Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off with a discussion about Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 which just concluded and raised a little over 3 million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. From there we talk about Pax South 2020 and the interesting things Ashgar has encountered while being there. Bel goes into a diatribe about the Witcher games not doing a great job of explaining the cast of characters. 2020 is a year of game delays so far and we talk about a few of them and why we are mostly okay with them. We then close out with a long discussion about Fire Emblem: Three Houses which leads its way into a discussion about Tactics versus Strategy.
Fallout 4 – PC
Continuing the series we dive into some of the games that were important to me in 2015. There were a bunch of games that made the early version of this list, but in many cases I didn’t feel like I had a lot to talk about any of them. I’ve been trying to avoid expansions/dlc on the list, and as a result that knocked out Heavensward which took up a significant portion of my year. Similarly this knocks out Destiny Taken King which also was super important. The final list was whittled down to just four games but I feel like there is something special with each of them.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3 – PC
For years I had heard wonderful things about the Witcher series, but I found them somewhat obtuse and difficult to get into. Maybe if I had played the original when it first was released it might have made a difference, but trying to make it with modern expectations was a nonstarter. I found the interface to be deeply cludgy and confusing. When The Witcher 3 released I was not expecting much from it based on my past experience with the earlier two titles, but I got a free copy with a new video card and gave it a shot. What I found was a deep and rich world that I really enjoyed exploring. I’ve not gotten anywhere close to actually beating the game, but it is on that list of titles that I keep meaning to restart from scratch and play through again. The recent release of the Netflix series is re-igniting that desire so maybe I will spend some time over the coming days giving it another shot.
Dying Light
Dying Light – PC
Dying Light is one of those games that is almost impossible to explain without actually experiencing it. At its core it is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse, but it is much more than that given that there are rich systems where you gain favor with various factions of survivors. The other aspect that is hard to explain is how important movement is to this game. It is a game that takes parkour to the next level as you try and find a path to run on that is safe from the endless hordes of the undead in the world below. There is always this tentative balance between staying in safety and dropping down into the places where you need to scavenge materials from. The total package is wildly enjoyable and now that the game has been out for quite some time you can pick it up on the cheap. If you missed it the first time, well worth grabbing especially since there is a sequel in the works for 2020 release.
Victor Vran
Victor Vran – PC
If you have read this blog for very long you will know of my deep affinity for “diablo-likes” and ARPGs in general. One of these that sorta slipped under almost everyone’s radar is a game called Victor Vran, where you take the controls of a Van Helsing like character that hunts demons and monsters. What makes this game interesting to me is that it has really good WASD controls and extremely interesting level design that works in old fashioned Wolf 3D era “secrets” that can be unlocked to find both new paths and troves of loot. The combination makes for a compelling action RPG that in some ways reminds me of early Isometric shooters like Crusader: No Remorse. You have a wide variety of attacks and special abilities and the levels are hand crafted instead of procedurally generated. This leads to a more structured game-play experience but also somewhat harms the replay value. This is now out on even more platforms including the switch, so well worth checking out if you too are a fan of ARPGs.
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 – PC
I love the Fallout series and have since I first played the original back in 1997. The Fallout community tends to have two distinct branches… those who hold up Fallout 3 as the best title and those who hold up Fallout New Vegas in highest regard. I like aspects of both but tend to fall into the New Vegas camp. Fallout 4 was not exactly the game that either of those factions wanted and as a result it tends to be a fairly divisive title. For me… the aspect that I love about it is Base Building, which is the nail in the coffin for other games. I love feeling like I get to have an effect on the world by linking together disparate groups of refuges into a larger community. When I play this game I more or less ignore the story-line that is forced upon you, and the constantly limiting choice paths… and instead play a game where I am rebuilding the wasteland. I am pretty great at making up my own story when I find the current options distasteful.
Where Bel Was Mentally in 2015
2015 was the year that I went to my first video game convention in the form of Pax South in San Antonio. I got to hang out with my friends Ashgar and Rae and explore all of the nonsense that makes up a Pax while also doing various press meetings. I managed to abuse those connections to sneak them into a gameplay session for Gigantic which was probably the game of the show that year. If you start on the right side, the faces that are pointed towards the camera at the screens are me, Ashgar, Rae and then hovering above Rae and explaining the abilities is Lonrem. It was a pretty good year, that started with a bang. I greatly miss going to Pax South each year, but the timing just hasn’t worked out since 2018.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Firstly I feel like I need to lead with an apology. I’ve picked up some crud over the last few weeks and as a result my voice is pretty rough. I manage to make it through the show but there are a handful of long pauses where I went into a coughing fit. Tonight we talk about how jealous I am that Ash is at Pax South and I am not. The timing was horrible and I wouldn’t have wanted to be there in this condition anyways. We talk a bit about Destiny 2 announced changes and Kodra’s recent experiences with Super Mario Odyssey. From there we dive into the recent Nintendo Direct and Tam’s current forray back into Final Fantasy XIV. Lastly we talk a bit about the Total War series, specifically Warhammer 1 and 2.
For the majority of last week I talked about games that I had played at PAX South, and in truth there are still a handful more than I want to discuss. I think that is the real triumph of this years show, that I walked away with so many things that I found interesting enough to write entire posts about. Granted in my super meandering way I end up talking about a lot of things other than the game during each of them. Today is not going to change that. In 2016 the most memorable game at PAX South for me was a game called Ultimate Chicken Horse. In fact this was the sort of experience that I kept dragging people back by the booth to check out for themselves. I don’t have a ton of opportunities to do the whole couch co-op party game thing, and it seems that when I actually do get that opportunity I want to take advantage. I even wrote a couple of different posts about my thoughts talking about just how fresh and interesting the experience was. Now I did not expect to find another game like this, but it seems like it found me.
Ultimately I think I happened to stare a little too long at a booth as I was passing by, and within moments was engaged by someone talking about a game called “Think of the Children”. Admittedly we had not shifted into “lets play all the games” mode yet, and this game was a good part of that mental shift for me at least. The idea apparently came out of a recent game jam and was being groomed into a full game. The concept was simple enough… that you are parents and have to try and take care of a bunch of children. The challenge comes in when you find out that the children are essentially lemmings. They have no survival instinct and instead of simply slowly marching towards the edge of the a cliff… they are going to actively go find danger. The kids might decide it is super awesome to go try and pet a jellyfish… and get stung to death, or mess with a bird… and get pecked to death. Essentially these little buggers are constantly trying to kill themselves and you as the parents are trying desperately to corral or distract them long enough to make it through the timer without losing any of your charges.
This turns out to be exceedingly difficult, and just as you seem to have one group of kids under control… another group goes off and does something truly horrible. Essentially you have a few tools for managing the children… you can either pick them up and move them away from danger… or shout at them which effects every child in range for a super short period of time… before they go right back to doing whatever horrible thing they were planning on doing. You can also temporarily distract children by setting up tables, or deploying a pinata. I found myself largely throwing children away from harm while Rae who was playing with me attempted to set up the distractions. Regardless I was an extremely bad parent and my first time out of the gate I got an F-… and on attempt two I upgraded that to a D. Let me just tell you that was the proudest I had ever been of getting a D in my life.
Sure the game is morbid as hell, given that inevitably some of your children are going to die horrible and stupid deaths. However the gameplay was so fast paced and frenetic that we spent most of our time yelling unintelligible sentence fragments at each other while desperately trying to keep yet another child from going and playing in traffic. I mean there is a clear reason why I am not a parent of anything but animals… because in truth animals have way more survival instinct than proto-humans. Where the game shines is when you are sitting there playing co-op with one of your friends, and if I had an opportunity to do this often I would absolutely suggest this game in your rotation of what I term “party games”. One of the cool things that happens at PAX in general is that you wind up striking conversations with random people while waiting in lines. Each and every time this happened to me it ultimately got down to talking about our favorite games of the show, and this is the game that I kept sending people out into the world to find. It was tucked into a quiet row and was ultimately rather unassuming, but man was it a great experience to play. Even though I don’t have a lot of opportunity for couch co-op I am still going to pick this up for no reason other than to support what is ultimately a really cool game idea. If you find yourself interested in this madness you can check out the official website, or do what I did and just add it to my wishlist on Steam.
