This is where you can read any of my irregular wafflings about computer gaming. The whole point of this blog is to help motivate me to properly finish games, whether they be recent ones or older ones I played when I was younger that I never managed to beat.

29th October 2015 - More Darkness

In the last couple of weeks I've finally been motivated to work through Assault On Dark Athena after finishing Butcher Bay a while back. It was mostly much of the same, but I found some of the later sections very frustrating and difficult. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally over.

My main issue was with how the fighting style changed as the game progressed. In the early sections, it was all about sneaking up on people and taking them out, or stunning them with the tranquilizer and moving in for the quiet kill. Later on in the game, sneaking became pretty much impossible, as the enemies always seemed to know where I was. With the added loss of the tranq-gun about half way through, the game pretty much became an FPS, where the enemies had more accurate and stronger weapons than I did. It sucked.

Some of the bosses were also a pain in the ass. Pretty much all the later bosses demanded I use a weird mine-shooting gun called the SCAR gun. That thing loaded so slowly that just one miss could totally screw me, and regularly did. The last boss in particular was the worst, as you need to use the mines to knock her down an elevator shaft. Sometimes the mines would knock her over, sometimes they would knock her back, and most of the time they would do nothing at all. It took me ages to knock her back enough times to get her over the edge. What a ball-ache.

There were a few bugs here and there, but I don't think as many as the first game. The one that really pissed me off was when all the Nanomed cartridges I had saved up just went missing from my inventory for no reason, meaning I couldn't heal up. Fucking game.

But it's done, and that's a good thing. I was hoping it would set up Pitch Black, but it gave absolutely no clue as to how Johns captures Riddick leading into that film. Oh well.

Before tackling Riddick's second adventure, I had originally intended to complete a game from a Humble Bundle I bought ages ago, as it was about time I had a go at some of those games. I chose Psychonauts, as though it's an old game, it seems to be held in high regard, and looked worthy of a play through.

I was wrong.

It's been a while since I've played a game that got me that frustrated and wondering why I was wasting my time playing it, but this one managed it very quickly.

Without a doubt, the most annoying thing was the very limited camera controls. I even switched from controller to mouse and keyboard trying to find the best way to play it, but that only made it fractionally better. Most of the time, there was hardly any vertical movement available on the camera, so I couldn't look up or down more than a few degrees. For a platformer, this was stupid. Then at other times, the camera was completely locked, especially during boss fights for some reason. Give me control damn it!
Didn't help that there was no compensation on the camera when it came to the environment, so things like rocks and trees would constantly block my view as well.

I found the controls a bit awkward also, but I think this was mostly linked to my camera issues. It only got worse when using the psychic power "levitate", as my character pretty much had a mind of his own at that point.

The last straw came when I reached a level that flat out told me I could go no further without levelling up first. There was no way I was going to go back through the old levels to grind out levels and get new skills, so I decided to immediately uninstall the game. What a piece of shit.

I'm still not sure what the story was about, and I guess I never will. It was something about this kid wanting to become a "Psychonaut", kind of like a psychic crime fighter or something. There was some bad shit going down at the training camp he is attending, and he had to figure out what. That's about it.

I really did try and finish it, but holy shit the game was so frustrating I just couldn't drag myself through it.

1st June 2015 - Let's Have A Butcher's

So I just got done with a game I didn't initially realise I even owned. Quite a while ago now I bought Assault On Dark Athena from GOG, and when I came to play it a couple of months back, I finally saw that it was bundled with a remake of an earlier game called Escape From Butcher Bay. Made sense to play the first game first, so that's what I've done.

You play as Riddick, the main character from the Pitch Black and Chronicles Of Riddick movies, in a story set before those films. Riddick must escape the eponymous prison after being captured and delivered there by Johns, another character that is in the Pitch Black movie.

I found this quite challenging in places, especially early in the game when I didn't really know what I was doing. At times, I was further hindered (though sometimes helped) by the very poor A.I. of the enemies, especially the Riot Guards, who are dudes in massive powered armour who can only be killed if you shoot them in the back. The worst incident was when a Riot Guard came down an elevator in the corner of the room, then refused to get off said elevator, keeping his back to the wall. I kept trying to lure him into the room by sticking my head out of cover and letting him shoot at me, but he'd take a couple of steps forward, do a weird stutter, then take two steps back. It took ages for him to finally wriggle free and start chasing me around the crates in the room, finally allowing me to take him down.

There are sections of straight up FPS action, but most of the game leans towards being stealthy and hiding out in shadows, which is not usually the kind of thing I like. The more I played of this though, the more I got into it. It was quite cool to pretend to be Riddick, especially after you become able to see in the dark. Vin Diesel's voice acting also helped, as it really would not have been the same if someone else had done it instead.

The story was freaking bonkers, as Riddick sneaks and kills his way through a prison which must be bigger than most cities. There were also quite a few weird graphics bugs, but they were easy to shrug off, and just made me laugh.

Along with the Scoob I've also just started up two multiplayer games. I haven't really played many MMOs while doing this blog, but we've just started a new one in the form of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Though the game seems very much like any other MMORPG, it does focus heavily on story and conversation, so I hope that side of the game keeps me more interested. I've created two characters, being Imperial Agent Munkfish and Kreethen the Jedi, so I can experience both sides of the conflict.
The other game is one I've wanted to play for years, after seeing footage of it on Youtube, being Saints Row The Third. Recently, and surprisingly, it was released very cheap on GOG, and I swooped on it like a hawk. We've only played a little of it so far, but it's definitely gonna be fun, and I can't wait to sing along to the Hot Pizza song.