It’s not at all what it seems

So, I played Rime finally. Mostly because it has been free on PS+ during February. I was mildy interested otherwise, but not $40 interested. After the fact, though, there is a part of me that kind of wishes that I hadn’t played Rime.

I knew nothing about it going in. It looked like another “guide this character around the island and solve some basic puzzles and we’ll tell you a story” kind of game. Not totally a walking simulator, because you can jump and climb and swim and all those good video game verbs, but fairly close. It’s a generally non-violent game, too. You never attack anything, and your main means of interacting with the world is to shout at stuff.

And the first forty minutes or so substantiated my hypothesis. You’re set free on an island, with some basic puzzles, a short list of collectibles, and a few mysteries to discover. This is great. It’s really pretty, very scenic, and the world design is quite good. To keep you from swimming too far away, there are schools of jellyfish that you can’t pass. Much better than an invisible wall!

But then you reach the tower, which appears to be the goal, and which I sort of thought was going to be the endgame. There are so many collectibles left, though! Maybe I just did a bad job of exploring? No, there’s a lot of game after that. Four more chapters. Each entirely distinct from the rest. The fun, colourful island replaced with desert ruins, wooded ruins, rainy ruins. A lot of ruins, is what I’m getting at.

MASSIVE SPOILERS NOW.

Continue reading It’s not at all what it seems

From consumer to creator

I have a long history of enjoying video games about making video game levels (Super Mario Maker, Chicken Wiggle, etc.), and have dabbled in a couple of programs that make it easy to put together more complex stages (like Super Mario Bros X). Back in high school, I even took a class on basic programming where I learned to cobble together crappy little tic-tac-toe and mastermind games.

Last night, however, I took a major leap forward and began the process of learning how to create an actual video game.

I have now downloaded and started futzing around with GameMaker Studio 2, and got absolutely lost in the process. I was so involved in learning about the program and how to use it that I completely forgot to make myself dinner. That never happens! More importantly is that I actually feel fairly confident about diving headfirst into what amounts to a completely overwhelming project. Usually as soon as anything shows even minor resistance I give up immediately.

Progress made last night started with installing GameMaker and clicking around, and realizing that this was not a good way to go about it. So I looked up some tutorials on creating a basic platformer. Two-and-a-half hours and one (of six) YouTube tutorial video later, I had assembled my very own little box of platforms in which a cube could run and jump around freely. Even though it amounts to less than the Visual Basic tic-tac-toe game I made sixteen years ago, I’m still really proud of my creation. I feel like I accomplished a lot last night, and I am very anxious to get back and start learning more.

It’s going to be a long, long road. I have huge plans for the game that I ultimately want to make, though I know that it’s not going to all come together right away. I’ve obviously scaled way, way down for the time being, just focusing on learning how GameMaker works and how to code. If I come up with something halfway playable as I learn, great! But all the design documents that I’ve been drawing up are for a project far too large in scope for someone with just slightly more than “zero” knowledge of programming.

So, I think I’m going about this all right. Following tutorial videos. Learning the basics first. Taking pride in each baby step. Understanding the concept of scope. All that’s left is to wait and see if I actually follow through on any of this, or if I get bored after a week and never think about it again. Exciting stuff!

I am bad at Uncanny Valley

In January, one of the free games available on PS4 through the PS+ program was Uncanny Valley. Now, normally I don’t bother with the weird little indie games that they put up there, but Uncanny Valley is a horror adventure game. And when you’re me, “horror” and “free” are the magic words. One or the other will pique my attention, but both will guarantee a download.

The game begins in a nightmare scenario, wherein your guy wakes up in an alley and is subsequently mauled by shadow monsters. Then he wakes up in his home but the shadow monsters sack the place and maul him again. Then the game proper begins and you’re on the subway to a new job. You’ve been hired on as a night security guard at an abandoned office building. You get the tour and instructions from the morbidly obese day shift guard, Buck, and then you’re off to the races.

Now, Uncanny Valley is the type of game where your actions affect how the story plays out. I apparently did quite poorly, as I got a pretty awful ending. But that’s putting the horse in front of the cart. Gameplay consists of wandering throughout the office building for seven in-game hours each night. Then you can either retire to your bedroom to sleep, or continue wandering until you pass out. It seems like every time you fall asleep, you’re taken to a new dream sequence where you end up getting mauled by the shadows again. I don’t know if the mauling is inevitable or something I was screwing up, but I’m not sure I’ll ever find out the truth.

The first couple nights weren’t very exciting. I met the woman who is in charge up facility upkeep, Eve, and found a number of cassette tapes lying about. There was a safe in the 4th floor office that I had no key to, and I was able to turn on a number of computers to read through staff emails. Other than that, nothing happened. I guess I also learned that if you hold the right analog stick, it shows you how much time is left in your shift.

On night three, I found a tape deck and started listening to the cassettes that I’d collected, but then the power went off, and Buck told me that I’d have to go out to the generator to reset it. There was a puzzle on the generator that I was unable to solve, so when my guy passed out, I was put in control of Buck, who then had to go out to fix it himself. This is when the first spooky thing happened, and the screen faded to black as a scream rang out, following by a number of gory sounds.

When I woke up, there was an odd red light shining into my washroom, apparently coming in from the next room. But I couldn’t get into any of the other rooms, so that was a dead end. I opted not to go over to the generator room, just to see what would happen if I ignored it. Turns out, nothing at all. I listened to the rest of the cassettes, which had recording of a man speaking to an AI of some sort, and said AI apparently hurt a man whom she was getting to know fairly well. Seems like maybe that was what happened.

After listening to all the tapes, I hit my timer to see that my shift was over. My guy passed out though, and the next day when I checked my timer, the shift was already over again. Bluh? I spent the day exploring the few rooms I hadn’t been to yet, and the day after that, the timer still said my shift was over from the moment I woke up. So something had gone horribly wrong. Whether it was a bug or intentional, I do not know.

I walked down to the generator room to find Buck’s mangled corpse, but my guy did not react to it in the slightest. Weird. I felt the urge to end this madness as quickly as possible, so I went up to Buck’s room, stole his car keys, and attempted to take off his his car. But I was greeted by some hoodlums who I’d apparently wronged somehow, and they knocked me out and took me into the office. I woke up in some sort of production facility, and complied when they said not to move a muscle. Then the lights went out and there were screams and more gory noises. When the lights came back on, I wandered to the back of the room passing by the mutilated corpses of the hoodlums, and found Eve. Then she knocked me out.

I woke up in an idyllic-looking house, along with Eve. She said she loved me and we’d be happy together forever. Ruh-roh. I wandered over to the bathroom, where my guy was like “I bet I could break this mirror” so I did that and got a shard of glass. Then I went to the storage room and found a grate. Being an adventure game, I attempted to use the shard of glass to pry to grate open and escape, but my guy was standing too close and interpreted my action as wanting to use the glass on himself. And that’s how I ended up slicing my guy’s gut open.

When he woke up again, Eve had bandaged him up, and when I tried to walk away, my guy decided to try to sock her in the face. At which point she knocked him out. Again. Finally, he woke up strapped to the wall, with Eve explaining somberly how she had to make sure that he couldn’t hurt himself any more. So she hacked his limbs off one by one and cauterized the stumps with a blowtorch. Then she cuddled up to his mangled torso and said “I love you.”

I don’t know if I’ll play this game again to try to earn a better different ending, but man, that went places. And here I was, playing just to try to do a good job at being the night guard.

Monster Hunter World: (could be) The Movie

In the review I posted a few days ago, I made note that Monster Hunter World has a much more engaging story than any previous game in the series. While it’s been fun to follow as I play through the game, I don’t know if MonHunWorld’s story will stick with me at all after the fact. Lord knows that I have no idea what any of the other games’ stories were about any more. What I do know, however, is that this plot is scores better than the plot that I’ve read for the upcoming Monster Hunter movie.

First of all, let’s look at a brief summary of Monster Hunter World’s plot. It begins with your hunter, part of the Fifth Fleet, travelling to an island called the New World. Your fleet is part of the bigger Research Commission, who are in the New World to investigate a phenomena wherein elder dragons cross the seas to the New World every ten years. The particular monster you’re tracking is Zorah Magdaros, a gigantic turtle-like creature that wears a volcano as a shell. Throughout the course of the game, you follow tracks of Zorah Magdaros (though how something that big manages to elude the Commission, I cannot explain), learning about the New World and the creatures that inhabit it. At the midpoint, you learn that the elder dragons migrate to the New World because it’s their final resting place. But Zorah Magdaros has a massive amount of energy built up inside of it, and if it happens to reach the heart of the island when it dies, the release of that energy will incinerate the entire place. For some reason. I’ve already forgotten why exactly. Because it’s going to take a dip in the lifestream or something.

This all leads up to an exciting climactic showdown where the Commission tries to block Zorah from the lifestream or whatever, diverting it back out to sea where it can expire harmlessly. It’s actually a really great setpiece, and makes for a very entertaining climax in the game. There’s cannons, a really big ship with a giant mechanical spear weapon in the hull, and a happy ending. Putting all that on the big screen would probably be pretty neat too. The story actually does continue afterward, but it’s into another mystery that isn’t strictly necessary to get across the point of the Zorah Magdaros story arc. So let’s call it there.

Now, as far as the proposed movie goes, the first strike is that it’s being directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. You might know this fella as the man responsible for all those Resident Evil movies that everyone hates. According to buzz on the internet, his script “would involve an American being dragged into the parallel universe that the Monster Hunter series is set in, learning how to fight monsters, and having to deal with the situation when monsters cross back into the real world and start attacking, such as a final climactic battle at Los Angeles International Airport.”

So basically it’s Space Jam.

Normally I like to try to be more positive about upcoming media. It’s really entitled to damn something before the final product is ready. But I really don’t care for this particular brand of the fish-out-of-water story. Especially because there’s no need for it. Why do we need to tie this into the real world? The fantasy world of Monster Hunter is so rich and interesting on its own, it would be a disservice to only give it half a spotlight to placate Average Moviegoer. Or at least, I’m assuming you would go that route so that people who don’t play Monster Hunter have a point-of-view character that they can relate to. You could also write the story this way because it’s a great way to completely avoid have to be creative and write an actual story. But hey, who am I to judge?

Anyway, that’s my little spiel for today. Just something I felt like I needed to rant about. Regardless of how uninspired the plot my be, I’ll still go see a Monster hunter movie. I really just wanna see those monsters up on a giant screen.

Ugh… Now that I say that, I just realized that there will probably be some Hollywood re-designs of the monsters. That’s… I’m not looking forward to that.

Wherein there is music-based rambling

I have purchased three new albums this year so far. Which is kind of a lot, I guess. I don’t really buy a ton of music anymore. And I don’t pirate any music anymore. So what are our three albums of honour? We have:

  • Story of the Year – Wolves
  • Tonight Alive – Underworld
  • Sons of Butcher – Cover Stains

So in January, I got the new albums from two of my favourite bands of all time, but those aren’t the ones that I feel the urge to type words about. No, today, for the first time in many, many years, I want to type some words about Sons of Butcher.

To catch you up: Sons of Butcher was a 2005 Canadian animated show that lasted for two seasons, and since the main characters were in a band, they also released two studio albums. I don’t know if either show or music were successful, as the market for comedic rock is very limited, but it took me a while to warm up to both. Once I did, though, I was all in. Bought both seasons on DVD and both albums. Listened to them all the time. They’re one of the few bands that I could not get the ex-wife into. And honestly, I don’t blame her. This is stuff for a very specific niche.

Moving closer to the present, I Googled Sons of Butcher randomly the other week, and through a series of clicks I discovered that they have a Bandcamp page and way more than two albums. While my instinct was to immediately download them all, I opted instead to pledge $5 for their live cover album. The track list was a strong list of classic rocks songs that I love with a number of SOB originals. Seemed like a good idea.

Results? Mixed. Mostly because it is a live album and lacks a certain polish. Normally that’s fine. I actually like the rawness of a good live album. But none of these guys are particularly good singers, which poses a problem when you don’t have any means to sand up the rough edges. Also, since there’s presumably no mixing going on, all the guitar solos are muted and only come out of the right side, which is not optimal. I mean, the solos are really good. It’s a darn shame they don’t get to shine a little more.

Aside from those gripes, I like the album. It’s not a straight cover album by any means. Like I noted before, there are a number of Sons of Butcher songs in there, and a number of the covers are tweaked a bit, usually for the sake of making them “funnier.” I really love “Tasty Meats (Done Dirt Cheap)” but the changes to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” aren’t especially hilarious, just excessively dirty. Thankfully that song gets cut off a little early.

That actually reminds me of something else weird; there are clearly supposed to be skits in between some of the songs, but they’ve all been excised. Why? I couldn’t even fathom a guess, but the cuts are poor and it’s more than a little distressing. A couple songs cut out very abruptly, and there are a number of instances where tracks cut out just as soon as the band starts talking. I can see how this may have been necessary for a physical album release, but when you’re using a digital marketplace, why not just keep it all in. Maybe it’s a simple as none of it was funny.

Like so many things that I like, I feel as though I’d never recommend this to anyone. It’s just for such a specific crowd, and I am very sure that nobody I know has the required sense of humour, or a taste for very unrefined live music. But that’s why I have this blog! So I have “someone” to “talk to” about all the weird things I like and not get scoffed at like I’m some kind of idiot.

Last Month in Movies – January 2017

Star Wars: The Last Jedi – It was absolutely everything I wanted it to be and more, though it still pains me deeply to even consider that there could be a superior Star Wars movie to Empire Strikes Back. It’s seriously wreaking havoc on my list of favourite Star Warses.

While I’m sure that nobody but Future Me reads this blog, I still feel it’s necessary to avoid spoilers. So here are, in vague terms, a few things I really liked about the film: the way Luke Skywalker was handled, especially towards the end. The strong use of vibrant colours, red in particular. The reveal, and identity, of Rey’s parents. Thrilling space combat!

Quite frankly, I really appreciate that the film was constantly zigging where I was expecting it to zag. I was surprised on multiple occasions, and I think that there was only one thing that made me cock my head to the side and wonder if that was the best choice. I’m pretty sure you’ll know exactly what I mean if/when you’ve seen it. Otherwise, yeah! Awesome movie!

Suicide Squad – Speaking of movies that surpassed my expectations, this one sure did! Not so much because I personally didn’t think that I’d like it, but it seems to me that the fan/critical reception was middling at best. Also, after Batman V Superman… It’s hard to trust DC movies.

I was a little worried at first, because it was slow going and it seemed like half the run time was going to be explaining the backstories of all four hundred characters. But it picked up quickly and I really got into it. Maybe a little formulaic in execution, but I liked where all the characters went, and the acting out of most of them was really great. It makes me real excited for the possibility of a Joker and/or Harley Quinn movie. Less so for Deadshot. He’s just Will Smith being Will Smith, but a bad guy this time.

I wish that I had more to say about Suicide Squad, as this feature is awfully light this month. I guess they could have used Killer Croc or Captain Boomerang a little bit more. Or just cut them completely because neither one made a lick of difference to the story. Oh well, maybe next time.

A dino-sized review: Monster Hunter World

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter games for almost eight years now, and as time goes on, I only find myself more and more enamored of the series. Maybe that’s a little weird considering how little it has changed over the course of the last decade, but you know what they say – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Monster Hunter has actually developed very similarly to the Pokémon series of its lifetime. Each game contains the same core gameplay mechanics, and every sequel refines a few mechanics, sands down some rough patches, and maybe throws in some weird new distraction that can be helpful if you take the time to use it. Where the bigger differences lie are in the new worlds to explore in each game, and the new stable of monsters that come around with each generation.

However, times are changing, and so are the things that we thought we could expect from a new Monster Hunter game. Two years ago, Pokémon Sun and Moon changed up the Pokémon formula in some very drastic and surprising ways, and now with Monster Hunter World, Capcom has proved that they don’t have to stick to the rigid formula that we’ve seen in every MonHun game that came before it.

Now that I’ve said that though, I’d like to note that the core gameplay loop is the same: Take your big weapons, find a big monster, kill it, and use its fangs and scales to fashion bigger weapons to fight bigger monsters with. Repeat ad infinitum with bigger and stronger monsters. This can’t change, or else it just wouldn’t be Monster Hunter. Obviously. But everything that’s wrapped around this core concept has seen a change that ranges between mild tweaking to a complete overhaul.

Continue reading A dino-sized review: Monster Hunter World

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – January 2018

~ Game Over ~

Mega Man X (SNES) – Much consideration went into the choice of what the first video game I played in 2018 would be. But it really couldn’t have gone any other way.

Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls (PS4) – A shooter spin-off of a visual novel mystery series. So for every 5 minutes of gameplay, there’s 20 minutes of dialogue. Still liked it.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Switch) – I purposely waited until 2018 to finish it so I didn’t have to reorganize my “best games beaten in 2017” list. It would have been much too hard to place.

Rhythm Thief and the Emperor’s Treasure (3DS) – Dug this up to beat it so that I could delete it to make room on my SD card. It’s actually an excellent game. Reminds me of Space Channel 5.

Mr. Pumpkin Adventure (WiiU) – A highly surreal point-and-click adventure about helping a pumpkin-headed man with amnesia to remember who he is and why he’s an amnesiac.

Monster Hunter World (PS4) – Tore through the story quests, because the game doesn’t really begin until you gain access to the High Rank quests. Loving it, but longing for portability.

~ Now Playing ~

Resident Evil 7 (PS4) – Booted ‘er up for the first time in a long while to dive into all the DLC from the season pass that I bought with the game last year and subsequently ignored.

Pokémon Ultra Sun (3DS) – The adventure continues, at a rate of about half an hour a week.

Yooka-Laylee (Switch) – I don’t know how the game was when it initially launched, but I think that the current version is generally a very good homage to Banjo-Kazooie.

Volgarr the Viking (Switch) – Almost beat world 2, but man, the boss is really tough.

Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) – After a painfully slow start, it’s definitely getting its hooks into me. Except when I had to kill a bunch of people with a chain gun. That was really dumb.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way (iOS) – Retro-style adventure game about a rancher who must… rescue her cows from aliens? Fun, but the rhyming text often feels forced and gets annoying.

Super Mario RPG (SNES) – Played via emulator, which caused the game to crash quite often. Funny, I don’t have that problem when playing on an actual console…

Commence countdown

I know that I’ve mentioned it before, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually embedded the trailer for the film adaptation of Annihilation. So… here it is. Watch and get hype! Less than a month to go!

BTW, though I put it down for a while about halfway through because… probably because I started taking my Switch to work to play on lunch break, I finally finished the third book in the Southern Reach trilogy, Acceptance. It was really, really good. Better than Authority, maybe not quite as good as Annihilation. There’s definitely more going on, and you actually get a few answers about what’s happening in the story, but overall it just wasn’t as absorbing. Still great!