StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

( I apologize, for this review being kind of a wall of text, I haven't had a chance to take screenshots as it isn't through Steam this time around and it's kind of tough in multiplayer to hit printscreen, minimize, and paste into Paint. I'll try to update with pictures when I have a chance. )


This is kind of a weird one for me to review. Typically in a video game I can overlook a lackluster story, because really the game is more about the gameplay to me. I mean, a great story can absolutely elevate an otherwise mediocre title. But usually a bad story doesn't hurt a lot for me (Think the original Gears of War or the Army of Two games). But in the case of Starcraft, the single player campaign exists only to tell a story. The majority of those playing the game, myself included, will play through the campaign once for the story and spend the rest of their time with the game in multiplayer matches. And in the case of this expansion, the bulk of the added content is in the single player campaign, it adds new units to the multiplayer yes, but it doesn't really change it in a meaningful way. So if that campaign has a bad story, the expansion really suffers for it.

Before it sounds like I'm hating on this too much I should point out that I really did enjoy the addition, but in order to do so I really had to stop taking it seriously altogether. Because it's just absolute garbage. This is going to include spoilers like you wouldn't believe, so if you still want to be "surprised" by the insanely predictable story, don't read it. Really the whole thing from here on out is going to be a discussion of the story, because you already know the mechanics of the game at this point if you are considering playing it, nothing has changed.

To start with I'm going to go back to the original Starcraft, where Jim Raynor first meets Sarah Kerrigan. The extent of the relationship was a little bit of playful banter, the closest they came to having a romantic relationship was when Kerrigan read Jim's mind and caught him thinking about her in some unknown perverted situation. At the end of the game, once Kerrigan betrays them all, Jim's last words to her are "I'm gonna be the one to kill you darlin'" or something to that effect. There was no love between the two. Fast-forward to Heart of the Swarm. Jimmy has gone out of his way to free Kerrigan from the zerg infestation and return her to her old self. She shows time and time again that she is still blatantly evil but everyone looks past it. She destroys a multi-billion dollar facility by controlling a horde of zerg risking hundreds of lives and everyone basically reacts by going "Oh Kerrigan! You hooligan!". Soon after the facility is attacked, Kerrigan escapes, Jimmy stays behind and is captured by the Confederates. Kerrigan sees a news clip showing a bullet hole in Jimmy's helmet and immediately swears revenge on the Confederates and Arcturus Mengsk, their leader. (before this by the way they exchange words such as "I lost you once Jimmy, I can't lose you again!", come a long way since mind reading and death threats haven't they?).

So, before I continue, just keep in mind, you are supposed to see Kerrigan as a good character, (like a good alignment, not a well written character, don't be dumb) and you are supposed to sympathize with her despite how painfully obvious it is that Jimmy is still alive. I mean seriously, the headline on the news story that shows his helmet might as well be "REBEL COMMANDER JIM RAYNOR, CAPTURED, DEATH FAKED TO LURE OUT OTHER REBELS". So from here Kerrigan just goes on a very basic revenge quest, except in this revenge quest she re-unites the previously separated zerg broods into one massive army. Commits genocide on two separate occasions, and orders her brood mothers to annihilate the entire populations of at least 4 other planets (that brings the genocide count into numbers I don't care to think about) and we are STILL SUPPOSED TO SYMPATHIZE WITH HER. She still talks like she is just doing what's necessary to get to Mengsk.

The issue here, beyond the completely contrived relationship between Raynor and Kerrigan, is that Kerrigan could sneak in and kill Mengsk any time she wanted. She is a former ghost. HER SPECIALTY IS STEALTH. Most likely it has been long enough that hardly anyone would even remember her human face, throw her in a common woman's outfit and she could probably walk right up to the guys office and kill him with all her psychic mumbo jumbo. And that's the thing that kills me. I don't understand what it was that convinced her that the only way to get to this guy, was to invade and destroy his entire city. Even better is when you finally attack the city, the rebels contact Kerrigan and ask her to give them time to evacuate the civilians from the city. Kerrigan refuses. For no reason. She just says "no we have to go now". There is no reason that they couldn't just wait. It's not like Mengsk's forces inside are suddenly going to grow new people. And it's probably safe to assume that he doesn't have reinforcements coming since Kerrigan has mercilessly slaughtered every last career soldier, and their wives and children, on every confederate planet she could find.

I'm not exaggerating either. You probably think I am. You're probably sitting there thinking, "come on, Blizzard isn't THAT far gone. Surely they at least know that we aren't going to sympathize with someone who makes Hitlers acts look like a stubbed toe and who's motivations make about as much sense!" well no, they don't know. And don't call me Shirley.

Zeratul shows up a few times, and his character is still dumbed down to being "that old wise man who shows up and delivers cryptic one liners about a prophecy". Jimmy isn't in it much until the beginning and end (he does have a really cool bit at the end though, that I won't ruin). And every other character with a speaking role is either some Zerg queen or a Terran higher-up, there are maybe 1 or 2 exceptions but they don't really matter.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you're considering this for the story, and you want it to live up to the original game, or even to the low bar set by Wings of Liberty, you should give it a pass. If you don't care much about the starcraft story and just want the extra multiplayer units then yeah, go for it, I had a lot of fun getting back into the multiplayer side of it and the new units made it feel fresh again. You might even want to consider this if you don't know the background of the characters involved, and you think genocidal monsters are totes cool.

All told, for me it was a worthwhile purchase, like I said, I had a ton of fun with the new multiplayer content, and as much as the story infuriated me at times, I still enjoyed a lot of the campaign (the unit upgrade aspect of it is very fun). I guess to sum it up, I'll say this. If you liked Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, you should probably pick this up.

Starcraft 2 and its expansions are property of Activision/Blizzard
All else is ©Alexander Jenkins 2013

DMC and Dead Space 3

This is sort of in a similar vein to my last article, about the way that "fans" of the Devil May Cry franchise wanted DMC to fail solely because it changed things. Dead Space 3 can be added to that as well seemingly. Though honestly in the case of Dead Space 3 it makes even less sense than with DMC, I mean honestly, there have been zero changes to the Dead Space formula outside of the addition of crafting and rare fights with human enemies. But it all stems from one group of idiots, maybe on an early trailer, or even as premature as a post-announcement interview. Someone hears something that they interpret to be "HURRR WE'RE SHITTING ALL OVER THE IP LOOOOLLLLLOLOLOLOL!!!1111ONEONEONE!!!" when it was really more along the lines of "well we feel like it's getting stagnant, and we need to bring this franchise into the modern day, but we need to do that without sacrificing what first made it so beloved."

And then of course that small group of fools spreads their absurdity to those around them, such that their friends, and their friends friends, and the people who read their internet comments, have their opinions colored by this small but vocal group of invalids. And it really feeds into the idea that, if you go into something expecting to not like it, and wanting to not like it, you aren't going to fucking like it. So these sequels and reboots are essentially crippled before they ever even get out the door and it's ridiculous. We, as gamers, are systematically destroying everything that makes games good. WE are the ones forcing developers to make games for the one purpose of mass appeal. Because they know if they make something that appeals to a specific crowd, the slightest change to the formula will bury them in a financial pit so deep Bill Gates couldn't dig them out.

Enter Call of Duty. Call of Duty has had a consistent fan-base of mostly casual gamers and people who really only care about the multiplayer aspect of games. But those of us who aren't fans of those games, often hate them for the fact that they never change, they literally release the same game year after year to a horde of ravenous college kids so excited for the next game they don't even realize they might as well have not taken out the previous disc. Now let me remind you that this is exactly what you're all raging about when DMC and Dead Space DON'T DO IT. They change, they evolve, they grow up as games. So just to clarify, CoD never changes "OH COD IS SUCH BULLSHIT THAT'S THE SAME GAME EVERY YEAR", Dead Space changes "DUDE WHAT THE FUCK, I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS ISN'T THE EXACT SAME GAME AS LAST TIME, THIS IS BULLSHIT". Starting to see the problem?

And, even if change wasn't absolutely critical from a creative stand-point, it is critical from a financial one. Much as we like to sit around bitching and moaning about how EA and Activision are such a bunch of commercial whores, THEY FUCKING HAVE TO BE. Games are expensive as all hell to make. I mean seriously it's borderline stupid. We're talking 30 million, minimum, for a big budget title. MINIMUM. So when you sit there, tears streaming through the babbling brook that was once your quad-chin, the wind of your sobbing whistling through the reeds of your neckbeard, shouting incoherently about the evils of micro-transations, consider the facts. And consider this, if you love a series, and you want the series to continue, you need to be ok with changes, you need to be ok with a wider appeal. And you need to be ok with the fact that it's a business, and money will always come first. Or you need to be ok with the exact same drivel being released every year on a by-the-numbers formula, and if that's the case then shit, join the CoD crowd, they have jackets I think (or those might be adult diapers, correct me if I'm wrong).

And don't get me wrong here. I'd love it if this all wasn't the case. But the fact of the matter is we don't live in a fantasy world. Look at THQ, they rarely did what companies like EA or Activision do, they made games based on what they believed the game should be, and in doing so, dug their own grave.

And this isn't even touching on the issues surrounding DMC. DMC wasn't trying for a forced appeal to a larger audience (which Dead Space 3 really wasn't either). It was simply given to a new developer, a developer with a really great opening effort under their belt. And they did something incredible with it. They kept the heart and soul of DMC in tact, and they updated it. They brought it out of the place it had been sitting for the past 10 years and made it cool again. You could even see in DMC4, that they wanted a change. Nero was an experiment. Capcom's way of testing the water. You look at his combat mechanics, more fluid, more dynamic, cooler looking on screen, and then when they throw you back into control of Dante you find yourself missing the grab attacks and abilities of Nero. Dante just isn't as much fun to play. DMC brought the fun back. And the "fans" collectively killed it.

Both DMC: Devil May Cry, and Dead Space 3 are likely the epitaph of these two phenomenal franchises. Each has performed well below expectations thus far. And while numbers for Dead Space 3 are currently unreliable, the numbers for DMC are not. It has sold terribly. Well below one million copies thus far across all 3 platforms combined. Considering a baseline budget of well over 30 million, coupled with a monumental amount of spending put into advertising, and it doesn't paint such a pretty picture. And that is in no way the fault of the developers. These guys put their souls into these games for years so we can enjoy them for 10-20 hours, this is THEIR creative vision. But thanks to the idiots of the world, it is no longer a possibility for people to present a true creative effort without it being stepped on and crushed into the dirt. So thank you, all of you, for ruining some of the last bastions of good games we had left. I hope you enjoy the future you've wrought, because it involves about 30 dozen different variations on a first person view of an M4.

DMC, and the idiocy of people on the internet. (not a full review)

I've played Devil May Cry since the beginning. And like many, I was pretty pissed when Ninja Theory first revealed the reboot they were working on. At first glance it looked like Dante had become some whiny emo bitch boy, out to fight the system. And initially I was with most of the nay sayers. But when it came down to it, I love this series, and I knew I was going to pick this game up one way or another. And honestly I was extremely pleasantly surprised by what I got. The combat has never looked better, (though it felt marginally better in DMC 3, which still stands as the flagship of the series) the dialogue is both well written and well acted by all parties involved, and most imporantly, Dante's character, while visually disparate from his source, has a very similar personality, he still tosses out one liners with wanton disregard for decency. As far as difficulty goes it's pretty much on par with 1, 2 and 4. None of which were challenging games, so it is a bit easy, but that's in keeping with the majority of the series.

Some Spoilers from here on out! Avoid this if you haven't played the game yet.

So I was pretty surprised when I poked my head online and looked at the player community response. Which is almost unanimously negative. And what gets me, while reading these peoples comments, is that they never played the game. For example, something that comes up a lot is people saying "the protagonist shoots a pregnant woman in the stomach and then the head". They neglect to realize that, A: Vergil, the one who did the shooting, is not the protagonist, and is generally painted as a man with very questionable moral fiber, and B: he shot a frigging demon that was carrying the spawn of a demonic demi-god. Not a random innocent woman with a tiny baby. So clearly these people didn't play the game, they watched a clip without any context and came to a misguided and silly conclusion.

Then there's the people who claim that the combat rating system has been simplified. A large number say that your rating depends only on doing damage and avoiding being hit. Again, this just isn't true. If you just sit there spamming the same attacks over and over again, your rating is going to suck. But beyond that, if you spam the same attack, your enemies will find a way around it and you'll get slapped around. The rating system is honestly identical to previous games. Just like always, you mix it up, keep the swords scythes axes stone fists and chakram things flying, and dance your way around the enemies attacks to keep your score climbing.

I haven't finished everything I want to do in DMC yet, I'll likely play through every difficulty again like I have with previous games so I won't post any official review yet. I just really wanted to put this out there. Because I don't want a group of whiners, who won't even give the game a chance, to poison this games image for people who might really enjoy it.

Resident Evil 6 Part 1 of 5, Ada fucking Wong

DISCLAIMER:
(I cannot stress enough that Resident Evil 6 IS A GOOD GAME. This review specifically targets the one part of the game that was not enjoyable. There are more reviews forthcoming which discuss the good parts. Please don't let this review be what makes you decide not to buy this game until you've seen what else I have to say about the rest of the game.)


I'm going to preface this whole thing by saying that I am not a Resident Evil fan. This is not to say that I have disliked previous Resident Evil titles, I simply haven't been interested in them. I only played 5 recently, and while it was a fairly enjoyable experience, it's nothing I'm dying to get back into. I have not played any releases earlier than 5, though I have seen them played substantially so I do know what they're about, what they are like, and what kind of atmosphere we're talking about. So Resident Evil 6 was sort of a weird "this looks kind of interesting, whatever" purchase for me. Driven largely by the wealth of content I understood was present in the release, I picked it up. (I hope everyone's pumped for free use licensed images because this was played on my xbox!)

This is obviously Leon.

I had originally been a bit leery just because I had seen some of the critical reception, but then I remembered how scathing fans had been about the 5th game, which I kind of liked. And this brings me to my first discussion point. Resident Evil fan boys, are worse than CoD and Halo 3 fan boys combined. They've all been completely sucked in by nostalgia and have lost all concept of what the early games in the series actually were. These games came out when the majority of us still playing them today, were kids. The Wizard of fucking Oz was terrifying when I was a kid. So I can see where you might have been scared by them as children, but I challenge you to go back, play them again today, and actually be even remotely creeped out by them. It won't happen. The voice acting alone was some of the funniest stuff you'd ever get out of a game, even games trying to be funny. The graphics of course were terrible, product of the time I know, but it's pretty tough to be scared by the simple presentation of these old games. The reason we were scared of them and others like them was our own imaginations. We were kids, our brains could fill in the gaps like lightning, especially when those gaps represented something like a zombie that our child minds should be afraid of. And that is why these fan boys are so frustrating. The new games are just that, new. They aren't substantially different in content or narrative, these guys just CAN'T see through the fog of nostalgia to the truth. The only complaint that I find acceptable, is the lack of real zombies. That I'll grant you, Resident Evil should have zombies in it, not... plagas... And before anyone gets all "well you didn't play them so you don't know!". No I didnt. However, I played the F.E.A.R. games. And you know what, when I played the original F.E.A.R. I won't lie to you, I got pretty damn creeped out. Then 2 and 3 just weren't scary. At first I thought it was a change in the games, it wasn't, it was a change in my perception. Buy anyways.

This represents my.... change in... thought processes... from growing up?

So I didn't go into this determined to hate it like the so called fans of the series, I went in just hoping for a good time. And to be honest, for the most part that's what I got. The ability to move while shooting is HUGE, dodge maneuvers are cool, shooting mechanics for the most part worked fine, and there is a good variety of weapons, even if they aren't always superbly fun to shoot. The voice acting is generally terrific, far cry from the first games which I swear had to be trying really hard to make it sound that bad, I mean shit. It's like house of the dead except worse, "I think you! The master of unlocking! Should take it with you!" stellar stuff you guys swear by isn't it?

None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. I'm an apple.

The biggest, best thing I can say about this game is that it is LONG. There is so much content here it's almost ridiculous. There are 4 separate campaigns. One each for Leon, Chris, Jake, and Ada. I enjoyed all of them but Ada's. Ada Wong is just terrible and I'm going to explain why. In this, part 1 of my review of Resident Evil 6.

Hey! Hey look! This one's actually from a Resident Evil game! Don't get used to it. It won't be happening again.

Now, this is a little bit out of sequence admittedly. You actually can't even play Ada's campaign until you beat all three of the others. But you don't need to know what the other 3 are about to understand why Ada's is so fucking bad. Especially considering that all 4 campaigns occur simultaneously. Honestly I think the biggest problem I have with Ada's campaign, is that it's so painfully sexist that it often becomes flat out offensive. And I'm hardly a feminist, feminism bothers the hell out of me (in so far as women that identify as feminists rarely want equality, they want superiority, so no hate mail, I'm all for equal rights but sexism goes both ways (what? I'm not just covering my bases shut up)) but this get's so far out of hand. I'm talking bukkake monsters bad. I'm talking full blown Japanese fan service that's stops about a quarter inch from being full blown interactive hentai. And there aren't even any tentacles you guys. But you're going to have to wait for that glorious description, first you need to get a basic feel for the gratuity here.

Huh, oddly relevant. The site tells me when you save images.

There are moments in all of the campaigns where you have to crawl through tight spaces, during these moments the camera cuts back and you view your character from the feet forward, or at least that's what happened during Chris, Leon and Jake's campaigns. In Ada's the camera cuts straight to her ass which, she literally arches her back in order to push further up in the air.That might sound relatively tame. But this next part, I am honestly not making up. If you don't believe me, rent the game, or find a friend who owns it. These things show up in the first 10 minutes of Ada's campaign and stick around for probably half of it. No. Fucking. Shit.
It's a type of j'avo, which, by the way, exists only in Ada's campaign, and has a mutation which causes it's head to lower, right next to its crotch to it's crotch on a very long neck (You might be able to see where this is headed but just wait it gets better). When Ada get's too close it spews a gooey white substance all over her in stringy shots (not spider web unfortunately, not spider web). If enough of it hits she becomes stuck in place and must pull herself out of a literal cocoon of jizz. I've got a pretty dirty mind, but it doesn't reach that far, I am not just imagining this. The first time it happened I just stared in disbelief. This is the first and only time, that a cock zombie, has bukkaked any character in any game that I have played, to such an extent that the character literally must pull themselves out of their cum cocoon, or cumcoon, yes I'll call it a cumcoon. Come on guys. I know it's Japan, and all kinds of crazy shit comes out of Japan, but is this really the place for it? Whatever, I'm done talking about it.

It's from Japan what do you want from me. Free use images are Free to use for a reason.

And that isn't even the worst part of this particular campaign. It's the repetition. The way the game works, is while you play through one campaign, you'll meet the characters from the others. Each campaign does a great job of showing you how those characters got there and shows events from a cool new perspective. But Ada doesn't ever move independently of the other stories. Outside of the moments when she intersects with the other campaigns, she might as well not exist. This means that when you play her campaign, you're not experiencing a unique story, you're literally watching a highlight real of the other three. I almost feel like Ada's would have been better, were it the FIRST campaign you had to play through. Seeing all these snippets of all the difference characters could get you interested in how the hell they reached that point, though a few things would have needed to be cut to prevent spoilers, I think it would have been a better path.

The final nail in this Y shaped coffin, is Ada herself. Ada is obnoxiously self assured. And it is absolutely in the spotlight due to the fact that her campaign is the only one that doesn't have a coop partner, AI or otherwise. She has no one to talk to. But that doesn't stop her. Every time she kills an enemy she pats herself on the back, reminds herself how fantastic she is and how no one else could have done that. (despite the fact that the other 3 characters all do the same things with markedly more efficiency and intelligence.) and it really just wears you down. By the end, I honestly kind of wanted Ada to die. And I don't mean clone Ada, (yeah there's a clone, yeah it's a little goofy) I mean the real one. She was just that annoying. She comes across as this bizarre mix of stereotypical Japanese hyper-sexism, and a girl power ploy for female players. Neither of those things work on their own, much less when thrown together in the same pot. It's entirely possible to create a strong female character, like Zoey in Firefly, or Anya and Sam from Gears of War, all kick ass tough as nails characters in their own right, but they achieve this not by going "God I am tough!" they achieve this by fighting in the worst conditions, never giving up, adapting to things they were never trained to do. Anya especially, goes from being a non-combatant adviser, to full blown soldier and it seems perfectly natural, the fact that she and Sam are women at all is hardly even mentioned, much less used against them. They're just tough, and they belong on this battlefield as the warriors they are. But Ada almost never makes herself seem impressive or tough, and when she does she completely trivializes the entire thing with a stupid comment about how her vagina made it possible.

I'm not going to really get into gameplay or visuals here, I'll leave that for a roundup at the end of these reviews. Next time (hopefully next week) I'll review Jake's campaign.

This review is ©Alex Jenkins 2012
Resident Evil 6 is the property of Capcom

New Stuff Coming! I have a void in my life that needs fillin!

SO a little while ago I sat here and I said to myself. This blog is dumb, no one reads it, and you're dumb for continuing to write in something that no one reads! So, as I'm quite sensitive to such criticism I stopped writing. However I'm currently pretty bored outside of work. And I'm going for something that could be even vaguely mentally stimulating as my job is the opposite. So I'm gonna start writing again! Games that I'm currently playing that, if I don't suddenly change everything in my life again and stop writing, I will write reviews of are as follows. Serious Sam 3:BFE (spoilers its awesome), Resident Evil 6 (it's even gonna be a 4 parter! If I finish it...) Xcom: Enemy Unknown, Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs and much much more! Not really though, that's pretty close to it. Oh Assassins Creed 3 is in there too. Regardless I'm gonna write reviews! Some of them might even be vaguely comical, chuckle worthy possibly! Oh also Torchlight 2 and Borderlands 2! Fuck you I don't play too much or spend too much on games you're an idiot!

Game of Thrones (The RPG) Thoughts.

I've been playing the Game of Thrones RPG for the last few days. I was hesitant to get it because of the horrible reviews it had received. More and more often I find myself realizing that critics are not to be trusted, and this may be the most glaring example in recent memory. Game of Thrones is without a doubt one of the best RPG's I have ever played. It is right there with Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher 2. I have not quite finished it, I'm coming up on the grand finale now and I'm in a spot where I might not have a chance to finish it for a little while, so I wanted to give my thoughts on it so far.

Now that I've had a chance to play the game that was so maligned, I've gone back and re-read some of the more scathing critiques of it. And honestly in a lot of cases it's pretty clear that they didn't even play the damn game. For example in this Forbes article, the author states plainly that the games combat is turn based. Having spent somewhere near 10 hours now, I can say with some level of confidence, that the combat isn't even vaguely turn based. It functions similar to Dragon Age, or even MMO combat, in which you target an enemy, and your character just swings away with normal attacks while you queue up more powerful special attacks and abilities. There are no turn based elements in this game. I even double checked, thinking, maybe due to the restricted controller of the consoles as opposed to a keyboard and mouse, that the combat would have to work differently on console (as I have been playing on PC). But nope. It works exactly the same on consoles. Get your shit together, or stop writing articles when you're blind drunk.

Anyways, beyond my gripes about utterly incompetent "authors" who do their job with markedly less skill than an untrained chimp would in the same field, I'll get back to the game and why I absolutely love it.

A lot of it I think goes back to my love for Dragon Age: Origins. The combat mechanics are similar, and just as with DA:O, Game of Thrones places story on a pedestal. Don't get me wrong, there are no actually bad aspects of the game, combat may not be anything particularly special, but it's far from a hindrance. Combat actually has been pretty well crafted, if not so much in animation and such, in the tactics required. You really do need to think to survive more difficult fights. You can exploit the system in some ways. Like when playing the role of Alester (one of the two protagonists). He has an ability which knocks his enemies down, stack this with a passive ability that gives automatic critical hits against fallen enemies, and the fact that you can almost always regenerate enough energy to do it again by the time they stand up, and you get a sort of broken combo. This only works in very small conflicts though, if it's just you and 1 or 2 other guys it'll win every time. If they have a whole squad, you're going to need to think on your feet. And the "active pause" system doesn't actually stop time, it just slows it down. It gives you time to breathe, but you cant just hit pause and consider your options for hours.

The graphics as well aren't stellar. But graphics aren't a requirement for a great game. As I have said before, fantastic graphics can help draw you into a world, but it's the mark of great writing when you can be fully immersed in this fictional universe when the graphics are less impressive. That said, the graphics really aren't all that bad. Environments for the most part are well rendered, and major characters do look pretty great most of the time. The game only suffers when it comes to the random wandering NPC's and enemy combatants. They tend to be one of a very small number of recycled character models. One of the main characters, Mors, also has a dog, and the dog, well, it looks bad, it looks real bad. You wouldn't really notice, if not for the fact that you frequently get close up views of it every time you take control of it.

The voice acting ends up in the same department as the graphics. All of the major players are really spectacularly voiced, they sound real and believable, and listening to Mors gravely growl as he chastises and threatens those that get in his way really never gets old. Some side characters though are pretty bad admittedly. But again I haven't found any of them to be bad enough to take me out of the plot. Which is absolutely fantastically crafted. I know next to nothing about the Game of Thrones universe, (AKA A Song of Ice and Fire) and the game is crafted such that you don't have to. The two main characters are original to this game, so it's a stand alone title. But for fans of the series, the script went through the author of the books himself, so I'm told that it fits in perfectly with the canon.

Anyways I don't want to say much more at the moment, but I will try to update this once I've finished the game. I also have some word eating to do in regards to my comments on Bioware and Mass Effect 3, I take it back, I take it all back. Well, most of it anyways.

Dark Souls: Initial Thoughts

I picked this gem (so far) at gamestop just 2 days ago. So I admittedly haven't made much progress, being that I'm on a full time work schedule and have limited gaming time, especially when that game is as punishing as Dark Souls. But what I have seen so far really is amazingly impressive. Yes, you do die a lot. A lot a lot. But to be honest, it isn't over the top hard. Devil May Cry 3 was a lot harder, or at least it was back in the day when I first played it. But it's all extremely fine tuned, you have to plan things in advance and calculate all of your movements down to each individual swing of your sword. And in that regard it's in a totally different class from DMC3. Almost every enemy you face can kill you within seconds if you let your guard down. You need to move constantly, rolling, dodging, parrying. A single misstep can spell your end, and the loss of all of your souls (read: Experience Points) if you were reckless enough to get killed before reclaiming your power from your previous death.

Everything between boss fights is tailored for one thing and one thing only. To soften you up for whatever towering monstrosity is waiting through the next white light. I've only killed 2 bosses so far. The first was admittedly quite easy, I killed it on my first try, and I was honestly a little disappointed. I came to this game to get my ass kicked after all, I didn't want to beat BOSSES on my first attempt. That changed quickly though when I reached the second boss, the Taurus Demon. That one took me perhaps 15 tries. And each time you die you return to the last bonfire you rested at (bonfires are where you level up and restore estus flasks (read: healing potions) but each time you do this, all enemies respawn, so you can't just fight your way to the room before the boss, run back and heal, then go back at the boss. This might all sound really frustrating, and I can see where it would be if you go in expecting a usual modern game, which is typically an almost effortless romp more intended to present a story than anything else (which is fine don't get me wrong, but a good challenge doesn't hurt). But the thing is, when you finally kill that boss, or get passed that group that's been hounding you for countless deaths, it's one of the most gratifying moments you can possibly find in a video game. When you finally watch the giant minotaur demon disappear in a blinding flash of light and breathe that sigh of relief, you'll understand what I mean, and all the frustration will have been well worth it.

Less important factors here include the graphics and sound design. The graphics are ok, the textures aren't so great (mostly in the environment, character models, sans faces, actually look great and giant monsters are suitably intimidating.) but the animations are second to none. Everything moves, and controls, just about as smooth as silk. The sound design as well is really well done, everything sounds pretty much like you'd think it should, the thundering crash of a demons hammer smashing into the ground behind you will make your heart jump every time.

Anyways, once I beat it I'll be releasing a full review (it might be a while as my time is limited and the game is rumored to be about 100 hours long.). I'm also going to work on getting up my backlog of reviews including; Gears of War 3, F.E.A.R. 3, Dungeon Siege 3, (there are an awful lot of 3's in here...), Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Terraria, Skyrim (unless I did that already, I can't remember) Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and I think a couple more. Don't expect regular updates or anything but I'm hoping to get some writing done, maybe even this weekend. As always thanks for reading.