In which I might have something, or maybe not, I dunno

Luther M. Siler

I think I’ve ordered an Xbox Series X, to be picked up Friday from my local Best Buy. I’m not sure I actually believe it, though; I’m fully expecting to get to Friday afternoon with no notification that my Xbox is ready to be picked up, and the craziest bit is that I still haven’t completely convinced myself that I want one. The thing is, the new consoles have all been insanely hard to find– I literally camped at my computer and hit Reload over and over on Walmart.com to get my PS5, and for this Xbox I think I just had some phenomenally lucky timing. Assuming, again, that it’s not a hoax.

And here’s the thing: I’m going to get a Series X eventually, because of Bethesda. Microsoft bought them, and word is they’ll be exclusive to the Series X for a while, and I want to play their games. And I’m sure there’s a ton of indie stuff out there that’s Xbox-only, because I keep hearing about how good Microsoft is for indie developers. But, like, right now? Hell if I know what my first game for this thing is going to be, and it’s entirely possible that I’m going to bring it home without any plans to buy any particular games for it. There was a reason I was able to skip the entire Xbox One generation: there was never a single game that made it feel worth it to try and buy the console. Which, given that my Xbox 360 and my OG Xbox were both beloved consoles, never really made any sense to me. But, like, everything I want to play right now is on PS5. I can play Halo Infinite, I suppose, but skipping every Halo game since Halo 3 didn’t bother me any, so I think I can probably do without this one?

(Don’t come at me about which console is “better.” The better console is the one that has games I want to play. I don’t even know what a teraflop is and I don’t care which console has more of them.)

I recognize that this is the most First World Problem ever– waah waah I have the opportunity to spend hundreds of dollars of discretionary income on an expensive electronic device and I don’t know if I wannnnnnaaaaaaaaaa!!!11!11!one!!!! but it’s, like, genuinely bugging me. Right now I’m leaning more toward cancelling the thing than picking it up, which will mean that I’m not spending a ton of money right now but will still ensure that I’m spending the money later, because again, I’m going to want one of these eventually, I just don’t necessarily want it now. Like, if I come home with an Xbox Series X on Friday it’s going to have dust on it by March, I think. But … like, okay? Is that really that big of a deal? I’m taking up some extra desktop space for something that’s going to future-proof me for a while. It’s not like I don’t have the money; if anything, I’m in a better financial place right now than I’ve ever been in my life, and that’s only going to improve over the next few months unless something catastrophic happens.

At which point if they’re still hard to find I can try and flip the damn thing on eBay for $1000 or some shit like that, I suppose.

Bah.

#MyFave4GamesEVER, overkill edition

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

So there’s a hashtag trending on Twitter right now. And I can’t do it. Four games? FOUR GAMES?? I’m fucking 43 on Friday and I’ve been playing video games since I was sentient. That’s impossible. So, yeah, pick four of these, literally uploaded in random order and probably presented that way as well. I am also absolutely 100% certain that I’m forgetting several important ones. There are stories behind a couple of them; I may add some details later:

In which kids ruin everything

Luther M. Siler10 Comments

TheLastofUsMankindParenthood changes you; everybody says that.  Prolly ‘cuz it’s true, and pretty self-evidently so at that.  What isn’t always obvious is the ways in which parenting messes with what was probably a perfectly good personality and lifestyle prior to having kids.  I was expecting having a kid to cut into my video game time, right?  I wasn’t expecting having a kid to change the way I related to playing video games, and that’s kinda fascinating to me.

Maybe not to you; I dunno.  Hey: my blog.  Shuddup.

You might remember I got myself a PS3 and The Last of Us around Thanksgiving.  I’ve owned an Xbox 360 (several, actually) since launch; it took until the launch of the PS3’s successor for a game to come out that finally flipped the switch and made me pull the trigger and mix some metaphors up and buy one.

A warning, the only warning you get:  hella spoilers.  If there is any chance at all that you’re ever going to play this thing, first, go do it now— it’s easily worth the price of the system all by itself– and second, don’t read this post until you’ve beaten the game.  I’ll see you in a month or so, if you’ve got my schedule.  Go forth.

A short plot synopsis:  The game starts in present day.  You’re a single dad with a fourteen-ish-year-old daughter.  The zombie apocalypse starts, except these are fungus zombies, which are neater and more frighteningly real than the regular kind.

Within fifteen minutes of the start of the game, your daughter is gunned down in your arms.

It’s… difficult.  As scenes go.  It really fucking sucks.  Badly.

Jump forward twenty years.  Joel (“you”) is still alive; society, not so much.  For various reasons you get tasked with escorting a fourteen-year-old girl, Ellie, across the country.  Ellie, as it turns out, is immune.  Your job is to get her to some sciency folks alive.  

And we’re off to the races.

Folks, The Last of Us is probably the best game I’ve played in years; certainly the best game of 2013.  There’s no real doubt about that.  But what’s most amazing about it is the way it creates this relationship between Joel and Ellie, and pulls you along with it.  You’re tasked with protecting her for much of the game, although (thank God, because otherwise a game-long escort mission would have gone badly wrong) she does a good job of staying out of trouble and eventually is able to actually pitch in and fight alongside you.  But I really don’t think you can properly put yourself inside Joel’s head unless you’re a parent– and lemme tell you something, if you’ve got kids The Last of Us is gonna fuck you up.

There’s a point fairly late in the game where Joel abruptly gets quite badly injured.  The game throws a curveball at you by making you take over as Ellie for a while, trying to pull together enough food and medicine to get Joel through a Colorado winter alive.  There is, of course, one major zombie attack during this sequence, and to me at least it was one of the hardest points in the game– not just because it was, legitimately, a difficult gaming challenge to get through successfully, but because watching Ellie, this little kid who has been depending on you for, by this time, ten to twelve hours of gaming or so, get repeatedly killed was fucking gut-wrenching.  I had to turn the game off, not out of a frustration ragequit (although that was part of it, I’ll admit) but because I literally couldn’t watch Ellie get killed again.

(What did I do then?  Like an idiot, I tried to start the first chapter of the new Walking Dead game– which provided me with a refreshing tonal shift by making me play as 10-year-old Clementine from the first series.  That didn’t work very well either; I still haven’t finished the first section, for much the same reasons.  Plus there’s a thing with a dog and goddammit enough emotional bullshit from games tonight thank you.)

Anyway.  As I said, the main plot point driving the entire game is that Ellie was bitten by one of these things (off-camera, before you ever meet her) and she never succumbed.  She’s immune, and you’re trying to get her to this organization that Joel thinks can help to figure out why she’s so special and possibly find a cure for the Cordyceps fungus.  And then you get there.  And you’re separated from Ellie for a while.  And then you discover that the doctors do think that they can figure out what’s wrong with her– but that the fungus has invaded her brain structure and that it’s going to require risky brain surgery to be able to do anything about it.

It’s worth pointing out that at no point do they say “the surgery is going to kill her.”  They say “we have to do brain surgery” and Joel puts everything else together from there.

And Joel.  Goes.  Nuts.  Previously in the game you’ve either been fighting bandits (generally poorly armed and rarely protected by anything) or zombies (dangerous as hell, but generally lacking distance weapons.)  The last sequence throws you up against dozens of trained commandos with fucking body armor and machine guns.  Now, it’s become painfully apparent by this point in the game that Joel is a bit of a monster– the game isn’t really interested in letting you forget the fact that you’re killing people for part of it, even if those people can be broadly classed as Bad People a fair amount of the time.  It’s visceral.  It gets to you, after a while– and this was clearly a deliberate design decision on the part of the designers.  Joel gets more and more frantic about reaching Ellie before anything can happen to her– and, fascinatingly, so did I– I’m generally a hoarder in games like this, keeping everything in reserve In Case I Need It.  By the time you get to the last bit of the game where you know there’s not much more than a hallway between you and Ellie, I was playing with no quarter given for anyone— you’re behind a corner?  I’m not waiting for you to come out.  Molotov cocktail.  I shot at you once and missed?  Throwing a bomb.  Four of you back there?  Smoke grenade, followed by a Molotov, then breaking the neck of the guy who I missed.  Brutal shit.

And then you burst into the surgical suite.  Ellie’s on the table, unconscious.  There are three doctors in the room, unarmed.  They see the crazy man with the flamethrower (yup) and the machine gun burst into the room… and they cower.

I was expecting, at this point, to be presented with some sort of choice.  No.  Why not?  Because the game has gone to great pains to set up Joel’s character by this point, and isn’t terribly concerned with what you want to happen.  And there is no way in sweet shrieking Hell that Joel is letting anyone stick a knife in Ellie’s brain.  None.  Period.

Your only option is to gun down the (unarmed, hiding) doctors and pick up Ellie and run– which brings you right back to the beginning of the game, where you’ve got a defenseless kid in your arms, and because you’re carrying her you can’t get to your guns and shoot back, and your only option is to run like hell or you’re both going to die.  Because as it turns out the guards do not suddenly get less pissed at you once you’ve killed the doctors and taken Ellie back.

And you know how the game handled this the first time it happened, too.  She died.  And Joel didn’t.

And just to make sure this is clear: I had an Atari, people.  I’ve been a gamer for a very long time; I’m part of the first generation of people who can say honestly that they’ve been gamers for their entire lives.  And I have never once played a game where the main character was given the chance to save the world and chose not to.  Because if the choices are save the world, or save your kid?  Fuck the world.

Like I said:  if you’re a parent, this shit’s gonna fuck with your head.  Because, as contrived as it sounds, that’s not a choice that I could make and expect to keep my sanity.

Amazing, amazing stuff; everyone involved with the game should be proud of themselves.  And you should have played it by now.  Go forth and game.

In which I don’t like things

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

Geek-WallpapersWARNING:  Higher geek content than normal.  Prepare yourself as you see fit.

As I said the other day, one of my oldest friends is in town.  She’s been with us for Thanksgiving so many times that it’s basically assumed she’s going to be here by now.   She is not remotely the geek that I am, but we still spend a fair amount of time when we’re together playing video games.  The PS3 (which arrived this morning, and I had time to take out of the Amazon box but not actually hook up) was entirely her fault half her fault at least a quarter her fault slightly her fault, and she bought Lego Marvel Heroes (or whatever it’s called) for me, both of us believing that since it was co-op it ought to be a fun thing for the two of us to do for a while.

Sigh.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (that’s it) has a fun game hiding in there somewhere, I swear it does.  It combines LEGO and superheroes, for shit’s sake; I like both of those things, and the combination all by itself ought to be enjoyably goofy enough that it carries the game.  It does not.  There’s too much bullshit in there getting in the way of your fun:

  • The camera.  Sucks.  Suuuuuuucks.  There are two different kinds of split-screen:  static horizontal split, where each of you get half of the screen and you can’t see anything because your field of view is shit, and dynamic, where the border between your screen and your partner’s screen shifts and slides around and sometimes you’re on the same screen together and holy Jesus is it completely impossible to ever figure out where you are or what’s going on.  Even in the static mode you seem to inexplicably shift sides of the screen every now and again, and combining that with the fact that you can shift characters just makes keeping track of your character on screen a pain.
  • In addition, you’re frequently just out of view.  The camera’s almost completely not user-controllable, and there’s all sorts of stuff hidden behind game geometry or walls or just random junk that you can’t manipulate the camera to let you see behind.  Combine that with the game’s penchant to stick you in hallways or small areas and the inherent problematic nature of 3rd person 3D gaming, and the result is garbage.
  • Related to the last point, most of the time there’s very little indication of what you’re actually supposed to be doing.  For example, there’s a battle with the Abomination early on where you’re supposed to shine lights on him to stun him so that the Hulk can beat him up (because, uh, that’s how he works, I guess…).  Now, I’ve been a gamer since I was tiny; I speak Video Game with a fluency that my friend doesn’t, so between being trained by the game’s do-this-then-lather-rinse-repeat strategy of previous bosses and being familiar with the “weaken, then attack” trope because it’s so common in other games, I figured this out immediately from the game’s one comment that light bothered him.
  • Sub-gripe:  this is your second fight with the Abomination; the first one was outside in full daylight.  And light isn’t a weakness for the Abomination.  This is dumb.
  • Anyway, I was busy as the Hulk fighting off hordes of minions and occasionally fending off the bad guy, so it was left up to her to handle the light issues until the frustration just got to be too much and I took over.  I managed to get the second light shone on him and she beat him up, then ran over to where the third one was and… nothing.  No spotlight.  I managed to flash a light green and then had nothing to hit or break or anything.  I figured I’d forgotten to do something elsewhere on the stage, so I ran around looking for it.  For fifteen minutes.  While she beat up minions and the Abomination’s smell-attack, which shoves you away and keeps you from doing anything, got more and more annoying.
  • This is the point where my wife looked over and said “Are you guys actually having any fun?  Because you’ve both sounded really unhappy for about half an hour.”
  • At this point I discovered what I’d missed:  a couple of bricks, invisible and hidden behind a wall, that I’d not managed to smash and which turned into something I needed to get the spotlight up.  At this point we quickly dispatched the beast and ended the level.  But it took twenty minutes to find an invisible brick.  This is not good game design, not at all.  And the game is stuffed full of things like this, plus lots of LEGO shorthand where you’re supposed to play a level through multiple times with multiple different characters so there will be bits blocked off… but if you don’t know that, you’re just frustrated, because there’s a big shiny thing right there and you can’t get it to do anything.
  • Fucking fetch quests.  Game developers who use fetch quests should be punched in the dick.  And if I’m playing as the fucking Hulk and someone asks me to help him wash a window, which actually fucking happened, I should get to respond by picking that person up and throwing him through said window.  You have got to be fucking kidding me, game.

So, yeah.  Shoulda been fun.  Isn’t.  And it’s not like I haven’t played the LEGO games before; it may just be the co-op that’s magnifying the game’s/genre’s issues, but right now I’m upset that my friend paid $50 so we could play this thing.  Blargh.

(You may have thought that was nerdrage.  It was not.  What follows is nerdrage.)

Now let’s talk about Man of Steel, which I watched most of last night.  I was initially really excited about this movie, but I didn’t manage to go see it during opening weekend and the reaction to it convinced me that it was a terrible idea.  And yes, yes it would have been a terrible idea, because this film gets every single thing about Superman wrong except for his powers.  I’m not seeing any more superhero movies attached to Christopher Nolan; his Batman films were terrible (well, the first one was; I refused to see the next two) and this movie sucks too; that’s enough strikes.  I’ve said several times that I might have liked Batman Begins had it been called Ninja Bat-Costume Dude, and Man of Steel would have been a decent movie had it been called Strong Laser-eyed Alien with a Coward for a Father who Lets him Die because, well, why not?  Crying builds character.  

Fuuuuuuuuck that movie.  I would have walked out of the theater at the point where Jonathan Kent– Jonathan fucking Kent, the man responsible for Superman’s fucking moral core, which is the single most important thing about the character– blithely suggests that letting a busload of children die would have been just fine because letting people know about Kal-El’s secret (and I’m calling him Kal-El; there’s no “Clark Kent” in this movie, and the fact that they invent Clark Kent at the end is ridiculous) would have been inconvenient.  And if I hadn’t left the theater then, I certainly would have been gone (and, in fact, did leave the room and go read for an hour) when Kal-El lets his father die in the stupidest way imaginable because he goes and runs off to save a dog.

Fuck this movie.  Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, and I haven’t even gotten to the part where Superman lets millions of people in Metropolis die at the end without any real remorse at all until the point where three more are suddenly important, and he breaks some moral code against killing that he doesn’t have any reason to have because no one in his life up until now has been a good person.  Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.

Fuckit.

In which I kvetch about stupid things

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

…so, just like every post, really.

The boy’s current YouTube obsession is a video, not even a minute long, where Elmo is playing with a beluga whale, and it is a horrible, horrible video. First, it requires Elmo to twice ask Winston the beluga whale to “please show Elmo what love is,” which is absolutely completely creepy if you are possessed of a remotely filthy mind, and I swear to you that the filth in my brain has made run-of-the-mill perverts run screaming and enter monasteries. Also, in the last shot of the clip, Elmo is leaning over the whale’s pool so that he can receive belugish lovin’, and it is painfully apparent that they’ve positioned his ass off-screen so that the puppeteer can actually make him move. You can see every part of him but the back of his ass and it’s really weird and distracting and creepy.

On the plus side, he– the boy, not Elmo– has learned how to use the remote for the Apple TV to repeat his YouTube videos, so he no longer requires us to repeat the video for him. On the minus side, since he knows how to do this, his new move is to start the video, run out of the room to do something else, then run back in a minute later to restart the video– which means he isn’t actually watching it but I fucking have to because if he comes back in and the video is off he screams.

Did I mention that the video is only a minute long and I have to listen to the sentence “Oh please, show Elmo what love is” twice during that single minute?

I’m losing my goddamn mind, folks.

Currently occupying more braincycles than it ought to: whether I’m buying a PS4 or an Xbox One. I mean that in two senses; first, whether I’m buying one at all, and second, which one I’m buying if I’m buying one. This is a stupid thing to be wondering about for a wide variety of reasons, chief among which being the fact that I’ve barely touched my Xbox 360 since having Paul Revere riding bitch behind me and calling out incomprehensible directions for me to avoid British soldiers caused me to stop playing Assassin’s Creed 3. Combine that with the fact that the game I’d bought before AC3, Bioshock: Infinite, was almost completely devoid of anything interesting and it’s been forever since I tried to play anything on it.

Most of my gaming lately has been on my iPad, honestly; and it’s been playing Baldur’s Gate, which came out when I was in high school or early college or something like that. I could blame the boy if I wanted to; certainly fatherhood has cut down on both my inclination to and my time for gaming, and the fact that I’ve been spending almost all of my leisure time reading in a frantic and pointless attempt to get through 200 books this year hasn’t helped either. But I don’t like the idea of not owning a gaming console. It bothers me. But the Xbox One has a number of features that bother me rather intensely. For example, everything they’re saying the Kinect can do is something that I absolutely do not want a device in my living room to do, and the damn thing makes the system cost $100 more than the PS4. And I don’t really want a PS4 because, well, I skipped the PS3 and I think of myself as an Xbox guy. But I’m mad at Microsoft and the Xbox One is stupid. But I want a new console. But there aren’t really any games I want to play for them anyway. And it’s not like I can find one in a store. But I like shopping for futile things. But I don’t want to spend the money! But I’m frustrated and want retail therapy.(*)

I love it when I’m stupid.

Blah blah blah wank wank wank first world problems. I know. But it was either this or post about work, and the last couple of days require some thinking before I write about them. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll have eight hours at OtherJob and it’s supposed to be cold and snowing so I’ll have plenty of time.

(* Also? Thinking about buying a PS3. I want to play The Last of Us in the worst possible way and if the PS4 was actually backwards-compatible that feature might sell me the system all by itself. And I figure by the time I’ve worked my way through the PS3’s backlog of good titles that were system-exclusive, which will all be cheap by now, the PS4 will have enough of a library that it might be worth buying. Which… this is probably the most sensible approach, which is why I’ll likely not do it.)