xBox One: Dead Rising 3

So, I have already exhausted the key games I wanted to play in this system -- well, at least the ones that are not still at full price.  Dead Rising 3 was the last game I played, the first game I saw on the system and the quickest played.

The rather repetitive element of pondering that I bring up in video games, the rather lackadaisical approach to violence games have, doesn't accurately apply here. Sure, there is an immense amount, a rather ludicrous abundance of violent destruction of your enemies here in this game. But they are zombies, so it doesn't matter, right? They are already dead so you are not killing anyone. OK right? Not really, but more on that later.

The Dead Rising series is an open world, sandbox type of third person game set during zombie outbreaks. The first was set in a mall, because Dawn of the Dead made that the perfect place to run around beating on zombies and dressing up in stolen clothes. The second takes place in the downtown of a Las Vegas analog. I have the game on PC but never completed it. You see, all the games have a timer counting down concept, with the first two being very tight to the clock. Its hard to be entirely immersed in a world when you are forever rushing to beat one clock or another, and often failing, and then picking up again from a save.  The third game sort of removed that, allowing for many more hours of just running around smooshing zombies for the fun of it.

Yeah, the fun of it. This is really a beat em up game, a game where you punch, shoot, chop and explode mass amounts of zombies. You take damage but can quickly heal, eating snacks and downing smart drinks. The game is really about the rush of being overrun by a crowd of dozens or hundreds of zombies and fighting your way out. It takes the horror premise, the one that has always left zombie fiction seeping into my nightmares, and flips it on it side, allowing you to always get out. And in the most dramatic ways possible. There is nothing like feeling you get taking down 200+ zombies with a sledge hammer that has grenades attached to its head.

That. How you kill the zombies is as much the fun. In all the games, you construct weird, wonderful and bizarre weapons out of random junk. Combine the head of a dragon costume with some prop katanas and a car battery to make an outfit that shoots lightning while slicing & dicing z's. Add a chainsaw to  the end of a broom for a nasty polearm. Fireworks, machine guns, teddy bears, umbrellas, shopping carts, video game consoles, etc all combine to make dozens and dozens of fantastical and not at all serious items. This game also did it with vehicles, but entirely too tamely.

I am not sure  how many zombies I had destroyed after I got the 10,000 Achievement. They are not alive, so there is none of that back of the brain nagging about how sociopathic you are, but they were alive. These were people so there is still that creeping horror when you see thousands of zombies milling about in the parking lot of a mall, that the world has lost all these people. Must have been the same feeling soldiers go when they peeked out from a foxhole after a particularly brutal artillery barrage, to look upon a field of the fallen. Yes, I occasionally got introspective about smashing zombies with meat cleavers. Then I went back to it, because, by Tooten, I had a city to save.

I don't need to mention much about the story. You are Nick, an automechanic, trapped in the LA analog, who has to help his friends escape the city before the government nukes it to deal with the latest outbreak. Along the way there are government conspiracies and betrayals. But who cares, I got me some zombies to take down.

xBox One: Watchdogs

Violence. Why are video games so much concerned with vicarious violence? If any aspect of our pop culture confirms we are obsessed with the hurting & killing of each other, it is video games. And this is coming from a guy who has no issues admitting he is attracted to vicarious violence. But why? Why, when we are in a heyday of video game production, when we are capable and aware enough to create non-violent, very innovative and entertaining games, the top sellers continue to be focused on violence. Well, violence and the abstracted violence & machismo of professional sports.

Why do I always download the non-violent games, marvel at how innovative they are, and then never play them again?

Watchdogs has a plot narrowly focused on the violence of the main character -- if not for the violent actions he has taken in the past, his current history would not be now endangering his family. But if he does not take this violence on, head on, he will be left bereft of the remaining family he loves so dearly.

Aiden Pearce is a hacker and fixer, a criminal for hire with a wide range of skills and access to illegal technology. One year previous he got mixed up in something that led to the death of his niece. And he has been hunting down those responsible since. We join the story as he finds the gunman responsible for shooting the tire of his car, that his niece was riding in, that killed her. Aiden is ruthless in his treatment of the gunman, who almost immediately is shown to be a broken man, damaged by the death of an innocent. Aiden doesn't care. He only wants vengeance. But moreso, he wants answers. Who ordered this, why did they, who is at the top?

And thus it begins.

This is Chicago about twenty minutes into the future, but back in 2012. Remember that blackout in 2003? That was caused by hackers trying to show us that the convergence of networks, controlling so many aspects of our lives, was dangerous. Knocking the power out across the eastern seaboard was their idea of a wakeup call.  Almost 10 years later, not much has changed, even worse, interconnected networks have expanded with almost all city functions in Chicago being controlled by a single system called ctOS.

Aiden has access to this network, and all its resources, being able to spy on people from CCT cameras, listen in on their cell phone & TXT conversations, and steal from their bank accounts. He can control city functions, like street lights and drawbridges. He can overload things and causes blackouts. Aiden's not a nice guy so he does a lot of this, solely to benefit himself. But he tries to be a good guy, acting as a vigilante called The Fox, who uses a Person of Interest style monitoring system that tells him when a criminal act is about to happen, and if he so chooses, intervene. Do enough of these and the people will love him, and he might assuage his guilt a little.

Watchdogs is not wink wink, nod nod about the role of the character, like Max Payne 3 was. Aiden doesn't see himself as the ultra violent protagonist, just a man on a mission. Despite his sister begging him to just stop, stop the killing, stop the associations that are leading them all to danger, he just continues. He continues connecting dots and going up against various gangs led by sociopaths and pinnacles of the criminal communities. He goes up against Blume, the technology company responsible for ctOS, and the shady dealings they have. And in in each encounter, he kills lots of people. Until he gets to the end of the story and there is no one left to kill.

As a game, it actually has some fun concepts. The hacking, is basically a time-based puzzler, but the activation of various city functions via cell phone is just fun. Raising a city drawbridge as you are about to launch over it is exciting. The driving, hoping to emulate GTA V, is clunky but gives you the requisite number of vehicles to aspire to. And yes, you can car jack people.

If there was one thing that was frustrating in its emulation of other games, it was the outfits. Most games let you dress your character as you wish, from existing clothes in your closet, and that which you find or buy. Aiden could only buy colour schemes and slight deviations from his trench coat, sweater and ball cap outfit. He always looked the same. So much for trying to be a vigilante nobody would recognize. Dude, changing from a brown coat to a bright blue one, doesn't help much.

The Chicago of the game, was not really much a Chicago of reality, and I don't mean accurately representing real places. It was more like the Liberty City of the GTA series, trying to be New York. It has certain area that mimic real places in Chicago, but skewed left of centre. For example, the big shiny bean, actually called Cloud Gate, is there but doesn't look exactly the same nor does the park it is in. This Chicago has a bunch of islands, separated by canals and river ways, so you would have sufficient paths down which to drive boats or jump cars over. In fact, many places made me think the creators couldn't visualize anything but the city of Montreal. In doubly fact, I felt the game would have benefited from being set in a fictional Montreal. Alas, Americans.

In the end, this is a competent shooter, with some fun hacking sub-structures and plenty of mini-games and side missions, were I am that type of guy. It looks damn good and moves well. I would have changed the clothing options.

xBox One: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Nemesis system, nemesis system, nemesis system. In all the reviews that spoke favourably of this game, they all mentioned how innovative and fun the nemesis system was. It was. It was fun. But it really only played a key part early on in the game, for later on you become powerful enough to not need it. It still stays fun. Slowly picking off orcs and uruks, leaving weaker ones behind makes boss battles much easier. But despite being a new concept, I believe innovation relies on it really playing an integral part of the whole game.

Shadow of Mordor takes place in the scary period between Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Talion is a ranger stationed at the Black Gate, on the edge of Mordor, just before the world becomes aware that Sauron is rising once again, and has filled his land with orcs. The Gate is attacked by lieutenants of Sauron and Talion is killed, along with his family. No, the game doesn't end there, it just begins. The spirit of an elf Lord inhabits Talion's body turning him into an unkillable soldier of revenge.

Cool, an explanation for respawning after you are killed. Not like a dead man can die again. Now if the orcs can only learn to dispose of his body properly, they won't have any more issues with him.

You start off weakened, as you do in all games, stalking about in the rain and shadows (of Mordor), killing orcs stealthily and running from larger crowds. Soon you get a magic bow, with magical replenishing arrows, and runes to plug into your sword and your dagger.... which is actually a broken sword. Your goal is to fight up through the ranks until you draw out the lieutenants who were responsible for your death and that of your family.

Along the way, you encounter unique orcs, captains, warchiefs and finally, the Black Captains. But not just up the orc chain, as there are also beasties such as Trolls and Caragors, cat like versions of the worgs we saw in the movies. The unique orcs get names and a look and a funny saying. Initially this is a lot of fun, as it gives character to your enemies. But the more you play, the more the "a little from column A, a little from column B" aspect gets repetitive. Also, these orcs often return from the dead. Even if you behead them, they somehow end up coming back, a little older, a little wiser and likely scarred by your being so rude to kill them. The guy you burned might have horrible scars, the guy you split in two might be sewn together. Its kind of weird, but fun.

The gameplay is a combination of stealth stalking and Arkham Asylum style button mashing combo combat.  At first this is fricking annoying, and you have to run away or die - a lot. But as you get more useful combos, and get used to the style, it becomes fluid and cinematic. Nothing like being in a mix of about 15 orcs, rolling about, knocking down and beheading orcs, left right and centre. Jump over that guy. knock that guy to the ground, light up this one and put an arrow through the eye of that guy. Much heroic fantasy sword play!

Now, back to the nemesis system. Each of the unique orcs connects to another in the ranks. If you want to take down a top level bad guy, a Warchief, then you better have already taken down some of his allies. Or that mix of 15 orcs is going to contain every higher level orc who reports to him. As the game progresses you can pretty much clean out every orc that matters in an area.... until the next time you are killed. Then, survivors are promoted and the ranks fill up again. That guy you scarred? He's now a captain and realllly pissed at you.

Another trick in the system is "branding" your enemies. Basically, using your blue colored magic you can bring orcs under your influence. They become enthralled to you. And in turn, everyone reporting to them is yours. Soon, a skilled brander can have an entire region under their control. Lead your own blue light gang against the Warchief and its an all out brawl. And when they all die?  Start over again! There are always plenty of orcs to sway to your cause.

But eventually the gameplay becomes repetitive. Stalk orcs, brand orcs, kill orcs, take out captains and take down warchiefs in their fortresses. The story moves you along, stalking the ranks to be led to the Black Captains who were responsible for your death. The elf lord possessing you, and keeping you alive and killing, turns out to be Celebrimbor, that guy from The Silmarillion who forged the Nine Rings. He was used by Sauron and betrayed, and wants revenge. You are his instrument but you have to get through the Black Captains first.

If the game has one major flaw, that is it. The Black Captains. The first is decent, a tough boss battle requiring time and skill. The next is a stealth hunt that takes only time. And the final guy, before Sauron? A few quicktime events (directed videos hitting a single button) and he goes down. And that drives Sauron away. Bleah. Let down.  You only ever get to use your army of tagged Warchiefs once and then they are wasted.

But in general, it was a hell of a lot of fun. And Talion is a great looking character, the kind of Mary Sue ranger for D&D players. He smack a bit of a super model Aragorn but his character model looks and moves well. DLC holds no interest for me, but an entirely new sequel might.

xBox One: Destiny

I didn't enjoy Destiny and I cannot fully explain, even to myself, why. The game was the highly anticipated (yes, I know its been out for ages, but it was highly anticipated before it came out) from Bungie, the same studio as Halo. They claimed it would be revolutionary, innovative and a ton of other buzz words. What we got was a very very pretty MMO-style FPS. Ahem, Massively Multiplayer Online style First Person Shooter, for the benefit of my non-gamer readers. And that meant grind, lots of grind. But in a world with great art design. Again, grind is the repeating the same task over and over and over and over to accomplish a larger end goal. For example, collecting a resource from the fallen body of an enemy 50 times.

Premise. Its the distant future, long after a big (moon sized big) alien sphere was discovered. That discovery ushered in a new age for mankind, allowing them to leap forward in technology, colonize the other planets in our solar system and reach for the stars. The sphere, called The Traveller, had enemies and they ended our golden age and reduced us to ruin, from massive colonies down to one city, on Earth, with The Traveller floating above. We, as main character, awake from the dead accompanied by a floating Tyrion Lann... I mean, Peter Dinklage voiced robot. We don't know who we are, why we are, but we are a type of hero called a Guardian. Guardians exist to protect The Traveller and hope to discover why we fell and help the system recover. And there are aliens.

The background is sketchy, broad strokes of mystic scifi peppered with post apocalypse. We get more and more as we do missions but it never really fills in anything. There is no real story here, just a translucent attempt at creating a vast world with vast things happening. Hell, we don't even really find out why we were dead and why we lost our memories. There are undead aliens burrowed into the Moon, there are robotic intelligences hanging out on Venus, there are four armed aliens on Mars. All the alien races have boring names like The Fallen or The Cabal or The Hive. It gets rather vexing. Hah. That's a pun on another alien's name, The Vex. Yeah, I yawned at that too. Yawning is par for the course in this game.

I don't get it. In many aspects, Destiny is a loot-gathering, item-upgrading game like Diablo III. You go out and shoot the same enemies over and over to find special items, weapons, armor and stuff in order to upgrade your current weapons, armor and stuff. In fantasy games, this is fun for some reason, watching your guy put on different fancy suits of armor or wield neat, flashy weapons. But here I got so very very bored as I was challenged on fighting enemies for about 10 levels. The grind was very anti-heroic. It always felt dangerous, not challenging dangerous but act-too-cautious-in-order-to-survive dangerous. And that was ignoring the occasionally blundering into enemies you couldn't hope to defeat. It wasn't until about midway through the game, that it picked up and you could actually take down enemies with abandon. And the cool stuff started to drop.

Most of the stuff is usual stuff. Weapons, armor and currency. Much of it were crafting materials of which were almost solely to be saved for later in the game. You also got to upgrade your spaceship, but only in a cosmetic way. The only point of the spaceship was to make the load screens not as boring. So why the frick does my spaceship need a hat. Non-gamer friends? Hats are a general reference to a common cosmetic change to characters in game that have no effect on game play, but make you prettier, i.e. your character can put on a hat. Spaceships don't need hats.

As for the multiplayer aspect of it, it was more like MMO-light. There were always other real people running around in the background but I never interacted. Back in the MMO days I did that as well, but they at least made the world feel populated. The only time, in Destiny, that the other players felt required for the game was during Raids -- special, tougher missions that always had 1-3 people involved. You needed those other players. And of course, there was an arena style area, where everyone could fight everyone. Most MMO players looooove PvP, player vs player. I don't. I just get my ass kicked over and over and over by kids 1/3 my age.

It was around mid-level I realized this was a game for Real Gamers (tm) i.e. those people that understand the minutiae of this type of gameplay. They are about builds, min-ing and max-ing characters, strategies in raids, etc. They use tons of jargon. I just wanted to play a game and have some fun and be immersed in a world. Its why I got bored with MMOs, but at least they had some fun story elements that were always in play. Main missions, side missions, expansion packs -- TONS of story. The story in Destiny finishes after level 20. Yes, quickly done and over. The rest of the game, all the gameplay, everything else you would do with the game is about just advancing your character during hours of rinse & repeat of previous missions. OMG yawn.

Not long after finishing the story, I quit. And I gather many people would say the game is just beginning at that level. But for me, it was done. And I am rather disappointed. It was an Xmas gift, it was a highly anticipated game. It was boring.

xBox One: Sunset Overdrive

Sunset Overdrive was the primary reason I wanted the xBox One first, first as opposed to the Playstation 4, other than the reasons outlined in the previous Far Cry 4 post. I love the idea of third-person, open world games with weird super powers. InFamous and Prototype are a pair of my favourite games. This one comes with a sense of humor and smacks of familiarity, harkening back to  Jet Set (Grind) Radio from the Dreamcast days. Bright, colourful and cheerfully irreverent, as a followup game, it was a nice change of pace from the grimdark nature of Far Cry 4.

Premise. You are a janitor pushing a garbage bin while some big corporation releases a new energy drink to a bunch of meathead frat kids. Suddenly, said energy drink turns them into mutants - big pulsating, orange pus-y mutants who try to kill you. The entire tutorial is you attempting to get home to your apartment while the city goes to hell; very fast. Oh and I should mention, a badass old man gives you a gun that looks like a blunderbuss with a pair of *cough* balls attached. Its called the Flaming Compensator. And thus, the irreverent, juvenile comedic tone for the game is set.

This game is all about its humor. You are constantly breaking the fourth wall. You are constantly being reminded that you are in a video game. No better example than when you respawn -- animations of aliens dropping your body, or you emerging from a grave like a zombie, or sliding in from left stage, like a boss, or ... oh, just go look for yourself. They always made me crack a grin. All of the dialogue, most of the missions are just plain silly and setup to make you giggle. The game never takes itself seriously, even when you transition from the Hero's Journey from self-important to selflessness.

And the play is just plain fun. Like these other games, InFamous in particular, you are able to move fast along rails, i.e. telephone wires, railings, edges of just about anything. You skate along on your sneakers, boots or whatever jumping up higher points of vantage or hanging from them via a crowbar. What self-referential video game would not have a crowbar. You also bounce like a platformer cartoon, off cafe umbrellas, awnings and off the hoods of cars. Boing boing boing, you can go just about anywhere. Initially its a bit troublesome as the camera swings about you all willy nilly, but once you get the hang of it, and add in the ability to woosh (dash) over air or water, you are speedily jumping from spot to spot. This is one of those games where fast travel is almost never used, because normal travel can be such fun.

As expected, the weapons are going to be Ratchet and Clank outrageous and fun. Not much to be said there.

But then there is character customization. Of course, race, gender and hair colour are there but the fact you can change these ANYTIME you want is hilarious. Yes, you can swamp gender and body shape any time you drop by the change room. I started as a shaved punk kid, swapped into a gaudily dressed, bearded hipster and finished the game as a lil punk girl with quite the attitude. There are hats, weapons, outfits, accessories and general clothing all focused on making you look outrageous. These are street alterna-kids, one moment gothy, one moment punk and finally, once in a few missions, nerdy -- yep, you can dress as a LARPer. I never got tired of swapping out clothes every few missions.

The base enemies are the ODs, the kids who morphed into squishy orange zombies. They attack you, they ooze and when they die, they explode into the energy drink that you can use to upgrade. Then there are the big versions of them, 20' massive ones that you keep a distance from and just lob exploding teddy bears at.  Later on, you fight flashy fascist robots or gun toting gang kids. There is enough variety to keep things fresh. And after a few comments about ever-spawn, it seems completely normal that these things keep on climbing out the sewers.

Yeah, I loved this game. There were a few elements that I actively avoided, mostly the multi-player and the annoying 100%-er ideas of collecting. Collecting stinky sneakers, toilet paper and floating mascots was useful to a certain degree but only really appeal to the collectors. That and the achievements. If they had more clothing unlocked, I would have never stopped collecting. I need more than bragging points in my games.

I realize that after a handful of video game reviews, I will have to stop relating the usual things I have trouble with in games. Achievements will never be my thing, and in the more serious games, the never ending amount of murder you commit will be a normal reference. In this game, there was no sense of murder as they are completely post-human. OK, there are those gang kids, but the level of the game makes it more cartoony than reality, so no guilt. Even cyber-guilt.

I am not sure if I will return to the game once the DLCs come out, but if they have some new duds for my girl, then maybe.