s missing pinkie. This ends in Booker slamming the back of Comstock’s skull onto a baptismal font, right before drowning and killing him. They move on from the conversation, they use the Songbird to destroy the tower Elizabeth was held captive in, therefore destroying the siphon on her powers. 

Songbird turns on them again, but with the siphon gone, Elizabeth uses her powers to transport herself, Booker, and even Songbird to Rapture.  Booker and Elizabeth are inside, where they watch Songbird sink and die, being crushed by water pressure. 

At this point Elizabeth understands everything about her powers, and understands everything about whatever mystery there is left to this story. She takes Booker up the stone lighthouse, the very same one we saw in Bioshock 1, and basically explains multiverse theory to him. She explains that there are an infinite amount of lighthouses just like this. 

At this point, she knows Bookers history. She knows the truth, but Booker’s so traumatized that his brain legitimately erased the memory.  The rest of this is about Booker’s past, and how this all began. 

Booker was there for Wounded Knee. It traumatized him, made him resent himself, so some day he went to repent, to be baptized. But Booker couldn’t go through with it. he gained a massive debt, and in 1893, Robert Lutece approached Booker on behalf of Comstock, requesting that he “bring us the girl and wipe away the debt”, referring to Booker’s daughter, Anna Dewitt (hence, the AD on Booker’s hand.) Booker reluctantly agreed to hand off his daughter to wipe away his debt, but when he changed his mind, he chased Robert and Comstock down. Comstock tries escaping through a portal (the same portal Elizabeth can make btw) and the two struggle for the baby. Eventually, the portal closes, and Comstock snatches her away while the closing portal leaves her severed pinky in Booker’s hands. 

She explains that the Lutece’s have tried to recruit many Booker’s to stop Comstock, but all versions of Comstock will live on unless they try to stop his birth. So she takes Booker back to the baptism- but from another perspective. Booker changing his mind last minute at his own baptism sparked to life a universe where Booker went through with it, and was reborn from that moment onwards as Zachary Hale Comstock. After overusing the Lutece’s multiverse machine, he became sterile, and stole Anna to provide a biological heir for Columbia. 

We cut back to Elizabeth and Booker at the baptism pond, where multiple versions of her are appearing in front of him. The only way to stop Comstock is to kill Booker, so he allows them to drown him. And one by one, all the versions of Elizabeth disappear. 

This is the canon ending for the game. There are some more things in DLC, like Elizabeth going to Rapture to tie some loose ends connected to Comstock and Ryan’s abuse of the Little Sister’s. And it’s confirmed that Rapture scientists got the idea for Big Daddies from Songbird, and Columbia’s scientists came up with vigors from Rapture’s plasmids. The writers went as far to explain how everything in Rapture or Columbia came to fruition, and connected them all.

I’ve never gotten such an “It all makes sense now feeling” than when playing this game. They didn’t even have to connect it to the first two games but they did and they made it work way too well. Bioshock Infinite is the best out of the three, and thanks to this review I’ve finally gotten all that stuff out of my mind. This game is a 9/10 for me. I’d definitely play it again. 

[pants-jones]

We were here. Remember Us.

Nov. 15th 2019 - Nov. 13 2020

[pants-jones]

just for a bit but i enjoyed my time with y’all :)

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and thats that.

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‘relocate’

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Spiderman Ps4

I’m writing this on my phone, so it’s gonna be formatted a little differently than usual. Since the new Spiderman game is coming out in two days or so I felt it was right to talk abkut this a little. Spiderman is everyone’s favorite superhero- everyone knows him. the amount of spiderman media there is out there is too much to even comprehend. I’ve always loved the Webhead, so when they announced a new game for him after years of meh games, I was excited like everyone else.

Spiderman came out at a rougher time in my life, and watching jacksepticeye (I know i watch him a lot) play through it helped distract me a lot. When I actually got my hands on it, i played it to completion and 100% the whole game and the three DLC’s. The first time I’ve ever done that for any game. It was admittedly easy. The gameplay is fun but a little flawed. You sort of have to play by the games pacing and not your own, but its still plenty of fun and face paced. There are tons of collectibles and side quests and the best part is- You know where all of them are at all times. This game did fetch quests right. You don’t have to soend hours searching, everythings right there for you.

I’m not gonna bother explaining the story. Everyone who’s played or seen the game knows it. But I’m still gonna review it. The game took me at least 9 and a half hours to beat on stream, and that was with me rushing because i wanted to beat it before the new one came out. Btw, I’m also gonna stream Spiderman: Miles Morales. If you wanna watch pull up to my twitch channel at twitch.tv/dru2i. I’ll be streaming it after 3:45 pm eastern time.

Anyways, ignoring the shameless plug, this game has a completely original spiderman story. No comic has ever done it, and I think it’s obvious that everyone liked that. The new spidersuit with the white spider looks amazing, even though I never have it on. Plus the 20+ suits that you can change at any time are great too. This game is a solid 8.5/10. The combat bugs out with dodges sometimes and it gets a bit repetitive after you finish the story. But that’s most games.

This post is a bit shorter because I wanted to put up something about this game before the new one comes out. I’m currently working on a Bioshock review for all three games, and I’m almost done with it. It’ll be a long one so look out for that.

[pants-jones]

Outer Wilds is the best exploration adventure literally ever.(Story Review)

Outer Wilds is a small space exploration game that came out on May 28, 2019, developed by Mobius Digital. It’s gotten multiple awards and there isn’t a second of someone’s voice in the game. I personally found out about it thanks to Jacksepticeye, and he does this thing where he doesn’t explore things in a game enough for me to be satisfied, and it really frustrates me even though I love his content. So, like a normal person, I held that frustration deep within my soul for an entire year until I got my own ps4 and I noticed that they were selling it on the PlayStation store. I remembered very little about the game at that point and going in blind was literally the best part. Ever since I was little, every time a game came out promising endless gameplay or a large world to explore it pretty much never happened.

Like Disney Infinite or whatever that shitshow of a game was called. Surprisingly finite, believe it or not. Same thing with No Mans Sky, even though I’ve heard that it’s improved recently. But this game is perfect when it comes to space exploration. The solar system you reside in isn’t too big, so going from planet to planet isn’t a pain in the ass like No Mans Sky. Each planet has so much to explore, on top of everything you can see in the ice comet that flies through, or the sunstation orbiting the sun at like 40000000 miles an hour, or the literal ghost moon that disappears when you look away. Each planet is extremely unique and has their own dangers, and I could talk for literal hours about each location in the game and the story behind each. Before I actually get into this, there is this one youtuber that has a channel about this game, and he actually explains a lot of the stuff that I didn’t understand or just got wrong on my first playthrough. He’s called The Lore Explorer. You can click his name to go straight to his YouTube channel. 

This is going to be on the story of Outer Wilds. Because I want to talk about the gameplay separately. 

In this game, you play as a member of an alien race called the Hearthians, residing on an earthlike planet called Timber Hearth. Your race is small, but they devote their time to science and exploration of the solar system they reside in and the universe. They want to know the secrets of the universe, to understand it. They’re a peaceful people, like space hillbillies, They don’t have a specific gender, they refer to each other with they/them unless requested otherwise, You are a rookie in their space exploration program, Outer Wilds Ventures. You wake up early at your campfire, eyes looking up at the sky, the giant planet Giants Deep above you. The ancient alien space station orbiting said planet explodes, and a small purple light launches out into the night sky. (This is the best picture I could find)

You get up and meet Slate, a Hearthian that was roasting marshmallows in the campfire next to you. You exchange some dialogue, and you learn they’re the one who made your ship, and that this is gonna be your first voyage into space. They tell you that you have to go to Hornfels, one of Outer Wilds Ventures’ lead scientists, to get the launch codes. You spend some time exploring the small village that your people reside in. You meet up with your old teacher, who taught you about everything you’ll endure up in space. You do one last no-gravity test, before heading up to the Observatory at the highest point of the village. The first thing that greets you is a statue, made by a strange ancient race named the Nomai.

You move on to Hornfels, get the launch codes and walk out the same way you came in, when you freeze and the statue opens its eyes and faces you. It’s eyes light up, and it’s almost like your memories of today are being played back at you. (below is the best picture I could find.)

A Hearthian who works at the observatory watches all of this and approaches you, claiming in shock that they had no idea that the eyes could even open, neverminded that they can grow. 

You move on, on to your ship. You enter and where you go first is up to you, the player.(obviously.) Personally, I decided to do what I think most people would ignore, and explore the planet we all start on, Timber Hearth. And of course, I found some stuff, but that’s for later.

Anyways, it doesn’t matter what you do, but most likely you’ll be going to Timber Hearth’s moon, the Attlerock. It’s an asteroid like moon that you’ll probably see in the sky orbiting the planet from it’s surface. There’s a Hearthian named Esker up there, and they give you their first goal: Find and meet the five founders of Outer Wilds Ventures. You’ve already got one down, since Esker is one of those five. But, ignoring all this, lets assume you made the mistake everyone makes (and I promise you it’s everyone) and you didn’t land where Esker grew trees for oxygen, and you made the dumbest decision to just, forget your space suit. Well, you’d die obviously. Air is important. You obviously suffocate. Dummy.

I genuinely can’t find a way to show you how dying looks in Outer Wilds. Or, the post death. Pretty much, every moment you just experienced gets played in reverse, up until  the very moment you wake up. Then, this Nomai mask is the last thing you see, before you wake up on Timber Hearth again.

I think anyone with an IQ above sand knows that this means you’re in a time loop. It’s obviously because of the statue, and when you go to look at it, it’s eyes are still open. There’s a mystery here, and you will most likely not have any clue how to solve it.  

You’ll go back into space. And you’ll choose any of the five planets in this small solar system to explore. It doesn’t matter which. You’ll learn things abut the Nomai, you might even meet one of the astronauts you were told to meet. None of this matters. Because in 22 minutes after you wake up, you hear a strange loud noise, look to the sun, and realize its collapsing in on itself and exploding. You barely have time to react before you die again and wake up in your village again. And that’s pretty much the opening of the game. If you wanna see the sun explode, click here. It’s pretty cool.

First I wanna start with the fact that this solar system is pretty small, but each planet has so much stuff you could do. I didn’t even mention all the stuff in the observatory, like the rock that moves when you don’t look at it (which is VERY important), the Nomai text that you can translate with the device Hornfels gives you, or the fucking creature that they call an anglerfish that they hold in a tank (which is also very important). I didn’t tell you about the Planet Locator on the Attlerock, or the fact that you can see the ship you use in the Alpha of the game. I want to talk about each planet and location but it would genuinely take me way too long, because the story itself is way way way too long but it’s literally amazing. This game is probably the closest thing to real life in one way; it doesn’t matter what you do. You could throw your ship into the fucking sun and it won’t matter. Inevitability is one of the biggest themes of this game. 

You learn of the Nomai, an ancient race that came to your Solar system on something called The Vessel, but they got split up when they had to use escape pods because of some tragedy. You learn that they’re looking for something called The Eye Of The Universe, an entity older than the universe itself. That space station that blows up every time you wake up? That’s their Probe Launcher, that’s them trying to find that Eye. You learn how they made warp technology and how Black Holes work, you can even create a paradox and break the universe (this is very loud, I’m warning you.) This game takes environmental storytelling to a whole other level, because this race of Nomai is dead and long gone, but their underground catties and escape pods and ships and every piece of research that they have is left behind. They left a fucking Sunstation that orbits the sun at the speed of something really fast, and if you’re good enough at flying (i am not) you could land on the damn thing. Or you could teleport to it using the Nomais warp tech.

I think it’s there that you learn why the sun is dying. Your goal this whole time was to learn why the sun is dying, maybe you can reverse whatever the Nomai did. But the Nomai didn’t do this. Sure, they wanted to make the sun explode, but that was to power their time loop machine, so they could find the Eye easier. But it didn’t work. The sun station was made to blow up the sun and it didn’t work. The sun isn’t blowing up because of the Nomai, it’s dying because it’s just old. It’s old and there is no saving your people or your solar system. You then realize that its not just your solar system that’s dying, but others too. You can see it all the time.

When you’re out in space and see stars suddenly start to glow brighter than before, if you zoom in, you can see that they’re exploding. And not only that, once you find the Nomai’s Vessel (which is hard to do), you can find transmissions from modern Nomai, claiming that the entire universe is dying. There’s nothing you can even do about it.

Before I talk about the Eye itself, I need to explain what a Quantum Object is. A Quantum object is an object that exists in all possible ways until viewed by a conscious. The rock in the observatory I mentioned earlier is one of these objects, and there’s tons of items just like them 

They usually look like this black shard above. The Nomai found these and studied the actual hell out of them, and they learned three things they labeled the rules of quantum objects. The first being, if you are making physical contact with one of these objects and you turn off the lights or lose your vision, you will become quantum like the object. Technically it means until you can see again, you will be everywhere and anywhere at random.

The next rule is that if you take a picture of the quantum object and look away, it will not move. I think this is self explanatory, you’re still technically observing it even if it’s just a picture. And the last rule has more to do with the Quantum Moon. The Quantum Moon is supposed to be the Eye’s moon, but since it’s a quantum object it always appears orbiting random planets in this solar system. 

The Quantum Moon won’t be on any map of the solar system, and it’s by far the second most difficult location to enter and navigate. You’ll only know how after exploring multiple Nomai ruins with text on the walls teaching you the three quantum rules. If you just fly into it, You’ll simply go through the grey smoke and end up on the other side, You need to enforce the second quantum rule (this is called Quantum Imaging btw) and take a picture of it. Then you’ll be able to land on it, though what you find first may be different depending what planet it’s orbiting.

It mirrors the planet it’s orbiting, like when it orbits Timber Hearth the surface of the planet is going to have a lot of trees and grass. If it’s on Giants Deep, which is mostly an aquatic planet with lots of tornadoes and storms, it’ll have a lot of water and smaller tornadoes in the distance. Eventually, you’ll make your way to the Nomai tower on the North Pole of the moon.

From the inside of this tower, you’ll be able to travel with the quantum moon, even getting close to the Eye itself. The Nomai always say that when the moon isn’t visible in this solar system, it has to be at a sixth location, and since the Eye orbits our sun from lightyears away, it’s safe to say that the sixth location is actually the Eye of the Universe. When you enter the tower, you’re going to be turning the lights off and opening the door a lot, since the only other way to tell where you are inside the tower is a mechanism on the wall. But when you’re orbiting the Eye, you won’t be able to exit the tower, since the door will be blocked by the same material that the quantum shards are made of. If I remember correctly, you need to have the tower appear on the South pole of the moon. Then, when you get to the moon’s version of the eye, You can leave the tower and see what it’s like. 

On top of that, you can actually meet the last Nomai. Her name is Solanum, and she is the only Nomai to get this close to the Eye of the universe. The same way that the moon has a sixth location it goes to, she is the secret sixth astronaut that you can meet. She doesn’t speak your language, or at all, which means the Nomai didn’t speak. They communicated using the blue swirls you can see next to her. Those are the swirls that you translate to learn everything they’ve done through out the game. 

Meeting Solanum is a bitter moment, since she claims that she believes she’s been in some sort of in between death and life state for years now. She theorizes that being in such close proximity to the Eye has made her a quantum object, which is why you can find her ship and dead body on all the other locations the Quantum Moon can be at except this one. Above Solanum is a wormhole, where all the clouds are falling into. When you try to enter this wormhole, you fall back into one of the other moons locations, Solanum’s body at your feet. 

Now the Eye of the Universe itself is the most difficult location to get to. It took me around three hours of trying over and over again, because we need to get to it before the 22 minutes run out and the sun explodes. You first need to waste 7 minutes getting a power core from the machine that runs the time loop, so if you die you technically die for good. Then you need to enter the 5th planet and the one I despise the most, Dark Bramble. 

Dark Bramble isn’t a planet. It’s the remains of an icy planet, destroyed by the bramble. Nobody knows where the bramble came from. Nobody knows how it even exists. But it’s there, and it should be the last place you want to enter, because it’s the only place with an actual creature that want to hurt you: The Anglerfish. 

The Anglerfish are giant, blind space fish that will eat anything and have super sensitive hearing. You need to fly past these things in your ship, and you never know what lights are anglerfish and which lights are just more nodes to enter deeper into this pocket dimension.  In Dark Bramble, you can find one of the 3 Nomai Escape pods. The other two landed on planets outside of Bramble, but this one had a much darker fate. 

This is Escape Pod 3. The Nomai in this escape Pod used audio tech to find the distress signal the Vessel was emitting, but there was a problem; they frequency was coming from two different places. The Nomai were scared and running out of oxygen, so they headed towards the closer frequency, leaving lights behind as a trail so they didn’t get lost. Unfortunately when they reach the frequency...

All they find is a seed. The frequency is coming from it, but they went the wrong way. They can’t fit inside it and it hasn’t grown enough for it to be a node they can pass through. So they all died there, floating motionless. You can shoot a scout through the seed, and it’ll land on the Vessel.  Now you have a way to get there.

When you bring the power core, you have to pass through the Anglerfish nest, so you’re pretty much gonna be gliding through the whole thing reaaaally slowly. You can’t outrun the anglerfish, and I never tried touching their eggs so I don’t know what’ll happen if you try that. 

After a lot of slow gliding, you’ll find The Vessel.

You can put the power core inside, and once you enter the coordinates that you can find from the space station orbiting Giant’s Deep, the Vessel will warp to The Eye of the Universe, with an overhead view of it. 

You can take as much time as you like here. You’re way too far for any supernova to affect you. The planet you can see isn’t the eye itself, but it’s more like an orb of the same material that the quantum shards are made of. All the clouds and lights surrounding it is the Eye. I’ll leave a video of someone getting to the Eye right here. When you warp onto the planet above the Eye, you’ll start on the north pole, and start walking towards the south, where the Entrance to the Eye is. When you walk under the clouds, it’ll be dark, with lightning strikes briefly lighting up the area, with random objects appearing due to the eye being the origin of quantum objects. 

(What the wormhole looks like from the outside vs. the entrance.)

I can’t really explain what happens when you fall into it, so I’m gonna leave it at that. This game is a solid 10/10 for me. It is the best exploration space game I’ve ever played, and I’d buy it at full price again just to support those who made it. Also the soundtrack and credits song are amazing. I 100000% recommend it

[pants-jones]

What I think about Devil May Cry 4

Devil May Cry is known as one of the best hack and slash games around, with its latest release taking the crown as the best hack and slash game ever. This post would be about DMC5, but there’s so much to do in that game that I don’t think I could even speak about it all, especially with it’s Special Edition coming out soon. So, I decided to talk about the game before it.

I’m gonna start with the fact that this is the first Devil May Cry where you don’t play as Dante (at least until halfway through the game). Instead, you play as Nero, the guy you see in the picture above. Nero’s gameplay style is very different from Dante’s, with a couple similarities. The biggest difference is that there are no style switches, and Nero only has one weapon and one gun. For those who don’t know, the absolute best part about playing as Dante is his arsenal; he ALWAYS has a ton of weapons that you can use to do the hokey pokey all over your enemies. You play as Dante for style, to look cool. Dante moves fast and you have to use all four of his styles and all of his weapons to be good with him. I’ll explain Dante’s kit in this game in a minute, but right now we’re on Nero. Nero only uses his sword, the Red Queen, and his magnum, the Blue rose. He’s a bit slower than Dante, and a whole lot more angry, which is consistent with his character because Nero is a very passionate, hotheaded person. Also he’s like 16-17 in DMC4, so it could be those teenage hormones. 

Now, here’s the biggest difference between Dante and Nero.

Now, if you’d kindly look at the top left of this shitty image I pulled off of google since I was too lazy to pull a pic from my own gameplay, you can see a circular gauge next to the green health bar. That would be Nero’s Exceed Meter. The special thing about Nero’s Red Queen is that it’s like... a motorcycle in a sword. The damn thing has an engine, it has a throttle on the handle and he revs it to make it heat up. I can’t even write all that without it sounding stupid and absurd but yeah, it’s real and it works. You can charge that meter up, and if i remember correctly you can swing the sword three times before running out, which is why if you press L2 or LT at the right time, you have a chance to fill up either one slot of Exceed or the entire bar, to continue your flaming onslaught. 

Next is the blue rose, which doesn’t have much but it works for Nero’s kit. It has charge shot, which is self explanatory, and it has Color Up. With Color Up, Nero loads the Blue Rose with explosive rounds, which you can layer on top of charge shot too. 

Nero has mostly the same abilities as Dante, with the only real difference being Table Topper. Table Topper allows you to dash around your enemy if you side roll at the perfect moment. The last thing in Nero’s arsenal for this game is his Devil Bringer. If you look at the picture above again, you will see a blue light coming from Nero, and if you look at the first picture I used, you’re obviously gonna notice his weird ass arm. I don’t know why he has this thing but its another big part of his kit. When an enemy staggers, you can grab them with this arm to play an animation that’s pretty cool. And when I say that you can do this move on every enemy, I mean every enemy. The coolest part is the game doesn’t say if you can or not, it just tells you what it does and you have to figure it out on your own. Using the Devil Bringer on bosses is probably the best part because it does massive damage, and when you do it with Devil Trigger activated it plays a much more aggressive animation. My favorite is when Nero uses Devil Trigger and triple suplexes an enemy. It’s so over the top for no reason and I love it.

Now, I would speak about Dante’s play style in this game but I literally remember nothing about it. I can say that it wasn’t that different from usual Dante. He obviously has new weapons but I don’t remember them that much. I’ve been replaying the game so when I get to that point maybe I’ll make a post about it. 

Now I’m gonna talk about the bad parts of the game. Because it is very flawed and dated, and playing through it hurts a little. This game takes place on the island of Fortuna, inhabited by a people who worship the Dark Knight Sparda(Dante’s father) like a God. Nero is the son of Vergil, Dante’s brother, and was born here. This religion (named the order) had some weird plot to take over the world with a giant statue that they called the Savior ( I think it was supposed to look like Sparda), and to do this they needed demon energy, so they made these big hell gates. Demons started pouring out and that somehow affected this islands climate?

And it’s a noticeable difference. Here’s an example. 

This is Fortuna Castle. This is a big castle that you go through twice (once as Nero and once as Dante) and the main climate in this area is snowy and very mountain like. On the backside of this castle is a bridge that goes into a waterfall that has a tunnel behind it, and once you go through this tunnel, you see this. 

An entire fucking forest. No, it’s more of a jungle and the worst part of the game. This game is full of dumb old 2000′s styled platformer bullshit that is tedious, annoying, and the reason I’m still taking a break from my second playthrough of this game. In a game that isn’t a platformer, it sure has a lot of annoying jumping stuff in it. Plus, this area introduces one of the worst enemies in the game. 

This is the Chimera Seed. It has no attack patterns that are easily recognizable, and even when it isn’t attacking trying to hit it only damages you. I have vivid memory of brute forcing my way through these enemies because I didn’t want to annoy myself actually fighting them. 

And this is Mephisto. A floating enemy, that goes through fucking walls. You can’t hit them until that black shroud is gone, and that’s also difficult to get off. This game has so many annoying enemies, it’s the worst to play through. Blitz was no where near as bad as Mephisto was.

This was the best DMC game until DMC5 came out, and it wasn’t that good anyways. But now that DMC5 came out, this games problems are emphasized greatly. In my opinion, this game is a 6/10. It’s good but flawed.

[pants-jones]

(i guess you could call this) A review on Infamous: Second Son

SInce this is my literal first post on this blog, I guess I should start by talking about the first game I really wanted back when the PS4 came out. Although i didn’t know this at the time, Infamous: Second Son is the latest sequel in the Infamous series, a series i know virtually nothing about. I haven’t actually finished playing it myself, but I currently am at least 75% done with the game.

The base plot, to put it simply, is this; In this world, there are people born with special powers, called Conduits. They could be anyone, and of course some of them start causing havoc, using their powers for crime and unintentionally demonizing the rest of the Conduits to the rest of the world. This starts the persecution of Conduits, now dubbed “Bio-Terrorists”, which eventually leads to this game and it’s story which I’ll touch on in a few.

The Game-play

When you start the game, your main method of attack is pressing X/square until your enemy falls over, or shooting them with small smoke blasts. You have the option to shoot a smoke missile that does splash damage, but unless you put some upgrades in, you wont be using it right away. You don’t use smoke like a regular power, instead you need to absorb some from a smoking car, or a fire to use as fuel for certain abilities, like shooting missiles or just shooting regularly. The regular melee attack doesn’t expend any energy, which you can always see in a bar on the bottom left. 

You can press B/Circle to Smoke Dash, though when you gain other powers this will mostly be used more for travelling the game world. It doesn't expend any energy, so feel free to use it as much as you want because you’ll need it to dodge the many many bullets that’ll be sent your way.

In the top right, you’ll see a symbol- that’s your Karma Strike Meter. The Karma Strike is pretty much an ultimate move, that when used properly can end most fights. But, its also my first gripe of the game. See, a big part of the game is a sort of reputation meter, where you can either play the good guy and fight those oppressing the Conduits the morally correct way, or you can do the same while also abusing your power and using your allies as soldiers for your mission. In my first playthrough which I haven’t completed, I decided to be the good guy, which made getting the Karma Strike harder in my opinion. To fill the meter, you need to subdue 6 enemies in a row, or subdue enemies while also doing something good that would fill your good guy meter. For some reason i just can’t ever find enemies to subdue, or enemies that are off to the side make it difficult to subdue others. A lot of stuff can happen in a fight, and that makes it kind of annoying when i know the best way to come out on top is to make 6 enemies subdue-able before i can wipe out the rest. 

But, a plus for this reputation meter and the Karma Strike is that it’s consistent. I’ve noticed that the further i get into the game, the more civilians cheer Delsin on when they realize he’s fighting for the better. Plus, you get different Karma Strikes if you have more good karma than bad. But, again, you get more combat options if you have more bad karma than good. Which makes sense, since the good karma upgrades help Delsin’s stats with healing and absorbing smoke and subduing enemies. 

The enemies don’t get too many introductions. They all have concrete powers given to them by the main villain of the game, and the more you play the stronger the enemies get. It starts with grunts that just have guns and make shields out of concrete, nothing too difficult though they can get tricky in high numbers. Then, in a mission where you climb to the top of the Space Needle, you fight a miniboss that then becomes a regular enemy. This enemy is especially annoying to me, because until you get the neon power that makes you move faster, they are extremely difficult to hit. They’re like Special Ops, with concrete chunks floating around them. They can trap you in concrete (which can be escaped by smoke dashing) and do some good damage. But ii’s not the concrete that makes it difficult to hit them- It’s the fact that they just run. If you get close enough, they will run and do their own version of a smoke dash to get away from you. And until you unlock neon, that makes them the most annoying enemy so far.

The next enemy is another boss that becomes a regular enemy, just way later. These guys sit in concrete tornadoes, shooting stones at you from a distance, and luckily they aren’t too hard to beat. Just use neon and shoot them from a distance and they’ll fall pretty soon. The next and latest one for me is an extremely aggressive concrete covered enemy that came in a group of three or four(i dont really remember how many). They move way too fast to be able to fight them with the video power, which I’ll touch on in a minute. I haven’t figured out their weakness yet, but i can tell you it isn’t melee because they will steam roll you if you try to get near them.

The Three Powers

In total, you get three powers to upgrade and use, each giving you different play styles and making you use different tactics. I’ll admit, I liked that you can’t switch between them like style switching in Devil May Cry. Instead, you need to find a source of smoke, a neon sign, or a satellite dish for each power. If you’re running low on one, you’ll have no choice but to switch to another and change the game plan. 

Smoke

The power you start the game with and my personal favorite is Smoke. The kit you get with smoke just seemed best for combat, and its easy and simple to travel around with. It’s the most abundant source to absorb in a fight because there’s usually a lot of exploding cars or ammo boxes you can absorb to fill that meter. The smoke Karma Strike is ok, but I absolutely love how it looks. Delsin sends himself flying straight into the air, and falls back down like a mortar, destroying everything in the vicinity. Plus, smoke just fits Delsin’s design in my opinion. He gets the next two powers from other people, so they obviously seem out of place for him to have (even though he also got smoke from someone else too but thats not the point it still suits him very well).

Neon

Neon is the second power you get, and it’s the second best in my opinion. It’s not as easy to subdue enemies with it as smoke is, but its still fun to use regardless. I think the lasers you shoot do more damage than the smoke blasts, and neon lets you run at what the game calls “Light Speed”, which is just kinda faster than usual. You can run straight up walls, and you can suspend enemies in these neon bubbles to attack them mid air. The Karma Strike can hit more enemies than smoke does, and you get to put on a pretty neat light show.

Video

Video is my least favorite, so much so that I kind of avoid using this power because its just so slow and when all the enemies are constantly focused on you and shooting at you at all times, being slow is not what you need. The melee is brought down to two strong hits with a bit more range, but they take way too long to finish for it to even be worth it. The heavy attack is pretty much a couple swords that i think are better against choppers? I haven’t tested it much. You get wings but you can only dash forward and up walls for a bit before having to stop. You can shoot automatic, which is kinda useful. But there isn’t much to write home about with this power. Even the Karma strike is hard to get, since this power gives me no real ways to subdue enemies, just hope they surrender and that doesn’t happen often enough to be able to fill the meter. It’s sluggish, it doesn’t offer anything new, and it’s just not for me.

One more thing about the combat; there aren’t many melee options besides mashing square and a ground pound. You can’t do any aerial combos which was disappointing to me because I thought that would’ve been amazing for juggles and just adding more ways to fight. Unfortunately, it kind of feels like you’re very limited in your options for combat. 

Other than the combat, I think the game looks amazing, even for something thats 6 years old now. I like the Karma Strikes so much less because they help me in fights and more because they just look super cool and make me wanna look at them again. A lot of games don’t look the best on current gen consoles and even on PC, but this is definitely not one of them. My only gripe with the looks is the how much saturation but this can even be fixed in the settings so it barely counts. 

When i first watched gameplay of this game, I had never wanted to be a super hero more in a long time. It was so much fun to watch, and even though it’s not as much fun to play through now, its still pretty good. I know I should touch on the story, but I haven’t finished the game, so I’ll probably do a post about it when i do. But i love the characters, and i love how they interact with each other, and I love how they interact with Delsin. I love watching those dumb brotherly arguments with Delsin’s brother. This game is  a 7.5/10 for me.