A stupid good thing

On August 27, 2017August 27, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

maxresdefault It has been a miserable couple of weeks around here. I just got over being sick and went straight into some major Clark Kent life drama, which combined with an apparent downturn in the local economy (the sales for the store in general have been shit for several weeks now) have not done well for my general state of mind lately. Unfortunately, while I do like to use the blog as a braindump for said on-my-mind stuff, sometimes shit simply isn’t My Business to share– that would be the family issues– and the other major thing that happened recently and scared the everloving fuck out of me would make it way too easy to figure out certain important things that I’m not willing to share about my kid, even if I just nibbled around the edges on it. So you all get VaguePosting and I consider opening another blog up and telling no one about it just so I can get the post in my head out and onto paper. Or, uh, pixels. Whatever.

It’s a thing, is what I’m saying.

But! I was fucking unconscious at work yesterday– I literally either sold something to or quoted out every customer I spoke to except for one, and managed to transform a sales week that was utter shit walking into Saturday into a quite-welcome average week walking out. I’m off today, because the boy turned six on Wednesday and his birthday party is today. There are lots of sweaty six-year-olds in my future. (I am tempted to say “and not in a good way,” here, which I think is probably just creepy innuendo for the sheer hell of innuendizing? What the hell would the good way be? I dunno.)

But back to that stupid good thing. And it’s really stupid, so those of you who aren’t video game nerds may just want to go ahead and cut out now; the tl;dr version is I had an utterly minor life accomplishment that has improved my mood.

Anyway: I can’t find when the first mention of Nioh was on this blog, but needless to say the damn game came out in February and I haven’t really played anything else since I bought it. I have been stuck on a particular boss– that evil ice bitch Yuki-Onna, pictured up there– for, literally, months, to the point where it has seriously affected the way I think about video games. I want a fucking cheat mode on everything I play now, because paid $60 for this damn game and I want to see the whole thing, and nothing is worth getting stuck for as long as I was. And it didn’t matter what the hell I did, I couldn’t get her past half her health, and I was still good for a two-second “Nope, not today” one-shot death about every third or fourth fight. This weekend (which, remember, is Thursday and Friday for me,) being generally miserable and lacking in any brainspace whatsoever that might be useful for things other than video games, I decided I was in “beat this boss or die trying” mode.

To wit: I respecced my entire character, twice, and learned an entirely different weapon, switching my build from sword-spear to kusarigama-spear and adding a bunch of ninjutsu and onmyo mage skills, just so that I could get past Yuki-Onna. And finally, Friday morning, I managed to take her out after months of trying. I have been playing video games for a long, long time, guys, and I’m pretty certain I have never once in that time gotten stuck for this long at a specific boss in a game and then actually gotten past it.

I am several stages past her level now, and destroyed all the bosses in between on the first time I fought them, having had to massively overlevel Yuki-Onna’s stage in order to finally fucking beat her. Which: way to difficulty spike, game. She’s supposedly only the sixth hardest boss in the game, too, so I have that to look forward to, since I haven’t seen any of the top 5 yet.

But hey: it’s good news, even if it’s stupid good news. The way shit’s been going lately, I’ll take it.

(Want to improve my mood? I haven’t sold a book in a few days. If you have a couple of bucks you don’t mind burning, you could order one.)

On holding back

On January 9, 2017January 9, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews3 Comments

If you’ve been paying attention to my posts lately, or to my Twitter feed, you can probably guess why I didn’t post yesterday, and I suspect you’d be right. I’ve been trying to write about it and I’m not quite there yet, for a variety of reasons. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please forgive the vaguebooking; all will be made clear soon enough.

Instead, let’s talk about something how I’m either too old, too liberal, or both to play video games any more. Despite shit-talking it when it came out, The Witcher 3 went on a steep-ass discount a few weeks ago– I got the game and both expansion packs for $20, if I remember right– and I was in a period of mourning the lack of video games in my life at the time and so I went ahead and picked it up. I mean, fuck it, right? This thing got Game of the Year awards from basically everybody, and I’ve been wrong before, right?

Nah.

The Witcher 3 is exactly the game I thought it was before picking it up; it is not only bad in all the ways I thought it would be bad, it manages to be worse than I thought it was going to be in several critical areas. I have been gaming for a very long time, so it is likely that I have played a more misogynistic game than this one at some point or another, but I can’t recall what that game might have been. This is a game that very, very badly wants to be taken seriously, but the overgrown adolescents who coded it think that “serious” means that you get called a cunt everywhere you go, and mistake adult content— there are lots of tits, oh so many tits, and oh so many whores, and so many of the swear words– for adult complexity.

I would probably have really loved this when I was sixteen. That’s who it’s aimed at, and regardless of the actual chronological ages of the designers, it’s who it was made by. There are bits of the gameplay I do enjoy, but I commented to my wife this morning that the game’s greatest feat is managing to remain perfectly balanced on the razor’s edge where I’m enjoying it just enough that I’m still playing, but it’s not actually good enough to make me forget the parts that make me want to quit– so I’m still playing, but I hate the game for maybe half the time I’m playing it.

I don’t mind the stabbing. I don’t even mind the crafting and alchemy, which is normally a part I do my best to ignore in most games. It’s whenever I’m not in control of the character– ie, cutscenes– that I want to throw my PS4 out the window and cultivate a new hobby.

Blech.

Fallout 4: The First Two Hours

On November 12, 2015November 12, 2015 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 September 15, 2015September 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews7 Comments

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:

Metal Gear 5 has one more minute to become a game or I’m turning it the fuck off. This is ridiculous z

— Luther M. Siler (@nfinitefreetime) September 14, 2015

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.

WOO! update

On April 3, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

All I do with my life is play Bloodborne now so I hope I don’t owe you money. There’s no time to do other things. That’s okay, I needed to lose weight anyway and eating is a distraction.

Can’t have that.

In which I admit something uncomfortable

On January 8, 2015January 8, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews11 Comments

Okay. The truth, now: I don’t like Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I’m not having any fun with it at all. I’d say “It’s time to stop playing,” but the simple fact is I just had two weeks off from work and I haven’t touched my PS4 since about the third day of the break. So I sorta already did that.

There has been an interesting backlash happening against the game lately, where a whole lot of people who put 100 hours into the game are looking back at it and going “What the hell did I do all that for?” I played the shit out of the first two Dragon Age games; I have literally every single Achievement point available for the first one and beat it with every character class; I didn’t replay DA2 quite as much, mostly because Skyrim and, oh, right, the birth of my son prevented the extended replay time the first one got– but I am a fan of this series, guys. And DAI has done nothing for me. A fair amount of this is my own changing priorities as a gamer, granted, but a lot of it I’ve got to lay on the game. They’ve already done this right twice; the fact that the crafting interface sucks so horribly and managing inventory is an enormous pain in the ass and there’s so much of the game dedicated to literally waiting around is on them. I’m, I don’t know, maybe 35 hours into it? I just completed a quest that effectively made me emperor and yet at the same time I feel like nothing I’m doing is changing the game at all. By the midpoint of both previous DA games I had all kinds of stuff I wanted to go back and do a different way to see what happened. This game? I can’t think of a single meaningful choice I’ve made since the very beginning of the game, where I went up a path instead of down a hill. This last quest could have ended a couple of different ways, but I don’t care about how it might have gone differently. That’s a serious problem. There has, to date, not been a single decision made in the game that I had to think about for even a couple of seconds. There were decisions in previous games where I had to stop playing for a while to think about what I was going to do.

I hate the war table. A lot:

I ended up having to just take a picture of my TV, because I couldn’t quite find a picture that showed this exactly the way I wanted, but this is how you activate most of your missions. You have to go to this one specific spot in your castle (which, by the way, you had to find on your own; there was literally a “find the war room” mission. This? Bullshit.) and then move that little glowing eye thing in the center around one of the two halves of the “map”– yes, there are two halves, for some reason they couldn’t put everything together. Some of the little spots and lights and exclamation points are things you can do. Others are things you have other people do, and there’s a bunch of words to read and then a little prize anything from ten minutes to several hours later and don’t worry about it because none of it was important. There are tons of these little things and by now they’re not making me curious; I just want to find a way to turn them off.

Each stage seems to have lots of shards to find. I don’t know what the shards are or why I’m looking for them. There was one of those somebody-else missions that had something to do with them but I accidentally hit a button too fast and the text went away, so I don’t know what happened.

Right. Words. There are lots and lots and lots of words to read in this game. Ordinarily this is a good thing for me– I read every syllable in the first two games– but this game doesn’t even want you to read all that shit, making me wonder what the hell it’s there for. An example: during loading screens, there are three little cards you can shuffle through on the screen. Each of them gives you a fact about the game, or a tip, or a little bit of backstory for something. Some of the bits of backstory are several hundred words long.

The game gives you maybe five seconds to cycle through those– not remotely enough time to read anything– and then will fade to black for thirty seconds or so. What the fuck?

Combat is boring. This is a little bit my fault, as I chose an archer for my main character– meaning I tend to be a fair distance from the battles– and by predilection in these sorts of games I’m very resistant to the idea of playing characters who aren’t “me” even though the game is perfectly happy to let me take anyone over. But my role in combat is to hold down a button. That’s about it. There’s an overhead tactical view; I’ve never used it for more than a couple of seconds. I suppose I could play at a higher difficulty level but I suspect the big difference would be I was bored and dying a lot.

The game wants me to take time between missions to talk to each of my party members, so that I can advance each of their own individual storylines. In previous games, I did this. In this one, I can’t be bothered any longer; it feels like a chore and I have no interest in it. I’ve not started a romance with anyone because I just don’t have the energy. I’m willing to accept this one partially being on me, because it’s effectively the same mechanism the previous DA games as well as all three Mass Effects used. Then again, I played along in those five games. This one? Nah, bald elf dude whose name I can’t remember, for Christ’s sake, you just go be boring over there by yourself. You’re gonna have that staff for the rest of the game; I hope you like it.

I hate it when I don’t like something that I feel like I wanted to like. I’m perfectly happy to dislike something that lots of people like, but dammit I wanted to really love this game, and had perfectly cromulent reasons to think I would. But I stopped playing it over two weeks ago and at this point I’m really not sure if I’m gonna go back to it or not. The thought that they released a Dragon Age game that I can’t even get into enough to beat really sucks.

Blech.

I could blog…

On October 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek8 Comments

Or I could play Shadow of Mordor all night.

Easy decision.

Not that you asked, but…

On July 28, 2014July 28, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy8 Comments

I have been gone all day on account of honest to goodness Sekrit Bizness that at the moment I am unable to divulge to other mortal hoo-manz. If you are immortal or a reptilian, let me know and I may give hints.

Also: omgtired. And I bought a PS4. Which I have no time at all to play.