Month: June 2021

Summer Game Fest 2021

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Yesterday was the kick off of the Summer Game Fest, another Geoff Keighley production. Essentially this is “The Game Awards” without the pretense of having to occasionally give out an award. Similarly you are going to hear the “World Premiere” sounder a ridiculous number of times before it is over. Apparently Geoff saw the Zach Synder Cut and was jealous of its length, because the official stream broadcast clocks in at around four hours. You can of course instead watch your favorite YouTube talking head talking over the show, or you could just do what I do… and simply track down the original broadcast and watch that so you can make your own decisions… and jokes.

I did not watch the entire thing, but instead chose to skip around a bit because to be fair… I don’t care about the random conversations in between the game trailers. That said it was sort of humorous to watch Jeff Goldblum awkwardly troll Geoff Keighley in a display that did not seem scripted or planned in any way. Even skipping around like I did, there was an awful lot to unpack and I did my best to catch all of the game trailers. I originally had a totally different post for this morning but instead realized that it is in fact game show season once again… and I will apparently be watching a lot of these over the weekend. It seems that E3 is back on the menu which is not something I expected. I legitimately thought E3 as a concept would not survive the last year given that for the most part it is really easy to do a pre-recorded segment that you can control the release of and most game companies are already doing this.

On to the games I cared about…

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

So essentially the breakout hit of Borderlands… aka Ashly Burch with her Tiny Tina character is helming a brand new game that is effectively the best DLC for Borderlands 2 turned into an entire game? I am down for this. Borderlands and I have a sort of hit or miss past with the games and I never really got into Borderlands 3 in spite of my best efforts, but I am interested in a fantasy looter shooter in the style of Borderlands. That is essentially how Ashly Burch described it and I am certain I will be giving this a spin.

Release Date: Early 2022 – Watch the Trailer

Metal Slug Tactics

This is a game that I most definitely did not expect to see in a genre that I think no one was expecting. Metal Slug is a favorite of mine and I think for the most part I love it because of the art style. It seems like all of that pixelated goodness is porting over to a rogue-like tactics game experience and while that isn’t normally my jam I am going to try it. The trailer was beautifully made, but also spent more time on animated bits than actual gameplay so it will be interesting to see any gameplay videos that come out about how things are actually going to flow.

Release Date: TBA 2021 – Watch the Trailer

Lost Ark

I have been waiting for this damned game since 2014 when I first saw its trailer for the South Korean release. It finally released in 2018… and I have to admit I contemplated trying to buy an account given that you have to have the national id thing to create an account to play on the Korean servers. I thought surely eventually this would come out in the West and last year it was announced that Amazon would be bringing it here. Finally we have a release window and I am super pumped about it. I love hack and slash Diablo style games and I am hoping this is worth all of the wait time. I am trying not to hype it up any more than I already have because I really want this to be a great game.

Release Date: Fall 2021 – Watch the Trailer

Axiom Verge 2

Axiom Verge was a really cool love song to Metroid and I own it on a bunch of platforms. So when the second game was announced it was almost certain that I would give it a spin. What I find intriguing is how different this one seems like it is going to be. In the first game you mostly used ranged attacks and in this one it seems like your character is largely melee based. The trick however is that apparently your character can also hack the mechs you are fighting to change the pace of combat. Additionally in the trailer they talked about how apparently you don’t have to fight any bosses in the game to progress through it. If you just want to run straight through the battle and keep on moving… that is apparently a valid playstyle. Should be interesting to see this as it launches.

Release Date: Q3 2021 – Watch the Trailer

Tunic

I’ve been tracking this game since E3 2018 and am still very interested in it. Essentially it is cute fox Zelda and that is pretty much all the hook I need. I’ve even played one of the earlier demos of the game and it was great… I just want it to actually release. I think this is a single developer project so I am way more forgiving on what has felt like the long development cycle. Ultimately this seems like a Switch game to me but I will likely buy it on multiple platforms to support the developer.

Release Date: Sometime 2021 – Watch the Trailer

Tales of Arise

So I am going to have to admit… I have seen a lot of trailers for Tales games over the years and I am not sure if I have ever actually called one of them out until now. Basically Tales was a series that I knew to be as beloved and complicated as Final Fantasy… but I had never actually engaged with it in any form. That is until now when I have been playing through Tales of Vesperia and have found it super charming and enjoyable and now suddenly care. I have no clue when I will actually get around to playing it but I am very interested in Tales of Arise as a result of this new experience.

Release Date: September 10, 2021 – Watch the Trailer

Elden Ring

This is the trailer that pretty much everyone online seemed to be hoping for… but also at the same time preparing for it not to actually show. Elden Ring is this weird collaboration by red wedding aficionado George R. R. Martin and the fine folks that bring us games that make you want to punch your screen… FromSoftware. I mean I have to admit I held out a slim amount of hope that this would be a very Skyrim like game experience… all the while knowing it was probably going to be another non-Souls Series Souls game like Bloodborne. Based on the trailer footage, it seems like this is very much a Souls game and while I generally am not a huge fan of that genre… I have to admit there is something compelling about it. I am probably going to be a sucker and give it a try since I did make some measure of traction into the Demon’s Souls remake.

Release Date: January 21, 2022 – Watch the Trailer

Of note… there were way the hell more games talked about than I just featured. If you ONLY care about the trailer reveals and want to completely skip the rest of the show… the YouTube channel GameTrailers has ripped and re-uploaded all of the trailers into a playlist form. There are 104 videos in the list so it will still take awhile to chew through it. Probably the strangest announcement is you can play as a Bean in Fall Guys that looks like 2B from Nier minus the mighty butt action. We have once again entered a wealth of new game information and expect my next several posts to probably reflect that.

Categories E3

Returning to the Start

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Morning Friends! There is something that you realize really quick when you attempt to go straight from a Mass Effect 3 playthrough into another Mass Effect save… the first game is such a downgrade as compared to the rest of the series. There are a lot of things that they had not quite figured out. Don’t get me wrong… the Legendary edition is so much better than anything that came before it. The controls are mostly standardized with the rest of the series and the models… while significantly lower fidelity still look pretty solid. What is most noticeable however is the dialog and how stiff the delivery is. Additionally there are just other things like the whole loot/encryption/omni-gel thing that doesn’t make a ton of sense… or the wide sweeping scope of the Citadel that serves to trap you there immediately following what is an otherwise action packed first mission.

I would be willing to bet that there are a large number of people who never actually make it off the Citadel. I had the benefit of the layout of everything being fairly fresh in my memory and I still found it a little painful. The best thing to come out of the trip to the Citadel is that you get your first three good crewmates in the form of Tali, Wrex and Garrus… which also means that I never again have to use Kaidan or Ashley. During the last playthrough I absolutely made the wrong choice between the two of them… and I will not be making that mistake this time around. I’ve never romanced Ashley… and I am trying to decide if I can hold my nose and go through with the space racist or not. The game suffers from not exactly having the best options that are not Liara… who disturbingly keeps telling you how young she is in Asari years.

The other thing that you notice is just how shitty the captain’s quarters are on this frigate. Like from the SR2 onwards you get this nice private deck that is exclusive to the commander with lots of cosmetic options and neat things like fish tanks, a stereo and even a display of your medals. In the first game on the SR1 you get a general purpose room that happens to have a bed at the back and you are certain is more conference room than quarters. In the later games this room gets used by Miranda and much later Liara so the layout doesn’t really change much because they all have an office and adjoining bedroom but there is some sort of separation between the two. I guess it really drills home how much of a “military frigate” the first design really was, and how much it became a general purpose exploration vehicle in later games.

I am starting to question if I am going to make it through a second playthrough myself to be honest. Something that completely snuck up on me is the fact that Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis released yesterday. I logged in for a bit last night and was completely confused as to why all of my characters were showing up from baseline PSO2. When they talked about cosmetics carrying over, I did not realize that it actually just meant that your characters from the first game were going to be in the second game. You can change the appearance but I was happy enough with my original CAST design to just keep moving forward with it. I did a bit of the tutorial before logging for the night. I did quickly realize however that the load times mean I really need to free up some space one one of my SSDs for the install.

Saving the Galaxy

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Morning Friends! Last night I did in fact finish up my play through of Mass Effect Legendary edition. This morning I am going to try not to talk about anything terribly spoilery, which is sorta hard when most everything about this game series my brain takes for common knowledge. My memories were correct that when I started the mission to attack the enemy base, it was in fact a downward slide to the conclusion of the game. Weirdly in my brain I actually remembered the run up to the end being longer than it actually was last night. Side note, I talked about skipping dialog in my Mass Effect 1 discussion but that became less and less of a thing as I moved into 2 and 3. The dialog is just more compelling once you leave that first game.

I have no clue what the absolute maximum number of War Assets that you can gather are, but I feel like I got pretty close. I had read somewhere that you needed over 7000 to get the best possible endings, but I am not entirely certain what that number is. The problem is all data from before is out the window because the Legendary edition works differently. A decent chunk of your War Asset score comes from having made specific choices in the first and second game to unlock the ability to gain large caches of points in this one. There are a few things I would change but I think I got as close as I have ever gotten to the perfect playthrough… at least for someone like me who is extremely paragon minded.

One of the things that I greatly appreciate about the Mass Effect series is how by the time you reach the third game… you have spent a lot of time “living” in this universe. There are so many games that pull a third act turn that instead of a tightly focused foray, you now have the fate of the world hanging on your actions. The problem with this is that it often doesn’t feel earned… that you sorta step out into the high water and get swept along with the tide of the narrative. Given how much you go through in this series, by the time you reach the third act or third game in this case, it feels like it has earned the stakes that we are playing for. The game shows you from the very start just how overwhelming the odds are and that the only way we make it out of this alive is if we get all of the forces of the galaxy to band together in a tentative unity.

For me the game will always be best however, when I am jetting around the galaxy with my crew and completing little missions. I think this is why the second game in the series resonates so deeply with me because it is almost entirely “away missions”. You feel like you have plenty of time to spend getting to know your crew and shifting around using them for various missions. The problem with both ME2 and ME3 however is that you end up getting back Tali… my FAVORITE crewmember a bit too late in the game for it to feel like she makes a very meaningful impact on the decisions. There are a lot of things that I would change about how I played through Mass Effect 3. Most specifically a character died due to my actions that I would have preferred to have saved… but now I know specifically how to stop that from happening and it doesn’t require too much fiddling.

You might ask what I did last night after seeing the credits roll? Well I rebounded and created a new save as Male Shepard, aka the way I am honestly more comfortable playing the game. I liked playing as the Jennifer Hale voiced female Shepard quite a bit, but I still struggled with the romance options in the end. I also rushed my way through the first game, and I really should have spent more time doing Mako missions because I missed quite a few important sub plots and I am uncertain what influence those have on later missions. Since I am currently in need of good good feelings of nostalgia to get me through the bad bad chaos of my life… I am perfectly fine setting this on repeat for a bit and chilling out. I somehow doubt I will make it all the way through this second playthrough, because I can rarely play the same game twice in a row… but I guess we will see how that goes.

The other small miracle is that you have two blog posts in a row from me. Here is hoping I am “back” for now.

Avoiding Homeward Path

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As I alluded to yesterday, I am still struggling pretty hard right now. While I am not putting in near the hours I was at the beginning of this current crisis, the fact that it continues to drag on over a month into it… is just grating. The only word I have to adequately describe where I am mentally is “weary”. Part of what has helped me deal with all of this is the fact that I could come home and spend a few hours running around the galaxy with my cast of “friends” in Mass Effect Legendary edition. Unfortunately that is now coming to its own end as I have reached the point of no return in the third outing. Essentially if I move the story forward at this point I will be on a downhill slide to the end of the game.

I find myself somewhat wistful about this most recent outing in the Mass Effect universe. This was my first time playing a female Shepard and I enjoyed it greatly, apart from the less than awesome romance options. I’ve learned something about my particular brand of “pan” in that I am just not attracted to traditional straight white guys. If I could have romanced Cortez or maybe even Joker… then possibly. Instead I basically clung to Liara like a life raft in that department. Mass Effect Andromeda has a mod that opens up all romances to all genders, and I am hoping eventually someone figures out how to do one for the Legendary edition because Tali and Jack are far better than anything I had open to me apart from the non-paramour characters of Chambers and Traynor.

It is really interesting how different the three games in the series are. Mass Effect 1 is this very tight and focused adventure with extremely sharply focused storytelling. Mass Effect 2 is this big meandering adventure with a truly staggering cast of playable characters. Then Mass Effect 3 narrows the focus once again and makes everything about this driving conflict of the Reapers trying to annihilate all life in the galaxy. I still after all of this time prefer the second game and its pacing, but I prefer the mechanics and visual style of the third game. There are some pretty staggering cinematic moments that feel integral to the story and not just window dressing.

If I get home at a decent hour, I will focus on pushing the game across that finish line. From what I remember once I start the assault on the enemy base, it is a quick slide to the final moments of the game. As it stands right now… I still don’t have a clue how I am going to finish things up. I know I have three decisions before me and I have more than enough war resources to get the best possible endings down each path. The problem with finishing however is this journey will be over… and right now I have been using the nostalgia that it has brought me to prop me up and keep me from collapsing under the weight of stress. If I wrap things up… I am absolutely going to have to find another big sprawling adventure to dive into in order to keep me focused.

In another side notes… I did 182 pull ups last night that took about 15 minutes of real time and got absolutely nothing for it. If you find yourself down this path… abort because it is SO not worth it. In additional side notes… I am going to try and ease back into blogging again because the entire process is therapeutic for me and maybe will help me weather the storm a bit better. I miss these morning one sided conversations. I hope you are all doing well and I hope tomorrow I will come visit with you again.