After a delightful 6 hour layover in Shannon IE and a complementary "we won't have a plane for you for twelve hours" hotel room, I'm finally back stateside. I'll start on the best performances tout suite, because I'm toally gonna finish it goddamn it, ate at me the whole time. Oh crap, Breaking Bad premiered already?! I've some catching up to do... thank you (the twelve of you) for your patience. Thanks for for giving me a break, it was a great week.
I've got a vacation coming up for the next week and will not be able to update. Don't have a smart phone, and even if I did, I'm sure I'd get flayed alive with roaming charges if I tried.
I really would have loved to finish my best performances list... no excuse for that, I knew this trip was coming for months. Anywho,see you in a week.
I'm still trying to iron out my best performance list, making sure I only have one example per game, so that's making it difficult. I also want to have as little of the usual suspects as possible, so this is gonna take longer than I thought, but good news! There's something good on Netflix right now.
I've begun to like this season more in retrospect than I did a year ago, I used to have it right under season 3. Remember when the writers couldn't decide what to do with Skylar and it brought the whole show down a little? Having it there made it the De-facto "worst" season for me. But calling any season of this show "worst" only makes sense when comparing it to itself... and maybe The Wire.
The pacing was wonky to me and it felt like they were throwing out all the grand ideas they had left to burn now that the show was ending. The fumigation tent, the giant magnet, the train robbery, and that kooky German food magnate all felt like great ideas on their own, but never seemed cohesive. After watching the first episode again, I enjoyed it much more having an idea where it was going, but forgetting the finer details.
Not every game has to be 20 hours long to prove it's point and Shadowrun Returns will not take any where near that length of time to finish. It's short, there's no way around that, it took me barely 7 hours. But I'm not docking it any points. Why? Because it ended when it had to. I had fleshed out my character as far as I wanted to, the story had reached it's logical end, and as much as I love turn based combat, I was ready to put it down when I finally dealt with Sam's killer.
Shadowrun puts you into a cyber punk fantasy world filled with trolls, elves, dwarves, guns, drugs, corporate conspiracies, and nerps. I don't know what the hell nerps are, but the omnipresent billboards about them made me chuckle. Nerps! I'm an easy laugh.
The main campaign is a story called "Dead Man's Switch" in which a old shadowrunner buddy of yours is murdered after he set up an automatic video message through his lawyer, should his death be ruled unnatural. He's apparently stashed a humongous payday since you saw him last, and becuase he couldn't take it with him, he'll give it all to you if you can find out whodunnit. The murder-mystery noire angle is more than refreshing to see in a fantasy setting. A set up like this is more inclined to introduce and develop characters, rather that spend half it's time shoving it's made up dragon language in your face.That may sound like I have a chip on my shoulder about fantasy stories in games, but that's only half true. I've got a chip on my shoulder about what fantasy games get away with.
But I'm not getting into that now, SR is a great change of pace from the RPG crowd, and it's strictly linear (dun dun dun) structure actually serves to keep the game from watering itself down. Would I have loved some side quests to flesh out the world and help me grind for that last pistol skill? Of course. But thinking about it now, it wouldn't have changed my opinion on it much at all. Unless it told a better story than the campaign, but that's just silly. I also have a few problems with the way the Native American and Haitian characters are depicted but... you what? never mind.
Actually no, It's not ok. The Haitian is literally Baron Samedi from Live and Let Die, it's gross.
Moving on.
The way it plays is just as fun and breezy as the story it tells. You play as any of the typical fantasy roles, but then choose from the less typical fantasy classes like "hacker" or "street samurai." There was no way in hell I wasn't going to try the street samurai. Even though you hand pick your squads for the major missions, your choice of class has a huge bearing on how battles play out. This is no place for a jack of all trades, pick something you want to be good at and throw yourself at it. My 5 points in hacking meant f**k all compared to my pistol and rifle skill. You need to be the strongest version of what class you play, because your back up is only going to be half as powerful.
My samurai's assault rifle automatic attack was, hands down, the most effective skill I had. But the fact only I could learn it and that it could only take on one enemy at a time, and even then only once per turn, meant I couldn't possibly carry my team alone. SR's combat is a bloody ballet of teamwork and skill balance. There are many ways to build a bad squad of shadowrunners and I became intimate with them all. You do not need two hackers. Not ever. But this genius got halfway through the longest mission with two lousy gun hands that couldn't help each other out in cyber space at the same time. Disaster. (Pro tip: Deathsigh the troll and his shotgun is never a slot wasted...oh and don't try melee your first time, this is a gun fight.)
So while some folks may justifiably believe that Kickstarter is a dead end boondoggle, this is proof it can work efficiently and effectively. The game out of the box is worth $20 bucks on the nose, not much more bang for your buck, but you will at least play it twice with a different character on a harder difficulty. The game this will become a year from now is an entirely different story. The tools and assets for everything are included and I'm assured by my more tech savvy buds that it's very easy to use. New crowd sourced content is already rolling in and I say it's only a short matter of time before we start panning some real gold.
But know that Shadowrun Returns is already a gem.
This is seriously a thing that happens in some dude's penthouse.
ANYONE WHO HASN'T PLAYED INFINITE PLEASE STOP READING NOW.
Everyone else cool?
M'kay.
The two episode DLC is set in Rapture, a re-imagining of the story from the main game... yeah I was pretty underwhelmed too. We've already had two games explore Rapture, I honestly wanted more of Columbia and am now pretty glad I skipped out on the season pass. This looks like it could go either way at face value.
But far be it from me to judge a game by it's pitch, how does the trailer shape up?
Oh... oh god damn. Ladies and Gentlemen, never bet against Ken Levine. That looks friggn' incredible.
The only surprising thing about this is that it's
only just become a project. I remember way back in my middle school days
how controversial it was. There was a line drawn. One sided with Art,
the other with Harry and never the twain would meet. I was on the Harry
side and never really gave Art a chance, but apparently its pretty good
and will hopefully be a pretty good movie.
Fantasy, thief caper, spy thriller? It would be hard not to have a good time at that movie... unless it gets Percy Jacksoned.
If he actually ate a bullet next week, you wouldn't be surprised.
So anyone remotely interesting in gaming journalism has heard about Phil Fish's (developer of Fez) dramatic departure from the industry. A twitter exchange that will live in infamy (for 6 months at the most) exposed a raw nerve of an already outspoken independent developer. It all started with GT's podcast "invisible walls" particularly with Marcus Beer's segment on how Jonathan Blow (braid dev) and Fish chose to comment on Xbox One financially embracing the indie scene.
Fish and Blow acted like jerks, no question. They both appeared in the wonderful Indie Game: The Movie, officially making them even more prominent public figures in the gaming world. In fact its fair to say that its at least 60-70% Fish's movie. They're free to decline to comment, but they bit the hand that fed them so hard its a news story in of itself. That's where Marcus Beer comes in, a hilarious commentator with the best BS detector in the business. I agree with everything he says, but in this case I do not agree with his methods.
Years ago...like 2, my journalism professor drew me aside after I had turned in a review for The Other Guys. He liked it well enough, but he had issues with how I referred to Mark Wahlberg. You see, I called him by his real name once in the beginning, but for the rest of the review he was "Marky Mark." I told him I just thought it was funny, he shrugged and said, "Yeah but is he funny in the movie?" I said yeah. "Does he hold the movie back?" I said, no. "Well then, you're being a jerk for no reason."
A futurama reference, sure, but this is still miles away from stable behavior.
Beer makes a point about calling Fish "BlowFish" which is a pretty damn funny couple mash up name, but like "Marky" serves no real editorial purpose. Yes, if the both of them had their noses upturned any further they'd crack their necks, but it doesn't mean you need to spend ten straight minutes attacking their art and their character.
I'm not saying Beer is responsible for Fish's digital temper tantrum, but he sure as hell isn't blameless. We have no idea what's going on in Fish's life right now, it could be a waking nightmare, he could have been stood up at the alter for all I know. Maybe his life is fine and this balloon was going to pop eventually whether Beer said anything or not. But why be partially responsible for someone's public display of instability? I doubt that's what Beer wanted, and if I was ever responsible for something like that I'd try to do everything I could to patch it up.
In my knee jerk opinion, Fish's rambling rage-quit is just as childish as Beer's refusal to apologize. It doesn't matter if you're right and 90% of the internet agrees with you. Not to me, you really hurt someone, and you should at least try to shake his hand. Fish may not accept, but that's seriously not the point.
