zachsgamejournal

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Death Stranding

Done! Overall I enjoyed myself. I can respect the depth of its story and characters but I've got BIG problems with the execution.

Fucked Up Driving Physics

That's right, the driving physics are fucked and the bane of my experience for the last lef of the game. I started to have a lot of fun when I unlocked the Truck and started building roads. Suddenly the game became a little more relaxing and I felt more compelled to make deliveries. I also became very focused on building roads (something I sadly had to give up on for my sanity).

But right after discovering the second highway loop thru the mountains, the game decided to attack me, personally, by making the later game delivery targets nestled deep in snowy mountains. The steep hills and near constant snowfall made it hard to traverse and created more wear and tear on tools and boxes. I get this from a design perspective, you've given the player so many great tools that all challenge goes out the window, so how do you challenge the player? Make the tools they have less effective.

Counter point: fuck off!

Despite these delivery stations being in the mountains where they likely intended to reach on foot, I drove my god-damned truck thru it anyway. But I only did the deliveries required by the story. Afterward, I relied on the bot delivery system to reach those mountain locations. Fuck you, don't live in the mountains.

Comically, one of the final "big missions" has you traveling over the mountains and across a large valley, of which the latter has no bases or safe havens along the way. I get how on foot this might have been challenging. But I brought my truck, so duck you I win!

But it wasn't all fun and games. Because the driving physics are fucked. I spent hours climbing up a steep hill only to have the truck "stall" and begon and uncontrolled slide back down the mountain. I've been playing 3D driving games for 28 years and I've never seen this kind of nonsense.

So the truck is capable of climbing near 90 degree angle hills, and at great speed with the turbo active. But the game has artificially decide the steering has near no traction at odd times. And when the truck loses traction and begins to slide, it has an odd tendency to orient horizontally across the hill.

So while driving up, the truck will start to rotate sideways. Counter steering is ignored, and almost seems to worsen the amount of sideways drift. Once sideways. This can cause the vehicle either to drive madly sideways across the mountain, getting you off course, or slide back down the hill...sideways. if you try to turn down hill to control your decent, the game fights it--still trying to maintain a horizontal orientation. It's madness.

There are two other issues. One, when the vehicle has lost traction and is sliding, the accelerator doesn't work. I think it's because of the context braking. If I'm going backwards, the game doesn't treat the accelerator as an accelerator. It treats it as a break. So the wheels won't spin forward until the car has stopped moving. Bullshit! So despite the back wheels having near perfect traction whenever you're moving forward, they're worthless while sliding. And, despite the back wheels having near perfect traction all the time, the front wheels have 0-5% traction when in snow. Which is bullshit. So I can accelerate at 100 mph but I can't turn!!

This is the physics of a truck that can bunny hop over 5 ft tall rocks.

Fighting the physics was painful and made me hate the game. So I was excited to find myself approaching the end.

Combat

I was excited by the idea that this game wouldn't have combat. I was disappointed that it did. But relieved to see it wasn't a major component. O reduced the difficulty to below normal when I first started cause I didn't want this overlong game to be stressful. Once I realized how "easy" the combat was I... didn't change the difficulty. What am I trying to prove.

In a sense, the simplicity of the combat made the BTs, even the boss fights, seem easy. I was kinda bored cause it was more of time drain and inconvenience that a terrifying event. But had it been more challenging or less forgiving, I think it would have made me hate the game. So I can't say whether I should complain. Boss fights just didn't feel epic...but I also don't think that should have been the focus. Not aure how to improve it, but this might be tied to my other issues...

The Story

My real problem with this. The lore and characters are deep and pretty well thought out. But the path we take thru that info is weak. I typically consider MGS3 to be my favorite game, despite its flaws. Vs The Last of Us that's near flawless, but maybe lacks some of the depth and OMG moments of MGS. Really it's a strange balance, Kojima games go to the extreme, with amazing gameplay moments that challenge world views and our souls, and other mechanics that are so laughable that it can spoil the gravity of the whole experience. Same with the atory and characters. While Last of Us may never go as far as Kojima, it's very consent with tone and themes. Kind of like Saving Private Ryan vs Inglorious Bastards (I prefer the former).

Death Stranding carries on that trend of extremes. Tho maybe not as goofy as MGS. And I think I'm ok with some of the extreme, but it's more the execution that's off. The issue is that game is highly dependent on plot dumps and extra reading to tell it's story. And focuses its over long cutscenes on surreal moments meant to confuse and weird out the player.

And sadly, much of this could just be gameplay.

Take the opening mission where a body necrotizes. Give it to the player to carry, have it leak tar. Suddenly Higgs shows up and starts chasing and teasing the player. Then bam, the big BT shows up. The player can try to get away or watch. But all of it can be gameplay with minimal cutscene interference.

Also, there are tons of conversations that happen in cutscenes that could just be audio during deliveries. Given it's mostly plot dump, why force the player to put the controller down to listen.

The plot itself is very contained. It reminds me of a metal gear game. But those games typically took place over a day or so. So it makes sense that you wouldnt deep dive into characters and would learn about the context after the fact. But when a game takes place over a series of weeks or longer, you have a chance to evolve the characters over time.

Take Higgs. In cutscenes he mostly acted weird. But I learned, from a youtube video, that he has a deep history with trauma, conflicted morality, and a slow descent into madness. That all happens before the game. And all we get is crazy Higgs.

But what if we were able to watch that over time? Beginning of the game, Higgs is a co-porter that likes to brag about his delivery times. He's jealous of Amelie's favortism towards Sam, so is always teasing Sam and showing him up.

After a few missions, Higg's tune changes. He's learned disturbing things but won't share (the BB experiments). Suddenly Higgs joins the terrorist group and that's when he antagonizes fragile.

After some curious events, Higgs emerges with his gold mask, his own BB, and the new ability to warp. He starts calling on BTs that increase in size.

Finally he reveals that Death Stranding is an extinction event and he's its messiah to bring on the inevitable end of the world.

But instead we get him saying a whole bunch of nothing and acting weird. And I get that this kind of vagueness is moderately entertaining and creates mystery, but I ain't got patience for BS. Especially when the more interesting stuff is being tucked away in journals.

Other things that drove me nuts, so we learn the president doesn't have a daughter, its just her ghost. She's manipulating us to connect the world to make it easier for her to destroy: something she views as a tragic duty. We also learn that Sam is the original bridge baby, and all these baby flashbacks are actually Sam's memories, not his BB unit's. All of this is dumped on us basically at the end of the game. This is the shit I should have been learning about all the way thru the game.

It reminds me of MGS3, my declares favorite game. The whole plot and double, triple agent storylines got kinda complicated, and it just felt like twists. No real heart. But after you beat the game there's a huge plot dump that explains all the events in the game and it's quite heartbreaking and enlightening. It's a great villain origin story. But it all comes together after the game is done. And that's bad game storytelling to me. Something Uncharted and The Last of Us handled better.

So while the lore and characters are interesting and the delivery gameplay is mostly interesting (especially the asymmetrical online multiplayer), the way it's all blended feels dated. It's got be hard for Kojima who has broken so much ground on cinematic video games, because he's getting loads of feedback that he's doing it the "right" way. Sadly, it no longer feels like innovation, but like digging in. Like when Martin Scorsese dis The Irishman. Haven't you made this movie like five times already?

I'm curious about Death Stranding 2, but I'm not sure I could bear it.

Ultimately this is a good game. It's no worse than its competition, but still a reminder of how much Hideo is in a rut.

Oh, to get it out, the dialog is predictably bad. The characters speak in subtext. Which is funny, cause subtext is the underlying meaning of normal words. Obviously the game is about making human connections. But why not let the player feel that instead of having every conversation explicitly discuss it?

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Death Stranding

Ok, ok: I like it. Kojima-ness of the writing and direction are still off-putting, but the introduction of vehicles and roads has been a...game changer.

Can't remember where I left off. I went to a new area and had a motorcycle. Things that have made the game fun:

The Truck: once I found a truck the whole game changed for me. Walking was slow and you're limited by what you can carry. So you can't rake many deliveries with you and forget about collecting lost stuff along the way. But with the truck, ah, I can put several deliveries on it while collecting supplies and lost packages. Given the truth can hop a little, I've basically climbed rocks--haha! I really enjoyed the game The Lake, where you delivered mail. I found it relaxing and the character interactions engaging. Having truck takes me back there.

Roads: when I first saw a road paver K was like WTF is this. But after building a few roads that cut across the rough landscape and make you nearly immune to mules and BTs made me pumped. I didn't realize you could turbo on the vehicles, so it was slow going at first. I spent a lot of time building roads. Now that I have roads with my truck, doing deliveries is much more bearable. It's now my whole mission to build all the roads. In my game space, I've been building every road except one. So i expect more praise from any players benefitting from my work. Haha

Delivery Bots: I really appreciate the game giving you robots to make deliveries for you. They almost always damage the stuff even if they have a road to follow, but it's nice to hand off four deliveries especially to remote areas with no roads. I also have a robot that can follow me about but I've had trouble making good use of it.

Killing BTs: Because I love playing passive stealth metal gear, I tried to be pure stealth and passive. But they're basically ghosts, so helping them cross over isn't bad, right? Hope not cause killing the oil monsters is a good way to collect chirum or whatever it's called.

Zip lines: I don't remember when I unlocked these but I wish i had embraced them sooner. While you're limited to what you can carry, lining up a series of these could help you zip around to anywhere with minimal worries.

I fought Mads, but I was sad I had to use lethal rounds. His already dead tho, right?

Learned a bit more about fragile. They had a scene where she was almost naked so that she'd be exposed to the time fall. I think it was a little objectifying given that her under was unnecessarily small and showed but crack. I get that they show muscular Sam in the shower, but whose the target audience, let's be real. Still, this game is quite the improvement over MGS as far as objectification.

It's interesting how you can see other player's structures. It adds an interesting sense of collaboration. But seeing all these bridges and generators everywhere, it makes the landscape polluted. Kinda parallels our world of just throwing up junk every where and scarring the environment. Wonder if that'll be a story thing?

I had some close call "epic" events. I tried to carry a body plus to floating carts worth of deliveries across a large distance. Unfortunately there was a large crack in the ground I had to go around. Mules sighted me and I wasted my battery getting away. I had to find edge of the chasm and walk around 300 meters with no battery. It was rough.

Later, I got a truck stuck on a rock on the edge if BT territory. I had to walk all the contents over three trips hoping no disaster would occur along the way.

I'm not so keen on the story. Hideo is giving me weird backstories and circumstances as to be expected, and weird character behaviors. Maybe I'm so emotionally repressed I can't appreciate the healthy expression happening.

Also, I got to go thru snow, that was cool!

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Death Stranding

I'm having more fun now. Bikes really help. Sometimes I feel bored, but I also feel compelled to deliver and build!

I was a bit harsh last time. But that was first impressions. It was so hard for me to get into the game that there were nights that I just stared at the TV, wondering if I even felt like turning it on. I don't have that hesitation anymore.

Before leaving the "starting area", they grant you access to a bike. I'm not wholly convinced it's faster than running but it's nice to have. Also, being able to build bridges made traversal easier. I went from "how quickly can I beat this" to "I could play this for weeks" in a single night. But since I couldn't build bikes, I was scared of losing it...which led to a really frustrating scenario...

The final delivery point is over a pretty steep mountain. But I thought, maybe the bike can handle it. Whoo it was rough. The path was steep and filled with rocks. Also there were BTs popping up everywhere. A black circle would appear on the ground, about 20-30 ft in diameter. And these ppl covered in black good would come out of the ground like aqua-zombies and try to drag me down. Sometimes they made me drop all my stuff.

So I'd struggle to get outside the circle, wait for the circle to disappear, pick up all my stuff, hop on my bike, and run into another BT 10 yards later and start it the process all again.

I did not enjoy it.

Once at port City I was forced into a boss fight with a black goo covered whale that had a squid face. Is this a prequel to Prometheus? To defeat the whale I had to throw blood grenades at it. I wasn't sure how they worked. I tried using them on a BT and was impressed with the results. Now that I've fumbled my way thru BTs, I'm less scared of them.

I delivered something back over the mountain and found a path cleared. I still had BT trouble but curious where the path came from. Was it always there? I know walking along routes creates a dirt path, presumably based on where other players walk too. Maybe it also clears rocks out of the way?

So now I'm starting to feel more comfortable with the game, and I have a bike. When I was told to advance the story i needed to cross a lake, I was worried about crazier challenges after I just figured out how to handle the starting area.

But I went for it and just got a cut scene.

The new area, while larger than the starting area, seems like a better starting area to me. There are no mountain ridges cutting through the field, so you can confidently travel in any direction. It's big enough to avoid problem areas unlike the beginning area bottlenecking you into trouble. Maybe the starting area could have been this on a smaller scale with a steep mountainous terrain as the final challenge.

I was sad not to have my bike, but I was happy to start building bridges. Of course those became quickly obsolete with the new road system. I over committed to deliveries thinking "I'll do a few easy deliveries while bringing bridge supplies to the road". But then all the deliveries had the biggest, heaviest boxes. So I still had to deliver supplies independently of jobs.

While I'm thankful for the road going over rivers and keeping me away from Mules (which I've also become more comfortable with fighting, non lethally) driving down the road is just boring. Maybe if the bike went a little bit faster?

Oh yeah, I unlocked the bike. And sank it in the river. Someone else had left a bike right at the spot I crashed. They must have known ppl would lose their bikes there.

The asynchronous aspect of co-building the world is interesting. But as I only get 2-3 hrs at night to play, I'm desperate for things to be built more quickly. I'm trying to leave more signs.

Anyway, this new area feels easier than before. I'm feeling less frustrated and the desire to do side quests is greater.

So the story. I don't care a whole lot. It doesn't feel grounded to me so I'm kinda shut off. I'll absolutely watch a breakdown on YouTube, but I'm not feeling the relationships. And the mysteries are so weird and confusing I'm not engaged.

One issue, I think, is that our main character knows everything and everyone. He seems to know the BTs, how everything happened, and what it means (for the most part), so when characters show up and start soeaking death stranding jargon and referencing past events, Sam is just like, "ok", but I'm like, "I have SO many questions". I understand this is a storytelling technique. Get the audience to ask questions and compel them to play/watch more.

Two ways to find that more tolerable. First, the Matrix approach. Make Sam ignorant of BTs and Death Stranding, and the end of the world. He wakes up on a beach, there's a baby and dead sea creatures. He sees floating ghosts then awakes with amnesia to find the world destroyed. So as ppl speak to and teach Sam, there's a shared experience with the player. Then have Sam's memory come back if you want him to be deeply connected to the characters. That's a little more Bourne Identity, but it gives the audience an in-story companion to learn with. Or two build better character interactions so we just enjoy watching the characters interact.

While I think Hideo Kojima is game making genius that tells amazing stories, the moment to moment storytelling is always rough. Characters are rarely grounded. They always have wild personalities based on wild childhoods, and they're stuck in wild circumstances. I think balance is needed. Either have grounded characters in wild scenarios (like Jurassic Park) or have wild personalities in grounded scenarios (Like Clerks 2). Hideo just goes all-wild and it's hard to embrace it.

But if he wrote better dialogue, that would help. He always seems to be showing off his research or turning his essays about philosophy into a conversation between two characters who have stopped trying to disarm a bomb to discuss existentialism. It's probably cause he wants these characters to be deep, and they are, but he's forcing a character's entire traumatic past into a conversation about unlocking a door.

Anyways, best I can tell there was an event where ppl died but their souls didn't really pass on. They're kinda stuck, maybe. So there's beaches that are a sorta after life and some folks can travel between them. Or if your body is on the beach, then your spirit can pop in to reality sometimes. So now there's ghosts haunting the real world and creating craters.

Also there's a thing with time. There's a rain that causes things to age when rained on. There are materials that have advanced properties, they get left behind after a BT dies...so I wouldn't trust using them but everyone does?! I don't know.

OH but driving around on the motorcycle in these interesting environments made me think of Final Fantasy 7. I thought it was because I just played Rebirth l, but I think it's actually cause in Advent Children, Cloud drives a motorcycle cycle around an apocalyptic wasteland to deliver packages. I'm Cloud again!!! Also the ghosts are kind of like the Spirits Within movie.

I am enjoying the game but I'm still not feeling the story. Will see if that improves.

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Death Stranding

I'm a big hideo kojima fan. Metal Gear Solid 3 is my official favorite video game. And I've been really pumped to play a story driven game that's not focused on violence. But I don't know if this game is for me.

Before we get into it:

For me there was a lot of hype building up to this game and so I'd like to reflect on that context. When I first saw the trailer for Metal Gear Solid 1, I wasn't impressed. But then when I actually saw Metal Gear Solid 1 in action I was obsessed. A game focused on stealth was so original and unique and even more than that, the amazing cinematography in the cutscenes blew my mind. I'd never seen a video game. Take it story so seriously and to go into so much depth about its characters and concepts. As a young high schooler this blew me away.

But Even then, Metal Gear Solid games were a little uneven. There was a very bizarre mix, grounded concepts with real soldiers, real technology, real departments of government and just absolutely insane supernatural elements and crazy characters. As the Metal Gear series advanced future games would get even zanier. Until we got to Metal Gear Solid 4 and found out everything was just nano machines.

While I love the Metal Gear games, there's a lot I don't like and a lot that I find off-putting. I feel like hideo kojima painted himself into a corner when he had even wackier boss fights and characters, crazier conspiracy theories and Wilder gameplay mechanics. Even if he wanted to make a more grounded and realistic experience, there was almost this expectation that he had to make something crazy. Also, the rampant sexism quiet's outfit is bullshit.

But there's a lot I love about the series. The games focus on stealth and even non-lethal combat is the best I've ever played. I respected this game puts you in high anxiety situations for fun. You know Wars and battles, but there's a greater theme of anti-war and even pacifism. It's helped shape my view and politics and morality. And when I play video games that force me to shoot and kill everything that moves it reminds me of just how boring and bland most action games are.

So when hideo kojima was going to make death stranding, I was really excited to see what he would come up with no longer bound by the expectations of the Metal Gear Solid series. I was hopeful that it would be something stealthy and pacifist. I was also hoping that the story would be well grounded in reality. Boy, what was I thinking?.

So the early trailers showed that a lot of weird shit was going on. Definitely not something that's more grounded. Honestly it was so weird I wasn't even sure how it was supposed to be a game. Haven't played the game now. It makes a lot more sense. I mean I'm still confused by everything but at least I see how it all fits into gameplay.

I'm about 4 or 5 hours in and up until just very recently I was about ready to quit the game. One of the things I like least about hideo kojima is a self-indulgent cutscenes. He always wanted to be a filmmaker and the closest he gets is making these cutscenes for his video games. Now back in the Metal Gear 1 days cut scenes were really helpful in video games because gameplay and graphics were so limited. You sort of needed the cutscene to help fill in the gaps where the gameplay couldn't. But as gameplay became more advanced especially around the PS3 era, we didn't need cutscenes to tell the story. We could tell it all in gameplay including the action. Just look at the Uncharted series. And speaking of Uncharted, that's a perfect example of how cutscenes become a treat, a reward for making it so far in the game. They're only about 30 seconds to a minute and they're very condensed and focused on telling you the piece of story that you need to know now. But you're almost always have a partner or even an enemy on screen. And there's dialogue going on the whole time you're playing. So it's clear that we don't need cutscenes to tell us everything.

But at the same time that Uncharted was showing us how cutscenes should be done. Metal Gear Solid 4 was for least with some of the longest cutscenes in video game history. Some of them were 45 minutes long. I read an interview with hideo kojima where he conclaimed that long cutscenes aren't popular anymore. It's myself. I have to wonder anymore? Sir, I believe you're the only one that loved really long cutscenes. This led me to hope that Metal Gear Solid 5 would have shorter more succinct cut scenes closer to Uncharted. But nope, the cutscenes were still very long. Still very self-indulgent and told very little story for the time that was spent in them.

I want to touch on what I mean by self-indulgent. Like I said, hideo kojima wanted to be a film director so it's no surprise that his cutscenes are very well produced. Everything from the angles, the lighting, the blocking. These are produced by someone that clearly loves films. It wants to reproduce that vibe. But in general, the cutscenes tend to be very very long. And film school. I had an editing teacher he used to shout cut over and over while watching our edits. He was trying to emphasize that we didn't need to hold shots for So long that we simply needed to tell the story in that was it. One second of screen Time can feel very long to the audience, so it's important not to waste their attention and patience on unnecessary content. And unfortunately that's exactly what hideo does. He spends long stretches showing off the graphic, showing off the scenery, showing off the character showing off everything he can and as a filmmaker I can get the desire to really spend time in a space in a scene. But as a game maker, I know that that time should be gameplay. That's how you spend time in space. That's how you immerse the player. Not in the cutscenes but in the gameplay itself.

I say all this because I hoped freed from the binds of Metal Gear Solid, Hideo could make a game as it should be. But I got something very, very, very Hideo Kojima instead. It's hard to fault the guy since gis cutscenes reign supreme over 99% of all others. But when I sit down for 30 minutes of gaming and get to touch the controller for only 5 minutes, that's a problem.

So the game:

When the fame started, the cut scene was pretty short. I was surprised. I was allowed to play for a few minutes as I made my way to a cave. That's where the game reminded me this was a Hideo Kojima project. We were visited by invisible entities that left hand prints on surfaces they touched. It was a slow, tense cut scene and established early questions for good story telling. But then it went on and on. If I'm not mistaken, we were visited by 3 separate entities, leading to tense hiding. Just one encounter was plenty, but nothing exceeds like excess.

We're allowed to do some walking and get used to some of the walking mechanics (which I hate). And then there was another cutscene. True, during a truck ride the player is allowed to move the camera. But it's still just a cutscenes posing as gameplay. More weird shit happens.

Honestly, the game is front loaded with weird shit. They have us asking too many questions with barely any gameplay. I get they're trying to build stakes but either do it faster or slower.

Faster: have the opening cutscene be the truck drive. We can introduce walking and ghosts later, lets just have the huge disaster out of the way so we know the danger of BTs. And cut that while scene in half, there is tons of wasted time.

Or, create a starting zone with 3 bases. Let the player do 2-3 main missions and 5-10 side quests. Let the player explore and have fun. Then when disaster hits, it's a little more impactful because you see the loss of what you had come to know.

Anyways, we're faced with more long cutscenes. It was throwing these long cutscenes at the beginning of the game that I realized one of the problems with hideo Kojima is there's not a ton of drama or story. He just likes to load you with information that he's created for his fictional world. This is information that I think is better discovered while playing the game and not forced to head and cut scenes. Focus on the drama and character in these moments.

Let's get to the gameplay, which I hate. It's a walking simulator. But much more literal than most games accused of this. Death Stranding has you delivering packages over difficult terrain. Part of the game is balancing the weight, otherwise you have to constantly use L2 and R2 to counter balance. Sometimes the weight over your packages cause you to go careening downhill or be washed away by a deep river. In a sense, every step can be a challenge. It makes walking truly a chore.

On top of that, you have fatigue and shoes that wear out, plus enemies: both physical and... spiritual? Honestly, he could cut back on the balancing bullshit and just made terrain and enemies a challenge. Cause the game as is makes walking miserable. There's lots of games with lots of walking, but they don't make me miserable.

Take Skyrim. You can walk around a lot if you choose. But you get to enjoy looking at the scenery or explore places for loot. Bringing balancing issues and tripping would have ruined the tranquility. And honestly, that's what I wanted from Death Stranding. The game is very beautiful and the environment is very organic. But it's hard to enjoy it when I'm desperate for the walking to end.

Then add in the enemies. Fairly early on we're introduced to bandits that will patrol and area and attempt to mug the player. So far I've successfully evaded or hidden from them. But it's another layer of annoyance when I don't already like walking.

Then we get to the BTs. Certain areas get rain. Time fall they call it. Whatever it touches begins to age, including your packages. But rain also tends to mark BTs. They're ghosts. Thank to a bridge baby, you can detect them with a shoulder mounted pointer. It spins and flaps to warm you of the direction of the closest BT. If you get too close, they can materialize and attack

I get this ks supposed to be tense and scary. But god damnit I'm already playing the most annoying walking simulator ever. Do I need more tension??? No. Fuck no!

I think if I wasn't worried about tripping everywhere I could appreciate the stealth elements. It's all too stressful without being rewarding. Compare that to dredge. Is there fuel in that game? Regardless, traveling isn't frustrating. It's easy. And the fishing mini games are simple. But within the context of monsters and ship durability, a simple fishing game can feel tense. And that's how Death Stranding should have been. Make walking as easy as Metal Gear Solid 5, but have complications that make it tense.

Quick complaints, how they fuck they gonna pretend they can pretend the president is still alive. According to West Wing this basically amounts to a coup. You can't have a non-elected official assume the power of the presidency. We're definitely not in a grounded story.

I'm uncomfortable with the treatment of the bridge baby. Especially since they were just gonna dispose of it. It's fucked to USE babies for dangerous missions, but to just abandon them when done? Fuck that.

We'll see if this game gets better. I don't know why, but I've felt inspired to give it another try. Though I've wanted to quit several times.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Oddworld: Soulstorm

Do you even playtest, bro? I feel bad for being angry and disappointed with this game. I know it's a work of passion, and as someone that is pursuing passion projects, I hate to knock it. But no your limits, I guess.

I do have hopes for Strangers Wrath.

To fet some basic complaints out of the way, the difficulty in this game is all over the place. The final level or levels weren't all that challenging compared to some of the previous BS. But every now and then there would just be ridiculousness.

In one level, you and some mudokons ride an elevator mounted with a gun. The gun shoots whatever inventory item you have equipped. But the margin of error in this sequence is TINY! I struggled with the first section (of 3 or 4) multiple times. It took me 15-20 minutes to beat a 30 second sequence. It's because if you shoot too early, your projectiles hit the floor. And once your clear to shoot, you have microseconds to switch targets before your mudokon pals get blasted, and soon yourself. It's so bad that it's not even fun. If you wanted to torture me for information, just tell me each time I failed that sequence you would give me an electric shock and I'd admit everything, immediately.

Later, after playing a pretty easy level, there's a really awkward platform section. To me, it plays like the designer got so used to beating the section with ease, they kept finding ways to boost the difficulty. And then after, you have defens Abe by possessing a slig and following him down a descending crate. But your slig gets a shotgun (which true to viseo game myth isn't accurate at long range) while enemy sligs get rocket launchers that NEVER fucking miss. I fot stuck here for a long time.

What I miss about the original game is the feeling of power when you took over a slig. You felt safe, hah, now I can defeat my enemies. Too often in this game when Im presented with a gun, I'm anxious that I'm about to face and overly challenging section with minimal to no fun factor.

I think the genius of the original is that each screen was a small scenario that took creativity to solve. It was a puzzle. And figuring out the sequence of events meant success. But this is much more of an action game. So simple challenges can go wrong a million different ways, but the health system is barely more forgiving. If you knew what to do in the original game, a solution was achieved in seconds. Now it could be minutes, but turn that to hours if you keep fucking up.

And god is it soooo repetitive. The second to last level especially. There were two main scenarios: solve a maze of platforms, about a screen or two wide, and then survive a combat room. The maze platforms were pretty standard Oddworld puzzles. But the backgrounds, layouts, and challenges were near identical. It didn't feel like progressing, it just felt like copy-paste, adjust. Worse are the combat rooms. There would either be four spawn points and you had to capture/kill all the sligs, or there would be slogs you had yo sneak past. I feel like O had to do each of those 7-10 times each. It was copy -paste like a mother fucker. By far the most unoriginal level. And then you had to sneak past sligs to let your train theu checkpoints, this was repeated three times.

Each level took me over an hour. And it was filled with pretty repetitive scenarios. In truth, the original had a lot of repeated vibes, BUT the environment changed (often) and you had story sprinkled throughout. I think I could beat three sections of the original game in the time it took to do one level of soulstorm, and I would get way more story.

Now maybe you LOVE the gameplay so much that you would pay extra for them to add even more scenarios, story or no. Fine. But the director of this project touts these games as story driven, and the story is as present as a teaspoon of coolaid mix in public swimming pool of water. It isn't present enough.

And this brings us to the real problem with Soulstorm: the story sucks. And I say this while having all the love for the original game. As mentioned, the key problem is how bare the story is. I read a plot summary to make sure I didn't miss anything, and the summary skipped three early levels without missing a story beat. There's a bunch of nothing.

And what's there is not good. I'm not sure how much oversight the creative team had, but I would have been giving pages of feedback notes when presented with this crap. I heard there was a desire to do cartoons comics, but they've not shown a strong sense of storytelling.

Details...

The first third of the game is Abe trying to get the mudokons to a train to escape the former ceo of ruptured farms (who I thought was dead). There's two or three back to back levels of Abe trying to help the mudokons escape. That is the whole story, "run for that cave!". Cut it!

Then there's about two levels where Abe is by himself getting to the train. So there aren't characters for him to interact with or develop relationships with. Early in the first level, he finds sick mudokons and makes a cure. Fine. But there's nothing else till we get the train. Except a dying mudokon that gives him a map and magic bug that points towards a secret mudokon place. These items are crucial and yet Abe finds them randomly. The fuck?

So my writer professor would ask, what does Abe want? We don't know, really, he's just reacting to his environment. It's not engaging.

We finally get to the mines and find our way to the Keeper, a kind of magical mudokon queen. There's all these past keepers in honey comb chambers or something, frozen in time..abe passes a trail and is electrocuted with the memories of past mudokons. From my my memory, we don't get to learn what Abe does. WTF?! Why even gave us do this?

We do learn that the soulstorm brew is an addictive poison that will kill mudokons who stop drinking. Fine. We later learn that the brew is made by causing mudokons to sweat. Fine. We have to make a cure and send it out with the brew so all mudokons in factories will be cured. Fine. This all works but it's the last half of the game. I was so bored and frustrated, that I couldn't care much about this.

The other issue with the story is the very uninteresting tension between the Glukkons. Munch's Oddysee had this issue two. What do I care if evil ppl hate each other?

See, Abe led a rebellion at Rupture Farms. Now that CEO wants revenge. For some reason there's a conspiracy theory with the Glukkons that he burned down his own farm for insurance. And they all hate him. Why is this plot? Shouldn't he be warning his friends of uprisings? And Abe and the other mudokons aren't fueling this conspiracy. Like, all the Glukkons turn on each other, but it's not because Abe was pulling some big political plot. So because Abe isn't directly involved and we don't care about these evil idiots, why does any of this matter?

It just isn't food writing.

Oh, and probably the worst part, end is a cliffhanger as Abe reveals the Rupture Farm mudokons all have the same mother. The mother that sewed up Abe's mouth. They want to go find her and ask why she gave them to the glukkons. While it could an interesting story, the fact the game starts on Abe's feelings about his mom and then ignores the mom till the end is kind of a betrayal. It'd be pikw if Fellowship of the Ring opened with the history of the one ring and then didn't mention it again until the end of the film..

What's sad, is I don't think this game was hopeless. Just cut every level to a third or half. Remove two or three redundant levels. And sprinkle more story. The reality about how soulstorm is made and works is good. Drop the Rupture Farms CEO, you don't need him.

LVL 1 Abe helps the survivors avoid capture. They sneak into an abandoned facility.

LVL 2 the mudokons start getting sick. Abe finds some Soulstorm, they start feeling better.

LVL 3 they decide to find a Soulstorm brew depot to sustain them. Wherein, they learn the Soulstorm brew causes addiction, they'll never be free of it. Abe gets a vision from the keep to find her in the mines.

LVL 4 steal the train. Some mudokons question Abe's leadership. Morale dwindles.

LVL 5 the mines. Abe learns of rumors of a hidden hideout for mudokons.

LVL 6 the keeper is found and offers Abe assistance to save all mudokons from the brew. But he must complete a trial.

LVL 7 the trial. Abe is told how to make a cure. First he must get supplies.

LVL 8 attack on the supply place. Mudokons run low on brew and start getting sick. Hope dwindles.

LVL 9 with supplies in hand, they attack the core brewery. The mudokons take it over and begin to send out the cure.

LVL 10 now that the mudokons can safely escape their facilities, Abe and his healed allies go to a TV station to get out a message of rebellion. The Glukkons, fearing the uprising, try to stop him.

End: Abe sends out his video. Mudokons are rising against their captors in a montage. All Glukkon industry shuts down.

Glukkons are mad that their factories are down. They begin to plot "war".

Something like that.

I do hope they're able to continue Oddworld games, but I advise they bring in some stronger storytellers.

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Oddworld: Soulstorm

Why does this game make it so hard to love it? While I might be frustrated with dated mechanics, poor level design and imprecise gameplay, I think what really bugs me most is the disappointing story.

Firstly to cover a topic I missed out my last post: I hate crafting. I understand that crafting is a beloved genre of video games, but anytime I see crafting advertised on a game, I am immediately annoyed. I don't want to figure out a billion different recipes. I don't want to go hunting for different materials. I don't want to get frustrated when I get to a place and I can't progress because I'm missing that one stupid item that's hidden under a rock or some bull crap.

So yeah when I found out that Soulstorm had crafting I was pretty pissed off. It's not even really meaningful crafting because they mostly give you all the supplies you need to achieve your crafting goals for the level. Instead of giving me different materials to put together, why not just give me the items themselves and so that if I go around searching all the trash bins and lockers I will find all the necessary grenades and what not in order to find all the secrets. To me it just adds nothing to this game and instead makes it overly complicated and less fun.

Moving on for a brief moment. I thought I loved this game. I was playing the level where you try to steal the train. I was about 80% done and I was facing a really hard challenge that was pissing me off and killing lots of my friends. But at some point I figured out the trick to doing it very easily and I saw that I was very close to collecting every mudokon on the level which inspired me. So I restarted the level from scratch and I found that playing through it a second time I felt much more comfortable with the mechanics and I was actually enjoying myself. I figured out a few ways to play the game more correctly and have a good time with it. Then after about 45 minutes, I'd finally reached the same place I'd reached before and I had my mudokons with me ready to beat the level.

But then when I was trying to get a few of my mudokon, I've been collecting to come to the top of a platform and I did everybody call. I accidentally attracted mudokon that I couldn't even see on screen and they ran right into a hazard and died just as I crossed into a checkpoint. So now whenever I loaded the checkpoint that mudokon died. I was so pissed. I wanted to give up the game right then and there. I didn't want to have to replay a 45-minute level to save one mudokon that shouldn't have died in the first place and it really just made me think this game lacked the precision to be great.

That experience really soured the mood for me. As I play through the next few levels, there were moments where I felt like the game was good and other times where I thought the game was poorly designed. I wouldn't say it was ever terrible. There was just a low threshold for failure and mistakes and sometimes the levels were designed in such a way that without the conditions being perfect success was impossible. That's just not how the original game worked. Each puzzle was very precise in particular and there was a way to play it so that you could perfectly accomplish your mission. Honestly, this is the problem with Munch's Odyssey as well. The game wants you to do much like the original, but it doesn't have the precision of the original. It's too organic. It's too chaotic which allows too many opportunities for errors. I think what would help is if the mudokons themselves were a little bit smarter and therefore you wouldn't have to babysit them so closely.

But honestly, sometimes as bland as the game can be the graphics aren't that bad. The design is interesting. The lighting works for a Unity game. It actually looks pretty good. The gameplay itself is pretty responsive and smooth for the most part, even if I'm not as happy about the precision. I do enjoy running around and playing as the different sligs and trying to solve puzzles.

But what really ruins the game for me is the levels are too long. The story's too scarce and the story itself sucks. The original game wasn't exactly Shakespeare but it was pretty good for what it was and I enjoyed the rhyming. And I think what worked best for it was the timing. It was very succinct and on point it gave you just as much information as you needed in the moment to entertain you and to communicate the plot and then move forward. It never overstayed. Its welcome and always kind of left. You wanting just a little bit more but never left you starved.

Soulstorm is starved for story. You go whole levels which can take 45 minutes to hour and a half with almost no story development whatsoever and then when you finally do get story, you get overly long cinematic videos that are very redundant and give almost no information. At one point about halfway through the game, Abe discovers that the Brew being made is to enslave the mudakans and if they don't drink it, they die almost immediately. After that, we get a similar scene from the bad guy's perspective that gives us almost the same information. If not a little bit less, there's no point to the scene. It just shows us that the bad guy is mad that he's not succeeding. Who cares? Now that I'm closing in on the end of the game, there are tons of really long cinematics by really long. I mean about 60 seconds. One about 10 seconds would have done it and they go on and on giving us no real plot. No real character development. Not only that, but there's tons of radio stations giving out propaganda that we all know is false. But why do we care that it's false? We know this is a corrupt world and we know that people listen to the radio station are evil. So why do we care what the radio station is saying it just doesn't make sense.

Each level is made up of about 5 to 10 subsections in my opinion and in truth, each one of these sections is almost about a good enough level in its own right. Also, given that there's a lot of failure in messing up and trying to save all the mudokins, you can get stuck in a single area for a long period of time, so adding more length to the level just adds more frustration that we're that much further away from victory. What could save this is filling it with good, meaningful story. Instead of having these really long dumbass cup scenes that aren't worth anything. Why not sprinkle details out as you play the game?. It would be wonderful if the mudokons you rescued gave you information gave you insights about the area. Or maybe as you wonder the levels you overhear the gluckons talking to sligs and gain more information and their plans to take out aid and their plans to make profit off the enslavement of the Dawkins. I don't know, just split it up.

This is something that naughty dog does a great job with and Uncharted and The Last of Us. There's a little bit of gameplay and then just a touch of story to inch you forward over the entirety of an hour or so. You've gotten about 10 minutes worth of story split up throughout the game. That way no gameplay moment takes too long without story and no story moment. Overstays us welcome. I mean their story development moments and then and The Last of Us s that probably could have been summed up in a 5 to 10 minute scene, but they're spread out over a 60-minute level. I think that's a good balance and that's something that soulstorm really could have used instead. It's just filled with long levels that are scarce for story and then when we get story it's not only over long. It just isn't very interesting. I hate to say it who wrote this shit?

Ultimately, I'm kind of torn. I enjoy this game. I enjoy the vibe. I enjoy the design but I just don't like the story and it doesn't make me love the game and that's always going to be a sore disappointment. So I'm glad that I finally got to play it after all these years. But I'll be forever disappointed and likely never touch it again.

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Oddworld: Soulstorm

I love Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. And I was excited to see how the team would explore this world. But so far games have either felt like rehashes or strike outs. Soulstorm doesn't break that curse but it's not the triumphant return I hoped for.

Before reacting to Soulstorm, I need to set the stage of context and expectation. I love Oddworld, so I want to be impressed by it.

Playing Abe's Oddysee was a core memory moment back in...1997? The production design was unique and relatable. The way they use CGI video to transition between scenes gave the 2d world depth. And props to the anti-capitalist story! No game quite felt like it. Which I'm sure I went into during a previous journal entry.

Later Abe's Exodus was released. I remember being put off since the studio claimed each of their games would focus on different characters and be unique experiences. The promise was enticing and the betrayal was confusing. They did make interesting upgrades, like controlling more than sligs with Abe's mind powers. Or having different mudokon types requiring different handling. Then of course the "All Y'all" command to get more than one mudokon tk follow was a life saver. Half the original game was leading each mudokon 1 by 1 to the exit.

But more isn't always better. The game was longer and more involved, which honestly caused to overstay it's welcome. Especially when it wasn't a divergence from the original. It's probably a good sequel but I just didn't love it. And the original is so perfect I didn't need it.

Then Oddworld Inhabitants teased a third game for PS2. Actually, early gameplay was the first PS2 graphics shown for PS2 (except it was prerendered). I think they already called it munches Oddysee, so yay, new character. But it still featured familiar mudokons and sligs. Ah well, the move to 3d space was promising. Showing mudokons collect wood and regenerate trees teased interesting strategy and resource management mechanics. Which didn't really work out.

Then those jerks had to bail on PS2 to make the game an Xbox exclusive. I felt betrayed. I played demo of the game back then and wasn't too impressed. The graphics were a bit stale, nothing like the high production quality of the original games. And I was disappointed to see Abe was still in the picture, meaning the studio still wasn't fulfilling its promise.

Finally playing the game 20 years later I can say that Munch's Oddysee was a mess and proof that the magic of the original was lost. Despite the disappointment, I still enjoy the world. Kind of like how I watch all the Jurassic Park movies despite them never getting near the excellence of the original.

Then came Stranger's Wrath and I was so excited. Unfortunately it was an Xbox and exclusive and I was a PS2 fanboy (because my mom only let me own a single console at a time). This was the game fullfilling the original promise: original characters and original gameplay. Reviews for the game looked promising. But sadly, no new games came.

But then there was the Abe's Oddysee remake on PS4 (and friends). By this point I thought Oddworld was a cult classic forgotten in the pixels of time. But apparently it was successful enough to warrant a series continuation. New N Tasty looked great and played pretty well. But the move to 3D cost it some of its precision. And for some reason they changed the very perfect CGI videos to cutscenes with worse timing. But whatever, it meant getting a back to basics sequel.

For years I've meant to play Soulstorm, but reviews weren't impressed and I was busy. I'm glad to have my hands on it now!

So, first off...it looks pretty good. It's made with Unity, which I respect as a former Unity user. Under close examination, the graphics look imperfect, but viewed from the distance they're meant to be seen they look good.

Judging by the opening scene, I'm sensing this is a reimagining of Abe's Exodus. Given that Soulstorm isn't deviating too much from the Oddysee formula, I think sticking with a similar plot is not wise. Or at least, it's possibly too safe.

The opening seen, while a little action oriented and sentimental, isn't great. It might have worked for a teaser if it hadn't overstayed its welcome. Like by making it 3-5 minutes long that some how made it better. But less is more with good scenes. Show the train, show the approaching sligs, show the mudokons throwing brew into the furnace, they see the sligs, they rush, the sligs attack, they bang on the door for abe, abe is being indecisive, one of the mudokons gets shot, rising high pitched noise, and cut! Its 60-120 seconds, max.

So next we've got the escaped mudokons drinking brew in a cave while Abe talks to a wise person. I can't really remember what it's about but Abe isn't sure what to do and...oh he's being encouraged to cut his mouth stitches as a sign of his freedom from slavery but I think he's vague posting about them being connected to his only memory of his mom.

Then they're attacked and the first level, a tutorial, is about escaping the cave.

There's too much happening here. One, we don't need an action teaser when the first level is an action packed event. Any internal conflict you wanted to show within Abe in the teaser could have been achieved in present day. To me it's someone more focused on grabbing attention than telling a story.

Two, why are possibly getting into Abe's mom out of nowhere. The game has dropped us into several situations without context. It's like starting a song twenty seconds in. It's off putting.

Not knowing the full story I think we start with a slow opening. Ooo, we have mudokon kids huddled around a flare in some industrial basement, telling the story of legendary abe. With the help of childish drawings, we see a brief retelling of the first game, how heroic Abe saved 300 mudokons. The kids want abe to save them, and one reassures them he will.

Cut to the wasteland and Abe is leading the mudokons toward a rock structure. Now, level one. Abe must check on a few mudokons, getting complaints of fatigue and hunger. He enlists the help of a few to scout the area. They find a ruins with water and fertile land. Mudokons move in.

But then Abe finds something. It's a box of bottles. He takes out a bottle and sees a flash vision. More mudokons suffering. The elder arrives and asks about the vision (but how did he know?). The elder advises that Abe's quest isn't done yet. Abe insists they're free. The elder responds, "No mudokon is free until all mudokons are free" or something.

Then there's an explosion. Sligs attack the cave. Now we have the action packed level. At the end, the mudokons run to safety. Abe has a choice, follow the other mudokons, or follow the trail of brew to the suffering he saw in his vision. The journey begins.

By having the relief of a home for the mudokons, it hurts more to lose it.

Back to the real game...

So gameplay is ok. It's basically the same as all games with abe. Jump around, navigate lethal scenarios, and take over sligs while helping your friends.

Oddysee remake was pretty straightforward with its 2.5d level design. But this game tosses in some curved and overlapping paths, just like Kloana and Pandemonium on...PS1. not trying to be too hard, but this isn't reinventing the wheel. Really, the disappointment is the "puzzle" sections. While the paths from A to B are curvey and organic, the action sections with challenges tend to stick to the 2d plane. They're very flat with a head on camera. It feels like they've not found a way to truly break free of the original's level design. It wouldn't be such a sore spot if the game impressed in other areas. But it doesn't.

The controls are responsive.

One near thing is that you don't have to kill the sligs. You can actually collect tape and use it to bind them, which takes them out of the level. You can also pickpocket them for supplies when bound. Coupled with sneaking around this almost becomes Metal Gear Oddworld. So I am a fan. But they don't emphasize the option to go low kill. They don't tell you when possessing a slig that you can switch to stun guns.

I read that originally it would hurt your quarma every time you killed a slig. That was a surprise at first, since part of the fun of Oddworld is all the many ways to murder sligs. But knowing I don't have to kill makes me rethink my sadistic position on slig murder. I read a wiki page about sligs, and in a way, they're enslaved too. Only their job is sadistic violence and oppression. Even tho they're the evil guards and bane of mudokons, they themselves are fodder for the Gluttons. I think they should have left the quarma and challenged players to consider what it means to kill your enemy. I think it would have been interesting that if Abe is able to spare x-amount of sligs, there could have been an alternative ending where the sligs rise up against the gluttons, hand in hand with mudokons.

As system of a down says, forgiveness is the ultimate sacrifice.

There's some added puzzle elements, such as collecting flammable liquid and water. You can use the liquid to burn down obstacles or enemies and use water to clear the fire. It's simple but a nice addition. During a challenge section of defending mudokon escape, I realized by creating fires in key places, I prevented slig reinforcements from ever pising a threat. I'll give the game kudos for creating opportunities for open ended solutions.

Really annoying thing. You have to ride a tram across areas. But you need to possess a slig to murder other sligs in your defense. But there's a no possession machine that requires you to delay a possession attempt. But then you're sighted and attacked before you have a chance to defend yourself. Bad design. I must have died 20 times just because someone stupidly created a tiny window for success.

That's all I got for now.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Fable: The Lost Chapters

Fable is like DreamWorks's take on Game of Thrones. I enjoyed playing it, so am saddened that it wasn't something better. It's got two sequels, so maybe they'll deliver in this game's promises.

Complaint i left off which is still valid, the popin is so annoying. This is a 360 game. There shouldn't be noticeable popin. I remember playing the Motorstorm demo on PS3 kiosks in Walmart. One of the things that struck me was how many little shrubs of vegetation were spread across the track. Dozens of individual sprites populated the environment, while there were up to 12 detailed vehicles on screen, all with animations and realistic damage. Plus you could see 3d mountains and terrain in the distance. Yet the popin wasn't noticable. To guess, the draw distance was at least 100 feet.

Yet on Fable, little plants were popping in at a mere 12 feet. Like these levels were designed for an xbox. They're not very big and the backgrounds aren't highly detailed. I can't imagine there's any reason to have a single object popin. Not like the game is trying to hide load screens or anything. It's blatantly poor optimization that ruins the experience and immersion of the world.

Moving on...O can't believe how close to beating this game I was back in the day. I stopped just short of saving the mother (whom I thought was dead). Maybe it was because I had focused on strength and fighting the summoned dudes was annoying. If only I understood the magic spells.

See, generally I like to play games and figure them out for myself. How well a game teaches the player is one of my criticisms. I don't think Fable really dissuaded me from magic, but I didn't feel inspired to try it. Turns out I wasn't inspired to use my biw either cause it wasn't till fighting the undead that I remember trying to build up my skills. I think I wanted to unlock steal, but the steal mechanic reminded me of how restrictive Fable js compared to Morrowind and others. I probably just lost interest. Had I leaned into magic I would have finished it.

Magic is OP in Fable. And I'm thankful for that. I've heard magic can be OP in Morrowind, but you gotta know what you're doing. True, Fable has a lot of trash spells. And once you get enflame all other spells are useless IMO.

I've always shies from magic in games because it tends to depend on Mana, a finite resource. And to me, if you can win with physical attacks, then you're just not ready. I'm changing my perspective, especially when I see how it disrupts my enjoyment of things. In Fable, Magic potions are cheap. I had about 200 stored up by the end of the game. And with enflame, you can hit as many enemies that are within range, so getting surrounded by 5 foes is a welcomed opportunity to save on mana and boost xp earned. Plus, you don't take damage while using enflame. So I was killing everything while remaining mostly invincible. It made the game way easy. Sometimes I'd switch to sword or arrows for the fuck of it, but it was never better.

So anyway, I go to save the mom. Kinda dumb as a mission. You find her and try to escape to only be cut off by Jack of Blades, or whatever his name is. Then you go to prison where you have to win a race to get invited to a poetry reading, where you steal a key and escape again. I failed the key stealing the first time. So I had to watch a cutscene and redo the race. Booooo. Then I escaped down the same hall we got stopped at last time. But for some reason Jack wasn't watching. I mean, he could have stopped me so easily. Ah well, plotholes.

The prison sequence was disappointingly boring. When I failed the poetry thing, I half expected a few skills to get reduced as punishment. But nope. Just a note that I was tortured. This could have been more interesting. Maybe force the player into a routine: sit in your cell, get food, walk the yard for exercise, go back to the cell. But have the player make connections with guards and cell mates until they can plot an escape. Punish the player with reduced skills or xp, which immerses the player into the harshness prison life, creating a fear that without escape they'd lose all they have. (You can give apl back later). This could be a more interesting prison escape. Instead, we get a boring foot race and dumb stealth mission. If anything, it felt like the game was trying to extend play time without putting in too many resources. I mean, having to deal with moral decisions while in prison was a great opportunity.

Anyways, we got out, met up with the sister and bear Jack.

Who the fuck is Jack, anyway? I don't think he appeared until the Arena mission, which is like 60% thru the game. Lame time to introduce an antagonist. I think he was the shithead that burns the village at the beginning, but he wasn't seen. How great would it be to see Jack strike down the father and take the women, only to hear about his evil exploits while being raised in the guild. This would have created a personal revenge story worth remembering.

I mean the first 10 or so guild/story missions are unconnected, random events: hornet queens and helpless farmers. Why not make Jack behind it all: releasing hornets werewolves to distract ppl while he makes his moves. That could be a cool mission tree, where did these hornets come from? We tracked them to this cave. Huh, Jack's bandits are breeding them and sending them out in sabotaged supply barrels. What's his plan?

So after the very basic ending of killing the bad guy that wants power, there's an extra 2 hrs tacked on. It's not in the original game, and you can tell. The game has a decent plot of rising action, climax, and resolution. So to then add two more hours of gameplay and pretend it was part of the plan along felt wrong. I remember thinking, "We killed Jack, why are we still doing things?" Turns out Jack became a dragon and had to be defeated again. But most of the main characters from the original game aren't present, so it feels more like a fan game than an official expansion.

Actually it would have made a good sequel. After Jack is defeated you get reports of strange going ons and slowly learn Jack is gaining power as a dragon. A lot could be done with that. Or you could just poop out a half baked 2 hr expansion.

Oh, and Maze's betrayal. It was a surprise, but I didn't care. He mostly died with honor. But what if his betrayal was really about helping prepare you to be strong enough to defeat Jack. So like, by working with Jack, he had enough influence to ensure you were never outmatched but grew enough to win. Basically like how game designers treat gamers. It's a mix of Infamous and Metal Gear Solid 3.

Ultimately the game is very ok. It's mostly playable, though the sword play is a bit annoying. The characters aren't particularly memorable and the plot is pretty standard. But it has a certain charm and is fun. I'm interested to see what 2 and 3 are like.

[zachsgamejournal]

PLAYING: Fable: The Lost chapters

I'm playing this mostly cause I want to play 2 and 3, but I felt I should actually finish 1. It's alright...

I used to be a PlayStation fanboy, hardcore. Especially around PS2. So back when Fable was coming into the scene I stubbornly refused to acknowledge its potential. In many ways I was right.

The game had a lot of hype. The hype I'm aware of came from friends. The idea was that this game was going to have a high level of freedom and outcomes. In truth, the game was extremely linear and restrictive. That's ok if you've got a great story, which it did not. It didn't help that Morrowind was already out showed us how great a fantasy game should be! This is my reaction to its launch.

Later I'd give into temptation and buy the game on PC. That's not the same as supporting Xbox, right? It was hard to play on a laptop keyboard, but managed. At the time, I had ok fun but had some complaints.

Level design. After Morrowind and Grand theft auto 3 showed the world how fun open world could be, but it was painful to see a game that was basically interconnected paths that had to be loaded. It was like Ocarina of Time, but even that made each area feel pretty open. And then Soul Reaver was basically basically interconnected hallways, but there was no loading, so it still felt open. Also, those were games from a previous generation. And in Fable, each area had very restrictive paths. You were blocked by wooden fences and shrubbery. So lame. Soul Reaver and Ocarina didn't have these lame barriers.

Names of things. By the time I got to Fable, I was used to characters, places, and organizations having unique or interesting names. Instead, Fable named things after what they were. The Guild. The Bandit Lord. The Seerer. Combined with the self aware silly tone, it made everything feel cheap and undeveloped.

Skill development was lame. I remember playing San Andreas for a friend that had just started Fable. He was jealous of how SA handled skill development. Want to develop your gun skill, shoot guns. Want to develop your strength, exercise and fight I'm sad GTA since abandoned this cause it was great. But Morrowind was the same. By using skills you got better at them. In Fable, you earned points. Two problems, it felt cheap buying something instead of earning it. But also, basic stuff like stealing was locked behind purchases. Morrowind let you steal tight out the gate. It was other skills like sneak that needed to be developed to make you better at it.

I don't remember how far I got on PC, but I never finished.

I tried to replay this years ago. Didn't get far then either.

Now, I'm trying again.

It's ok.

Graphically, I liked that the game has a thickness to it. I'm not sure how else to explain it. The clothes feel like they're on top of the models, not just part of the models. The walls and buildings have a personality to it. This is the 360 version, so it's a little better than the original. Despite the thickness, the art does appear a bit awkward. Western games almost always had uncomfortably awkward 3D models at this time. Either they were plain and "realistic" or awkward and cartoony. Japanese games seemed to do a better job of making low poly models look nice without being wild.

I'm focusing on magic. Being a magic user in games has always been intimidating. You have a finite attack resource (mana) and you usually have shit armor. But warriors have great armor and can swing their sword as much as they want.

(side note, instead of mana all characters should have stamina that is exhausted with moves. Swing a sword, uses stamina, cast a fireball uses stamina.)

But focusing on magic hasn't been too bad. The mana bar refills pretty quick and there seems to be plenty of mana potions. I started with lightning, which did well at first but fireball hit with more power. But once I tried enflame, forget about it. It seems to so as much damage if not more than fireball, and it hits multiple enemies without aiming. Now I don't really fight, I just stand in the middle of the fray and cast enflame. I'll switch to arrows or sword if needed.

The story is meh. The voice acting is ok and there's "humor". But it all feel so plain. At the beginning your character's sister sacrifices herself to save you. You go to be raised by a friendly old dude so you can fulfill your destiny as a great hero. Your sister witnesses the torture and murder of your mother before being tortured and blinded herself. The violence towards women is a bit much. The game is filled with subtle and blatant sexism, and I think the that's an issue with the back story too. By having women treated so poorly it's meant to inspire anger and vengeance in the expected male player audience. "We must defend the women" is probably written on a post it note somewhere. And then there are werewolves and a sword in the stone... it's such standard fantasy stuff without making it its own.

The game looks to be pretty short. I'm about 55-60% through. Which is kinda weird given how many unnecessary systems exist in the game. Like I can buy house in multiple towns or take advantage of price differences between merchants, but the game is so linear in mission structure and level design I don't feel invited to explore these systems. And I feel these systems are why the game faced so many delays.

I don't care much for the morality system. The problem with all morality systems is they're obvious. You always know what the right or wrong thing to do is. And right things are rewarded as much as wrong things. It should be the opposite. Right things should take sacrifice.

Like a merchant wants you to escort them to safety for 100g. But if you kill them, they drop 1000g. Or maybe you join a task with a guild member. Your attacked by bandits. The other guild member already has the payment and offers to split it with you. You can either run off and split the money, petting everyone die. Or you can stay and save everyone, but make no money. That creates a temptation to do bad things.

Or obscure how choices you make affect the morality meter. Don't give obvious black and white choices, give ambiguous grey choices...maybe. Like a poor family lost their house to a rich man, but all their heirlooms were taken as well. Do you steal back the heirloom or maybe offer to buy it.

Anyway, I'm glad being a magic user isn't difficult and that we're moving at a quick pace.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Dredge

I saw ppl praising Dredge. Whatever, ppl praise things. There are plenty of games I hate that are well praised. So I tried Dredge. Fuck it's good.

I loaded up Dredge just as a break from Dynasty Warriors 9. I was immediately sucked in. It achieves what I think more games should pursue, focusing on a core idea and making it compelling.

Dredge reminds me of my favorite PlayStation 1 games. PS1 had so many unique games. It was exploring the possibilities of 3d games while also having to solve technical limitations creatively. Now days games are just a copy of a copy of a copy. In a sense they have to be. If you don't give the expected systems and subsystems the core gamers will ignore you. Never mind risking something new. Maybe Dredge isn't 100% original, but it's accessible and functional.

The core loop is go fishing to make money and upgrade your fishing equipment to expand your fishing possibilities. And I love the fishing mini games. They're kinda nonsensical, as they don't represent what teal fishing is like. But real fishing is boring. This makes it more engaging. Bringing a little skill to the equation without being a blocker to joy.

Many of the quests and side quests you perform require you to fish, find places, or transport things (including people). So the basic gameplay loop proves to fit a decent amount of different contexts.

What then sells the game is the atmosphere. The day only lasts a short while before night comes, and with the night comes many horrors. They've done a good job making the night seem scary. There are parasites that climb aboard your boat to each your fish, giant fish they pretend to be other fishing boats, and monsters that will swallow you whole. Plus, if you don't sleep in game, you begin to see things. It's all simply done but very effective. They don't have wild minute long cutscenes that lose their creepiness after a few seconds, they have simple little haunts that have in game consequences, creating a fun aense of dread as the sun dies.

The cast and characters are freat too. There's a story being told. It has a level of creepiness but is also pretty simple. Characters can be off putting or creepy themselves, creating a constant sense of unease and disquiet. It's great.

The story itself is a bit confusing. I looked up some explainations and they helped but didn't impress. Some of it is predictable and it doesn't bend my mind in any way. But it all serves the atmosphere and the game itself.

One thing I live about the game us how it handles non fishing moments. You talk to characters and explore areas on land. But instead of building on land mechanics you explore areas via text. “in this room are two paintings. Which do you look at?” It's cheap but also just enough. I mean there is plenty of good fishing and exploring, why over complicate exploring abandoned labs and campsites? That would just invite more complications and move us away from the core loop.

So, I U loved Dredge. And I want more like this. Not creepy fishing games, but games that effectively explore a simple loop to immerse the player.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Dynasty Warriors 9

I love Dynasty Warriors. It's flawed a million different ways, but no other games (outside the warriors series) has tried to capture this excellent formula, so it remains the best game of its kind. When I saw DW9 going open world I was both pumped and confused, how could this work with such specific plot points needing to be hit? But I love it. This is exactly what DW needed.

Before the PS2 launched in America, game stores had a demo. On that demo was a 15 minute trial of Dynasty Warriors 2. I remember DW1 being a tekken style fighting game on PS1. The demo I played was sluggish. I was interested to see where they'd take this new idea.

It was fun! The hack n Slashed work cause you had a pretty open battlefield where you could go wherever you wanted. This allowed you to affect how the battle was going. On DW2 I mostly focused killing every enemy, systematically clearing the screen of red, like I was mowing grass. As the series evolved so did my tactics.

I only rented DW2. While I enjoyed it, I couldn't pull the trigger. But DW3 was great. They expanded the characters, the levels, and the gameplay. It was perfect. I learned that I didn't need to kill every enemy, just focus on the officers. By killing officers I received character upgrades, but it also had the highest impact on morale. If you boosted your morale high enough, your army would start wiping out the enemy for you. So by Dynasty Warriors 5, I was skilled at moving through the battlefield, assassinating officers abd hitting the key events to help my side win.

Despite all the Dynasty Warriors I played (100+ hours), I only barely understood the story. Well, I didn't really understand it. I liked that each character sorta had their own story. This meant playing as each character felt fresh. But it also meant things were happening in strange orders.

Dynasty Warriors 9 solved this issue.

So yeah, DW9. I'm very impressed with how they handled the open world. And I'm impressed with how much game is here. The biggest problem, admittedly, is the difficulty. It just isn't difficult. This was made more apparent when I tried the Dynasty Warriors Origins demo. Now that's a challenging game.

First off, how they handle the open world is pretty genius. The game is played in chapters. At the beginning of each chapter the map resets. The territories realign with the proper officers being in charge of their proper territory. The player is free to roam the whole map, conquering bases and cities as they wish. And when the chapter switches over, the map resets.

I guess if you spent the whole time conquering every territory, it would be frustrating to start back at 0 with the chapter reset. But you know what, I didn't do that so I don't care.

To handle the story, no matter what officer you play (you unlock as you go), you get the same basic story (I think). Each chapter is made up of about 20-30 submissions. These could be escorting a supply cart, conquering a castle, talking to characters, or many other things. It creates variety outside basic hack n slash while also making a game more aligned with the real story.

Take the battle of Chi Bi. In all DW games the battlefield is two shores bridges together by interconnected boats. The olayer can encourage or discourage key events based on the side you're playing on, but it's still 99% hacking up your enemies.

But the Chi Binchapter in DW9 is much more involved. Cao Cao threatens to conquor all lands with his massive amry. Wu and Shu have a fragile alliance against Cao Cao. Outmatched, they need to use clever tactics to win the battle. Sub-missions involve delivering wine tonthe enmy to get them drunk before the battle. Sailing a strawboat int range of enemy archers to collect arrows for use. Helping start a fire and other fun things. All the while there's character development thru cut scenes and mission specific events. Dynasty Warriors js finally telling the story of Romance of Three kingdoms in an engaging and coherent way.

Of course, you can always go straight to the boss character and wipe him out. But where's the fun in that.

The open world is also impressive. It's fucking huge. I'm not sure how big but I'm thinking bigger than Skyrim and maybe as big as Breath of the Wild. They've leaned into a more realistic approach, and the vistas can be downright awe inspiring. The light as the sun rises is beautiful. And the forts lit by torches at nice is impressive. I mean, for a PS4 game it should probably look even better, but it's Dynasty Warriors, I take what I can get. Unfortunately, the world is almost too big. There are huge swaths of empty land. There's trees, supplies, and enemies, but it's still mostly just space. Oh well.

I was impressed with how they brought in popular open world gameplay that felt right for DW. You can hunt and fish. This allows you to earn rewards and buy special items. You can also tame wild animals like bears, tigers, and wolves to fight with you. They level up on their own. It's pretty cool. You can also buy horses and the more you use them the more they level, eventual being worth 10 times as much when you sell them back. It's a good way to make cash.

Each town also has side quests you can pick up. Go here, kill this, bring back that. It reminds me of world of Warcraft, which I love. While i tried playing side quests on my first playthrough, I realized quickly that would make this game take hundreds of hours. So I focused on the story.

The weapon and item system is pretty intricate. By collecting scrolls you unlocked items to be built or bought. You can customize some items as well to give various boosts. The customization is near endless. But I stuck with basic favorites and didn't get to lost in this.

On my first playthrough with Shu, I stuck with Liu Bei for the first few chapters. TheN i switched to other characters. Ut was late game so fighting level 50s with a level 1 was rough. But ince I got to lvl 10, things sped up.

The biggest issue (besides screen tearing, wtf?!) is how easy the game is. You can basically walk into any fort, surrounded by hundreds of enemies, and just beat up the main officer for a quick victory. The standard soldier is basically no threat. Even in huge groups. And officers, as long as they're not too strong, are little more than hit sponges. Sometimes the game gives insta-kill options, which speeds things up. But it really felt there was no reason to play the gane strategically. That was a shame, cause the map is covered in bases to be defeated and turned to support the player's army. It's sad how unnecessary it is to take key positions and attack in force. I basically just hopped around the map assassinating enemies. I did all the submissions for the story, but it didn't make sense to waste time on bases. If it werent for that, this game would probably be perfect (ish).

This game is great. There's a huge beautiful world filled with quests, bases, and secrets. The game has many in depth systems to break up the button mashing monotony. And the story is being told quite effectively and more clearly than I've ever seen. I love this game.

A little on the story. I played Shu because Liu Bei seemed to be pro peace and modesty. The chinese show I'm watching suggests this is an act, but I choose to belive it. It was fun seeing Liu Bei gain power and respect as he built a kingdom out of nothing. Then near the end everyone starts dying. Guan Yu is defeated by ppl that were supposed to be allies. Zhang Fei is killed by his own troops for pushing them too hard. Liu Bei and many of his advisors die around the same time. It's a lot of sadness all at once, kind of like experiencing the red wedding in game of thrones.

I played as Wy, and learned more about them. I wasn't as invested, but Sun Quan seems pretty cool. I was about to start Wei, following the group that would eventually unite China, but I was at like 57 hrs kf game time. I needed to move on.

Despite its flaws, Dynasty Warriors 9 is great! It's some of the most fun I've ever had!

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Ratchet and Clank Size Matters

I bought Size Matters on PSP. I only played a little of the first level, thinking it looked like shit. But feeling pumped after playing Daxter and Ratchet remake, I thought I'd give it another try. God, it's awful.

So, as I remembered, the game is ugly as sin. There are PS1 games that look better. And as we saw with games like Daxter, God of War, and Liberty City Stories, you can get good looking PSP games. It's possible. Maybe cause of all they were trying to do with the game, they had to make some cuts in the art department, but it's sad to look at. It looks (and plays) like a cheap knock off, like when a game is real successful and the team takes 2+ years to make a decent sequel, so an inexperienced upstart company tries to rude the game's coattails a d fastracks a rip off.

The levels are a but uninspired. And some of the levels are a little more involved, with light puzzle solving. While I would commend the attempt, it's such a blocker to the main shootng loop that I find painful.

Also, the enemy balance is all pver thr place. The game cannhave super weak a d super strong enemies on the same screen like it's not weird. And the guns take way too fucking long to level. Partly because some just aren't useful. But by the end of my first playthrough, I was struggling to beat basic enemies.

The story is, who fucking cares. The cutscenes aren't really interesting and the game is such a painful play that I almost resent the inclusion of story.

I was gonna go for a platinum but I spent eay too many hours trying to grind these shit guns. Like one gun is a sniper mine layer. But the game does not lend itself well to sniper gameplay or mine laying. So it's a shit gun with no practical use.

I will never play this game again. It should be buried with ET out in the desert.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Ratchet and Clank (2016)

I briefly played Ratchet and Clank All 4 One with my kids and jt got me pumped for Ratchet and Clank. I thought to play the original game hoping it would have trophies like the Jak games, but no such luck. So I opted for the 2016 remake. It's pretty and fun.

My loyalty to Naughty Dog in the early 2000s made me resistant to try Ratchet games. They compared them to Jak games and I refused to think Insomniac could just come out of no where and win. Once again, I'm sad I didn't start on the games sooner. They're a lot kf fun. And while there's decent production value, the stories usually aren't too impressive. Better humor than Jak, but still lacking the heart of a pixar film (deapite the comparisons).

They changed the opening of the 2016 remake, probably to better align with the not very good movie. But afterward there seems to be a decent amount of similarity. The weapons and characters level up with xo, which I think was added to the more recent games.

The game looks great. Being in PS4 the polygon count is good and the lighting is amazing. Given the levels are based on the simpler PS2 originals the game gets to put more priority into the visuals. And ai live the simplicity. It allows me to just enjoy the game instead of remembering a complicated dance of button pushes and convoluted mechanics.

My biggest disappointment with all ratchet games is the linearity of the levels. The levels always feel like they should be more open and there's opportunity for side quests galore. But it's 95% of the time fighting your way from one end to the other. The few times a level has extra quests or more exploring I get really excited.

Inspired by collecting the Daxter Platinum trophy, I decided to get the platinum all this game. I kinda regret the commitment. The main problem was the groovitron trophy. While I get why this would be a trophy, the game doesn't track which enemies have been made to dance very well. I had to start a whole third or fourth playthrough just to make sure I got all the enemies. And the trophy didn't ping till I uaed it on the boss. I know I used it on the boss on my first playthrough.

While I like the idea of the weapons leveling up, there's a balancing issue. The first two weapons end up being the hardest to max out. Partly because they're not as useful as other weapons. It's like they get xp based on dmg and because they're weak they take forever. The Ryno was the last gun I got and I maxed it within an hour or two. But I was struggling to get the early weapons maxed for a long time.

My other major complaint is the Clank levels. While the puzzle bits are kinda fun and a nice break, they don't really help you advance you leveling. The main loop is shoot stuff to level up your guns to shoot more stuff. Clanks missions don't involve shooting or contributing to the levels. So it fewls like a distraction or inconvenience.

To fix it, the game should offer party xp. So as you complete objects or defeat enemies, you gain a little bit of party xp that can be applied to any weapon. So even if you only use the ryno, you can still level up other guns. And when you're stuck using Clank, you can still work towards your weapon goals.

I will see about the story, I liked the idea of the baddie being a rich shithead destroying planets so he could custom design vanity planets. This is the sorta woke plot I want to see in video games. Its a reminder that billionaires are bad. Not just because they're rich, but because of their greed (Luke 21:1-4).

So anyway, it's a fun game with great graphics. It's relaxing with an okish story. For the platinum chasers, it would have been nice to have some improvements.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Daxter

After playing thru the Jak trilogy, I was still feeling the Jak vibes so decided to revisit this PSP game. I had owned it back in the day, but I didn't get very far. I only played it at home and there was a PS3 there, so…Anyway, replaying it now I'm sad I never gave it a chance cause it's a magnificent platformer.

The game js clever in that explores what Daxter was up to between Jaks capture and eventual rescue at the beginning of Jak 2. While part of the idea is that Daxter is trying to find and rescue Jak, but it feels like he's mostly fucking around. He also rarely seems worried that his friend has been captured. I don't remember the story that well (it wasn't very impressive), but I think Daxter should have used the bug eradication business as a way to gain access to key areas, with the completion of each level should have resulted in a clue or progress toward that aim. Ultimately, the big bad was a major threat that needed elimination. But you don't know that till the end.

So that's my problem with the game. The rest of it is great.

Graphicallythe game is impressive for a PSP title. I think there's some framerate issues, but they managed to make the game look almost as good as its PS2 counterpart. Like the other Jak games, the world is detailed and feels lived in. And while they've shrunken down some of the borrowed Jak 2 locations, it still feels like you're getting a piece of the bigger experience.

While the game features a bug spray that aorta acts like a gun, Daxter feels much more like a platformer in the vein if Jak 1. The levels are pretty diverse as well, with unique aesthetics and challenges.

The game is a real blast and I look forward to playing it again.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Jak 3

I was looking forward to Jak 3. I thought it was my favorite of the series. But I might go back and say the original reigns supreme. Still, Jak 3 is a huge improvement and I spent a good 5+ hrs doing side quests cause I enjoyed the world so much.

I had hoped the story of Jak 3 would have been better, but it's more of the same, really. To its advantage, it is trying to close the book on the series ao it gets to tie up the loose ends and does so well enough.

Improvements over Jak 2 includw better difficulty balance, but also a decent open world wit the waste. Instead of a maze of loading corridors the game features a decent sized map that allows near total freedom of travel. The world could be at least the size of Morrowind or one of the islands on GTA3. It's basically just a big desert, but there are distinct areas and unique cities, temples, and caves hidden about. You eventually return to the city which has mostly been destroid. It makes me sad because I like seeing the city in operation.

The game is better than Jak 2, but it isn't mind blowingly better. Apparently they took less than a year to make it, leaning heavily on qhat was established in Jak 2. Unfortunately that rushed production makes itself known in a leas than spectacular experience.

So while I do like Jak 3, Jak 1 has my heart. I wish Naughty Dog would return to Jak and give it a really good makeover.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Jak 2

Hot on the heels of replaying Jak and Daxter I felt inspired to give Jak II another try. I remember being disappointed and even frustrated with this game. Especially when playing the HD remaster on PS3. My hope was that maybe I just didn't get it. But no, I was right. This game is rough as fuck.

To celebrate it, the improved cinematic visuals was nice. Unfortunately the game doubled down on the edgy/crude = mature story telling of the original. This was a mistake, as the story is very immature and lacking coherency, and it's now less appropriate for younger audiences. I'm glad Amy Hennig was able to save Naughty Dog's storytelling with Uncharted.

Also worthy of praise is the world building. The give the city some history and depth. But it's not great. I think Grand Theft Auto 3 had everyone looking at open world for ps2 the same way: play a wisecracking criminal. I think it was neat how Jak plays a rebel, making his criminal behavior more legit. But he's still a bit of a dick and all the aide charcters are dicks…it just isn't very inspiring.

Now that I'm done praising the game, let's look at its problems. It's many, many problems.

Issue one, the open world and traversal. Best I can tell, GTA3 had the main three islands’ geometry loaded. That's why from one island you can look at the major structures present on the other islands. Also, each island felt fairly open with fields, construction sites, and an airport. That sense of openness really sells it as an open world. But Jak 2 is very narrow. There's about 5 or so “zones” that are basically made up of maze like hallways. This was partly dones as a teick to allow the game to load in different zones when you transitioned. I wish I couls say it was clever, but it's such an inconvenience that it feels like going through the lines at Disney World. It has the opposite effect of GTA3, making me wish it wasn't open world at all.

What they do well is make each level feel connected. They use lower quality models of different major landmarks to show that no matter where you go in the game, you're still in the same world. Respect.

What also sucks, the shooting. Shooting games were still figuring out how third person shooting should work on consoles. Many games limited into some form of lock on aiming. Jak II has an auto lock system that mostly works. But can inconveniently shoot the least dangerous target or not aim at any target. Making the shooting in Jak II a painful chore. Especially coming from Jak 1 that required no shooting and was fucking great. Had they embraced a full aiming system like modern shooters kr even a two stick system like Smash TV and Apocalypse, it would have given the player more control. And sadly there's no first person aiming, which I think Jak 1 had with its fireballs.

The worst of it is during mandatory shooting gallery sections. I can't remember if 2 requires you to meet a minimal acore, but these galleries are awful. They're meant to be training courses with the guns, but they're harder than the regular shooting. Mostly bwcause there civilian targets that can be shot, causing point reductions. And for some completely stupid, poorly designed reason your guns will auto aim on the civilian targets. That means uf they're are two enemy targets witb a cicilian in between, its possible the auto aim will target the civilian. What a stupid, stupid, stupid feature. I rarely hate the game more than when playing the shooting galleries.

All of this goes into the biggest issue, poor difficulty balancing on levels. There are at least 10 levels that are almost quit-worthy difficult. One of the worst is the level in the docks. The docks are a maze with only one real path thru it. And you have to fight your way to the end. All the while, enemies are constantly spawning from dropships. Drop ships that have auto targeting canons. And if you fall in the water (usually by accidwnt or being shot) it's an instant death. I hated this level the first time I played it in 2004. I hated it on the remaster. I hate it right now. Some the levels are ao hard with unforgiving checkpoints that I think the Jak 2 developers owe any oerson that put money towards this game an apology.

But there are aome fun levels. One particular level is when you walk along the bridge from one of the spires to tge main castle. The linearity and platform obstacles feels like Crash Bandicoot. Sometimes it reminds me of being un Midgar of Final Fantasy 7. This and the diverse gameplay, such as a fully functioning skateboard minigame, lends itself to an interesting vibe that I wish had been better handled.

It's a tragedy cause a part of me wants to live Jak 2. But so much of the shit design makes me hate it.

[zachsgamejournal]

COMPLETED: Jak and Daxter

I've been a Naughty Dog fan since olaying Crash Bandicoot in 1996. I delayed playing Jak when jt first released, which was a mistake, cause I loved it. It's a bit derivative, but Naughty Dog's production techniques make this simple but charming platform feel epic and timeless. And replaying it recently initiated a grand trip down memory lane.

Firsty, the dialog and story are a bit crude. I think, maybe, they were going for edgy. But unfortunately I think they delivered something too childish for teens and adults, but too rude and pessimistic for children. Like many (crappy) cartoons, the humor is based around being loud and/or mean. They should have taken more direction from the amazong storytelling abilities of Pixar. Maybe it was still too early in 2001, but telling a compelling story will wngage more adults than telling an edgy story.

But looking past that, the game is great. The art dirction in particular. In true naughty dog fashion, everything has personality, even the way grass hangs over the edge of cliffs. It's wild to look at other ps2 games and wonder how they weren't able to look as food as Naughty Dog's first ps2 attempt?! This is assisted by the animations, which were top notch and still look great. This makes the game feel alive.

The levels are basic but pleasant. It's wooded areas, swampa, snow areas–everything that one is used to seeing in a 3d platformer. But with the art and animation, the levels feel like real lives in spaces. Not just carefully crafted arenas to hide collectibles in.

As great as Naughty Dog is, their originalality can be a bit lacking. Jak wears its Mario 64/Ocarina of Time inspirations on its sleeve. Every level is an Open design with 10 main collectibles and the hundreds of smaller collectibles. So it's basically PlayStations Mario. But the way they connect all the levels to feel like one big open qorld is inspiring.

I also appreciate the length of the game. I was able to platinum the game in roughly 10 hrs. That's pretty perfect. Despite the less rhan impressive story i look forward to returning to thia game again and again.