Tag: games

Fallout 4: The First Two Hours

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ReviewsLeave a comment

It is, as I’m typing this, 7:54 in the AM, and I’ve not had coffee, because my coffeepot won’t coffeepot fast enough.  I want to be playing Fallout 4, but I have a rule right now, and that rule is words before video games, so I gotta at least talk about Fallout 4 before I can go play Fallout 4.

I’m starting to really detest this generation of consoles.  Now, in the strict interest of honesty, I need to point out that all I have is a PS4, but I have not heard anything better about the Xbox One.  Trying to play Fallout the other night required not only an update to the console itself (for network features that I have no interest in and will never ever ever ever ever ever ever use, because if I want to be called the N-word by a nine year old I’ll go to work) but a probably forty minute long installation sequence, during which the game played seven different videos that I couldn’t skip through.  The first two were cute, at which point I realized the game really did think I was going to watch the other five and I felt part of my soul die.

I turned off the volume and went to do something else.  At least, unlike the vile Metal Gear Solid V, this game didn’t pretend its stupid videos were part of the story.  All that said, I would have preferred a goddamn progress bar against a black screen, because that would definitely have signaled go do something else and not this will be cute and funny for five minutes, bearable for ten, and will raise your blood pressure noticeably for the next thirty.

Anyway.  Eventually I did actually get to play a game, and I got to choose what I looked like, and it actually mattered, again unlike Metal Gear Solid V, where I still don’t understand why they let me choose what I looked like and then made me look like a mulleted, one-eyed hobo anyway.

Apparently the main story of this game involves saving my kidnapped infant son, which is sorta triggery, by the way, and actually affected my choice of how to play my character, because this lady’s gonna kill the hell out of everything in her way until I find the damn baby.  There will be precious few sidequests done before the main quest is finished.

Oh, right.  And then, an hour in, they threw this motherfucker at me.  Spoilers, but only real mild ones, and you’ve already seen the picture anyway, and it’s an hour in so shut up about spoilers anyway:

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Now, maybe you don’t play video games, or maybe you don’t play Fallout 4, so you’re not going Oh, holy shit, are you kidding? right now.  In that case, note that that giant fucker is called a Deathclaw, and understand that it earns that name, and take notice that it looks like a dinosaur on steroids on purpose, and also understand that throwing that thing at you as part of literally one of the game’s very first missions is a sign that the game is not fucking around at all with you and that you probably ought to get used to that shit right now.

It killed me five or six times and I went to bed.  Now it’s 8:12 AM, and I’m awake, and my coffee is probably ready by now, so I’m gonna go find a way to kill this nasty sumbitch because I have a lot to do today– we are actually having people over for dinner tonight, so I gotta cook, plus Sunlight, plus cleaning, plus a good half-dozen other miscellaneous chores that are probably good for a couple of hours.  Also, the wind is blowing outside like I cannot believe so at some point a tree will probably fall on the house.

But first I gotta kill my ass a Deathclaw and dance on the corpse.

More later.

EDIT: Kilt.

Unfair Reviews: METAL GEAR SOLID V

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews7 Comments
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He’s got no drawers.

I was gonna start this piece with “fuck this game,” but that’s not quite accurate.  I have to say “Fuck Metal Gear Solid V,” because I have not done anything so far that even remotely qualifies as playing a game.

I admit it, I should have known better.  The last Metal Gear game I played was MGS2, and I hated it.  Hated every miserable poorly-written cutscene-bullshit second of it, and to this day I can’t tell you why I even finished the thing, but I can tell you that for the last third of it I was frequently putting the controller down and going away to do something else while I was “playing.”  Something about the reviews for this one convinced me that it would be different.  That was stupid.  I should have known that it would not be different.

Here is how the first, oh, 45 minutes to an hour of Metal Gear Solid V went, on Sunday night:

    • Turn the PS4 on.  It starts beeping and trying to eject things.  It’s never done this before, and there’s nothing in there to eject, so I spend a while not quite realizing that something wrong is going on and I think it’s part of the game.
    • Hit X approximately forty-five times to get through a ridiculous number of screens about known bugs and other bits of nonsense that after a while I’m not even reading.  I know one of them was about how a character in Scene 27 can cause a game-stopping bug if she’s with you; I’m not going to remember this by the time I get to Scene 27, whatever that is.  There are lots and lots of white words on a black screen to ignore here.
    • Watch a ridiculous several-minute long cutscene involving waking up from a blur and then something about a cassette tape that provides no useful information and certainly nothing fun or interesting.  Right about here is where I started pounding on buttons trying to skip stuff.  I eventually discover that the way you skip cutscenes in this stupid game is by swiping right on the touchscreen, which is stupid and unintuitive, and it takes me several times doing it right before I realize what it is that I’m doing right.
    • Sooner or later, I get to the actual title screen of the game.  I have to hit the option button to get to the start menu, which is also stupid, and which ordinarily wouldn’t bother me at all except for the fact that it’s even more nonsense being thrown in your way before you can actually play.  No other game that I can remember makes you give the game permission to bring up the “start new game” screen.  This is ridiculous.
    • Right about here is when I realized that the beeping and loading were the PS4 freaking out and not the game.  I stopped and unplugged it for a minute, which cured everything but then I had to watch the damn cutscenes and click through the warning messages again.
    • At this point you’re in a hospital, and there’s a doctor, and you keep passing out, and nothing happens, and I give each cutscene a couple of minutes and nothing happens and by this point I start skipping them.  This literally takes ten to fifteen minutes even though I am skipping stuff and not paying attention.  I have no fucking idea how long they think people might have patience for these scenes.  Note also that I damn near never skip cutscenes in any other game; the ones in the Metal Gear series are 1) just that bad and 2) I haven’t gotten to do anything yet. I’ve hit X a hundred times to skip a bunch of text screens full of meaningless information and moved a thumbstick to look around a room.  Other than that I’m listening to this doctor yap at me.
    • Eventually I get to choose what I look like.  I make myself black and give myself a ridiculous long beard, thinking that maybe I’ll get to play now.  The doctor shows me a mirror with what I look like, but a moment later and for no clear reason (granted, I’ve completely stopped paying attention to him) I’m back to being white and looking like Solid Snake.  I have no idea why they let me choose a face.  They did fool me into thinking I might be able to play, though.
    • At some point after that, as I’m about to skip another scene of the doctor yammering, I notice the nurse getting killed in the background.  Something possibly exciting might be happening!  Nope.  The doctor takes like 20 minutes to get garrotted, then someone comes in the window, then that person’s on fire for some reason, and at no point anywhere do I actually get to affect what’s happening.  At this point I sent out this Tweet:

Forgive the extraneous Z; I was typing fast and frustrated. It had been at least half an hour and I had done nothing at all other than hit X on command.

      • Two minutes later, I sort of got to move around, if by “move around” I mean “hold up, because you don’t get to choose what direction you’re moving, and by the way you’re crawling and it’s insanely slow and laborious, and you don’t get to do anything but hold up for a while, and I hope this fools you into thinking you’re playing a game.”  Which cost $60, by the way.  I turn the fucking game off because fuck this.

Last night!  I had a few minutes, and I decided to hell with it, I paid $60 for this motherfucker and it’s getting fucking perfect reviews.  There has to be a game here somewhere.  Here’s what I did last night with Metal Gear Solid V:

      • I was immediately asked to wait fifteen minutes so that my PS4 could download an update, which, fuck that, no, I don’t care about your fucking update, and I don’t care about playing online, because I haven’t been able to play offline yet.  So I declined to wait, fuck the online features I’m missing.  Then something exciting happened!:
      • I held the up button.  For, like, fifteen minutes, following around a man in a hospital gown with no fucking underwear on, meaning I spent fifteen minutes following around bare man-ass-crack.  At no point was I allowed to do much of anything other than hold up; I couldn’t decide to go another way or anything like that, and since one of Snake’s arms is a prosthetic and the other spent most of the “game” broken I was basically just holding up and watching my character flop around like… well, like a guy trying to crawl with one broken arm and one prosthesis, which is not exactly thrilling gameplay.  Lots of other people around me were getting shot, but not me; in fact, I tried to get killed at one point and it didn’t work because the game wouldn’t let me turn around and go back toward the guard.
      • And, again, you’re doing this so that you can stare directly into another man’s asshole.  That’s not a joke.  That’s what you’re doing.  Mostly what you do is try and drag yourself up on shit and fall down.  Eventually he can stand up but then a second later they’re telling you to hit X to lay down again.  At one point there was a fire-dude, or maybe she was a fire-lady, or maybe both.  I didn’t get to fight him or anything.  I just laid there and did nothing and then I got to hold up some more.
      • And then I turned the game off, and now I’m fucking done.  Because this is not how you make a fucking game.

There will be no third chance.  Fuck Metal Gear Solid V.  Konami owes me $160, because I want a refund and I’m charging for my goddamn time.

See this thing?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

IMG_1955This thing has recently made an appearance at OtherJob.  It looks like it will be fun for littler kids who aren’t big enough for Dance Dance Revolution, plus it’s a ticket game, and the little ones always like ticket games.

I hate it to death.  Every so often– I’m not sure exactly how often, because it seems specifically timed to the precise moment at which I forget that it’s in the room– it kicks into attract mode and yells “OH YOO-HOOOOO!” at me and makes me think there’s someone else here with me.  We’ve hit the part of the year where I’m working solo again– this is my first Friday or Saturday night by myself since, probably, March or so– and I do not like the vidya gaemz screwing with my head.  It yells something else after the yoo-hoo bit, but I absolutely cannot piece it together.  It may not actually be English.  I’m not sure.  Point is, I don’t like it one bit.

Hmm.  I feel like that’s not enough for a post.

I will probably, at some point tonight, put up a page in the banner about Skylights.  And I may even work on the Benevolence Archives novel, which got shoved out of the way a little bit in all the finishing/editing/promo stuff for the other book.  But I’m at a fun part, so once I get rolling I’m really gonna get rolling.

Go buy Skylights, is what I’m saying here.

U dad, bro?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting15 Comments

1327202485_troll-dadI am not a good parent, people, and the degree to which I constantly troll my own son is probably going to bite me in the ass sooner or later.

The boy is in this phase– I don’t know if it’s typical of toddlers, but let’s hope it is because that means eventually it’ll stop— where he really wants to constantly be asserting control over the world around him.  This manifests itself in bossiness and occasionally being really picky about how things should be.  Since I am a bad person, I cannot stop myself from ceaselessly screwing with him whenever he’s being like this.

An example:  my son likes to play this game he calls “in the sky.”  It’s basically Catch except he’s two so he can’t really catch yet.  In the Sky involves getting Mommy and Daddy to stand up, placing them where he wants them to be in the room, and then assigning a ball to each of them.

Woe betide you if you use the wrong ball.

When the phrase “in the sky!” is uttered, all of the balls are thrown into the sky.  Then they land, and he retrieves them, and returns them to the proper parent, and then we play again.

I cannot stop from being an asshole whenever this game is played.  I’ve tried.  I can’t do it.

I’m always supposed to use the red ball.  He gets really mad if I use the wrong ball, so I’m always insisting on trading with my wife.  It makes him nuts.

You’re supposed to throw the ball straight up in the air.  Sometimes– perhaps, mathematically, a bit too often, my ball somehow manages to bounce off of his head.  I don’t know why!  The ball must be broken!

This game must be played standing up.  I don’t understand how standing up works and must have it carefully explained to me.  Every time.

I must stand where he wants me to stand.  I don’t.  I wander around.

He has to collect the balls and pass them back.  Sometimes I get them instead.  He gets so mad and it’s hilarious.

Sometimes I bounce the ball; you’re not supposed to do that.  Sometimes I don’t even throw the ball when he says “in the sky,” and do it too early or too late.  This is sin of the highest magnitude.

This is not the only way I’m like this, folks.  I’ll watch him spend ten minutes carefully lining up all of his cars exactly the way he wants them and then nudge one of them out of line.  Sometimes we’re playing with his car ramp and I send a car down the ramp backwards.  On purpose.

I don’t know why I’m like this, but I can’t stop.  Is anyone reading this a therapist?  Because either I need one now or he’s gonna need one in the future.

In which M-O-O-N, that spells S-M-R-T

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

tumblr_mhijhvr7eG1qz8911o1_1280I downloaded Words with Friends the other day.  I will, I think, be deleting Words with Friends by the end of the day today.

We might as well start off with the honest part:  A good bit of the reason why I’m done is that I’m being mercilessly dismantled by every single person I’m playing, over and over and over again.  I’ve always sucked at Scrabble (which feels like it shouldn’t be true, given my vocabulary) and Words with Friends is basically just Scrabble except it’s asynchronous and has a slightly different board.  I suck at Scrabble, therefore I suck at Words with Friends.

So, yeah, there’s a heavy degree of sore-loserdom here.  But losing at Words with Friends is somehow worse than losing at regular things.  Part of that is the asynchronous nature of it; you play a word when you feel like it, meaning that it might be thirty seconds or three hours in between turns.  One of the people I’m playing with is in California, another one is in England.  They’re not even awake at the same time I’m awake.  This means that the time when we’re both awake and available to play is limited as is, even when you consider that everyone involved has jobs and/or kids and/or other shit to do.

What I’m saying is that the ass-kicking I’m taking here is taking days.  I haven’t actually finished a game yet and I downloaded this goddamn thing like forever ago.  I’ve resigned two of them when the beatings got too severe to put up with any longer, and I’m real real close to resigning another that appears to have built itself into a suit of armor where it’s virtually impossible to hang any additional letters off of anything without one of those obnoxious add-one-letter-and-make-sixteen-new-words things.  Four of those words aren’t going to be real; you need access to the Special Scrabble Dictionary that tells you that “Xi” is a word (hint: it isn’t) to be able to pull this nonsense off.  I can look at a list of letters and see that I’m one letter off from spelling eschatological but I’ll be damned if I can look at a table full of letters and figure out that I can stick an L in someplace and make fifteen words.  My brain doesn’t work that way.

Fuck it, I’m going back to Bejeweled.  I can fail at that at two minutes and start over.

Today’s my day off, which means, say it with me!:  it’s raining outside and maintaining the horrorbeast that is my lawn remains impossible.  I bought a chain saw yesterday and spent a pleasurable half hour or so hacking last week’s storm-dropped huge tree branches apart.  I didn’t actually get around to moving them out to where the city will haul them away; that was going to be today’s job.  Instead, I think I’m just going to curl up in a chair and read a book and then maybe see if I can get something productive done in the house.