Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

More Snow More Control

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It is day two of the snowpocalypse and so far our sanity is mostly intact. To be honest… being snowed in would be much harder were it not for the fact that for the past three years I am leaving the house like once or twice a week. I’ve gotten exceptionally good at staying home. On Wednesday we received around four inches of snow, and over night it appears that we gained another three or so. This means the level of the snow is now above our front porch. My wife is off right now due to snow days and has seemingly made it her personal mission in life to clear the front porch.

Throughout the day yesterday we saw no signs of life from our neighborhood cats. I largely took this as a good thing because it probably meant that they had found some warm hidey hole and were safe and happy. However over night they started to roam again which prompted us to put some food out on a plate. Throughout the night we were visited by three cats… but sadly no “greybie” which is the one that lets us pet him. I am hoping he found some warmth and food elsewhere. I suppose we will keep putting out food on the front porch in the hopes that the neighborhood cats can at least come get it if they need it. In the backyard we have seen no signs of tripod, but with her I know she has access to some rabbit burrows where she hid out during last years much colder weather.

On the game front I have continued my journey into Control. I think probably the most remarkable thing about this game is its set pieces. Like this level design is just gorgeous and framed with cinematic flair. The Bureau has this characteristic of simultaneously looking like every government office you have ever been in. while at the same time evoking an otherworldly and “not quite right” aspect that is very hard to place. Sure the rugs are very reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but other elements also serve to create this timeless unreality of the place. If anything it reminds me of the treatment of the TDA from the Loki series, which admittedly came out after this game. It does make me wonder if anyone on the staff drew inspiration from Control.

The other aspect of the game that I am absolutely in love with is all of the care that has been placed in the educational materials scattered throughout the Bureau. There are a number of how to videos reminiscent of the educational films of the seventies. There is even this series of films that are puppet shows about a group called the “Threshold Kids”. All of this only serves to add additional texture to this world and make it feel all the more real as you explore it. I’ve never beaten the original Half Life or Half Life 2… but this game continues to remind me of what I have played of both. Additionally there is a gigantic spoonful of X-Files and Parasite Eve in play. The more I get into it, the better the story gets.

Pseudo Snowbound

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you are safe and warm and have completely avoided the snowpocalpyse. The northerners will think we are crazy down here… but this is a lot of snow for us and we have no real infrastructure to deal with it. My wife is a teacher and is effectively going to be out on snow days all this week. The positives and negatives of the pandemic is that I have been working remotely going on three years now, and as a result my job continues to function effectively the same regardless of how much snow is on the ground. I pulled this shot from our front porch camera where it caught activity around midnight, and since then the snow is effectively even with the front porch with drifts much higher.

As much as I have been enjoying Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I decided that I needed a break from it. The world of ancient Greece is so freaking huge… and honestly there are so many boxes to tick and objectives to discover that I can get a bit lost. On the podcast we have a phrase “leave the hinterlands” to denote that we should probably stop chasing the minutiae in a game and move the story along. This comes from Dragon Age Inquisition, where the game dumps you into the Hinterlands which are vast and full of detail… and completely a mistake if you waste too much time there. I am having one of those moments with Odyssey where I have spent the last several nights roaming around and doing all sorts of things… but also not really feeling like I am making any progress.

Instead I spent last night playing Control. This is a game I have wanted to play for quite some time and I figured something with a smaller scope might be beneficial for a little while. I am completely in love with the visual language of this game. It feels more movie than game… and very much lives in this weird space of how we remembered movies from the late 70s and not how they actually were. The game is super cheap pretty much everywhere right now, and I had a few copies of the game on various platforms that were given away. For anyone familiar with the internet phenomena of SCPs, this game draws heavy inspiration from that genre of an illusive organization trying desperately to keep a tight lid on reality. The game itself feels a bit like a truly modern version of Half Life… because things start out feeling pretty normal and then event unfold around you.

It has hooked me enough that I feel like I need to know where this story is going. Additionally I like the character of Jesse Faden quite a bit already. The game is not terribly forthcoming with a lot of details and I feel like there are going to be some major revelations in the middle act of this game. There is what feels like the main character is addressing us directly… like she knows we exist and I am not sure how that is going to shape over time. For the last few years I have had this notion in my head of playing more narrative focused games, and this year seems to be the time when I am actually doing it. I am sure I will get lost along the way again and mired in an MMORPG… but for now I am enjoying the variety.

Exploring Ancient Greece

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I don’t have anything terribly exciting to talk about this morning. I spent my evening as I have spent a lot of evenings recently exploring ancient Greece. There is a kind of game that has rapidly become my favorite things to play, which is in the lineage of Witcher 3. Essentially I love wandering around these big sprawling worlds with lots of pockets of detail for me to navigate and explore. I like that they live in this duality of both being quest driven when I want to have structure, and completely open ended when I just want to run amok and take out a camp of soldiers. It feels like I am inhabiting the world and after a very “on rails” experience like Guardians of the Galaxy, it is refreshing to be able to get off the beaten path.

The thing is… there is an awful lot to see in these game worlds. While it is absolutely certain there is a lot of sameness, especially when it comes to set decoration… there is just enough variety to keep things feeling fresh for me. I especially love finding the vistas that serve as teleportation points in Assassin’s Creed games. They give you this big sweeping view of the world from the eyes of your bird and give you a better understanding of the lay of the land. Often times it is through these that I spot things off in the distance that I want to go explore later.

When I play a game like this I feel like I live in this constant tug of war. It creates this cycle of pushing forward the narrative of the main story quest, and then roaming around for awhile trying to make sure I have seen what there is to see in a specific area before pushing the narrative forward again. There is most definitely a feeling that you are at risk of missing something and that it is highly unlikely that you are going to make it back this way again as the story keeps moving you forward to new areas.

With Odyssey however I see this mix changing up a bit in ways that it did not in Origins. There was some online interaction between the game and the presence of other players. I remember there being targets that would spring up that you could kill to get revenge for another player. This time around there are player driven missions that have been created that you can explore, or you also have a series of daily and weekly bounties that you can partake in. This serves to further MMOize what was a largely single player experience. While there does not appear to be actual players roaming around the world with you, there is quite a bit of bleed over as the game resents you with screenshots that players have taken of specific areas.

If the discussion points that I have heard are to be believed, it sounds like maybe with Valhalla UbiSoft pushed this dynamic too far into the MMO direction. For now most of the things in Odyssey seem to have improved upon the things I liked from Origins. I am sure at some point I will make my way to Valhalla and it will be interesting to see how these dynamics have shifted again. Ultimately I am hoping to make Odyssey keep my attention for the next few weeks until Horizon Forbidden West rolls out. Greatly enjoying my evenings roaming around the ancient world.

Kassandra the Pirate

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Traditionally I had never really been a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, but that changed in 2017 when the entire thing pivoted hard. I feel like the modern incarnation of the series is very much UbiSoft attempting to capture the magic of The Witcher 3 and duplicate it. So if you too had bounced off early titles, but also love big open world adventures… then maybe AC is a series you should check out again. It took me awhile to really attach fully to Origins, but when I finally did I loved the game and greatly enjoyed playing as Bayak of Siwa. Then the sequel released and brought us to Ancient Greece and while I picked it up… I never actually got around to playing it.

Since I seem to be rolling through a series of single player games and after coming off Guardians of the Galaxy, I decided to remedy never getting around to this game. I had started the game but never really got very far into it, so I picked up from the original save and kept going. I had heard from many people that Kassandra is the far better option as far as the game goes, and is a more interesting character. I’m already a big fan and I am looking forward to see how this character evolves over the course of the game. I had some “free” outfits waiting on me, so I have dressed my Kassandra is Norse outfits that I am guessing I got around the launch of the next title in the AC series.

I am not super far into the game but have essentially completed most of “tutorial island”. There are a lot of things about the game that feel like they have improved since the previous outing. There are quality life life improvements like the ability to just crank up your walk speed to where you are running all of the time. Essentially in an open world game like this… I don’t love using horses. I am not sure what it is about horses, but I always just end up running around everywhere and my pinky finger gets tired mashing the shift key. I think part of it is that I feel like I miss a lot while mounted, because I live for random combat encounters as I move from point A to point B. Additionally it allows me to pick up all of the random iron and wood that I happen across along the path.

When I stopped playing for the night I was finally out on the open waters with my ship and crew. I learned how to do me some open water piracy and such. This series has always done a better than average job of ocean combat, and I greatly appreciate how they have improved a lot of aspects of it. For example you can just hit a hotkey to board the ship, and it will align the ship so you can jump across and do some deck to deck combat. Similarly you can just hit a hotkey to “dock” the boat when you get close to land. Things things were always somewhat fiddly in Origins and I am always on board for improvements.

This is a pretty huge game, so I fully expect to be engaged in this one for awhile. Maybe even long enough for Horizon Forbidden West to come out next month.