The Philosophy of Dark Souls

The Philosophy of Dark Souls

There is great appeal in the action-oriented, character-driven narrative of Dark Souls games, and, in turn, a more existential, massochistic need that is addressed. Otherwise what is the draw of slamming your head against a wall over and over? Why take arms and suffer to help a world that does not care? A world that has fully accepted its status quo? It is selfish to want to improve the world, but if you don't do it, who will? Playing Dark Souls is braving the harsh dissonance of reality.

In Demon's Souls, you've wandered into the wrong place and consigned yourself to a miserable fate. In Dark Souls 1, you've been locked away for years because of your cursed immortality. In Dark Souls 2, you've reached the end of a long, inevitable line and lost your self like wax to flame. In Bloodborne, you sought a cure for an affliction you cannot remember. Playing Dark Souls is accepting that the past is meaningless.

In your real life, you wake up, hoping to change the world or get through the day as unscathed as possible. At the end of the day, you have a brief respite to escape; to pretend that everything is not as bleak as it seems with a nice video game.  Why do you choose a game that revels in its difficulty and its ability to kill you with ease?  Because you know you're not worthy. You're an imposter. A simple achievement for participating feels empty. Like Camus and the Myth of Sisyphus, you're addicted to trying and failing over and over. Though one must imagine you're happy playing Dark Souls.

For each villain you kill in a Dark Souls game, there is another stronger. While they tower over you in their strength and influence (much like the powers-that-be of the modern world), your powers are limited. The gains you've made stealing life from your victims have diminishing returns, and eventually you're stuck with your choices of self-improvement.  You may have neither the time nor money for a respec just as you're stuck in that job that's barely good enough in that career with limited growth. While Dark Souls is the realization of Nietzche's Will to Power - the only good in Dark Souls, after all, is what brings power - you live in a society of unattainable social mobility. At least in Dark Souls, you get infinite do-overs.

Your allies come and go from your world; the same way that you come and go from their worlds as boon or bane; blue, white, or red. You may have even become too powerful to deserve their assistance, or wasted all your IOUs and social capital (i.e. insight and humanity) the way that leech friend of yours always does. At some point, it'll just be you, Gamefaqs, and Let's Play videos to assist you. Equipment will help, but effectively is just fashion. Everyone who plays Dark Souls eventually dies alone.

When you've finished the main quest and saved the world, you've only just begun a new ng+. The only true win of Dark Souls is loss and storage on some dusty shelf. It nags at you. Why did you stop? Why could you do no more? There was no answer or closure. You were forced to move on like when grandma passed and your support network was already done with you. Playing Dark Souls is embracing the tragedy of life.

But life is good in between bonfires, so they must be lit. Playing Dark Souls is facing and accepting the harsh dissonance of reality.

Supremacy in Destiny

Whoa, long time. No post. Yeah, imagine that. We'll pretend Grad School had nothing to do with that.

I wanna talk some about Destiny. I hated Destiny after the Beta which was related to the story, and I'll be talking a bit more about that below, but first some positives...

Strengths of Destiny:

• Supporting character voicework by greats such as Nathan Fillion and other famous celebs
• Land speeders!
• Hand Cannons! Kills with one shot! Satisfying precision kills. 
• Different AI scripts and enemy design create dynamic encounters. Shoot and kill a floating 8ball that uses pink lasers.
• Boss fights can be really cool.
• Environments are so pretty. Venus Hot Springs! Craters on the moon! Etc.
• Lots to do and frequently updated!
• Cool co-op experience. Matchmaking for raids and strikes.

Weaknesses:

Story is blah! Go around! Do stuff and get obstructed from doing that stuff by other things! Kill other races because you're the "light" people and they're the "darkness". Very little critical thinking ("Uh, guys, should we really be doing this much genocide...?"). There are at least two or three scenes where you shoot aliens who are praying. There's at least one character who is a reformed "Fallen" and this guy has no problem with you killing every one of his people that you encounter.

Sidenote: The Fallen have like six arms and could totally fuck you up with six guns if they wanted. Your character is so OP versus other lifeforms.

It'd be more convincing that there was a threat to humanity if your homebase was ever attacked. Instead, it more smells of Cold War paranoia, preemptive strikes and containment. History has taught us that no nation is categorically evil and Bungie's earlier Halo games feature alien races as playable characters after you've been slaughtering them. It's surprising that looking at the other side isn't more prevalent here, but maybe this will be covered in later expansions.

I feel Mass Effect handled "Human Privilege" much better than Destiny. In Mass Effect, humanity is the upstart and one of the most evil characters (The Illusive Man) is human. Here, your human character is a massive death-dealer and unquestionable in that capacity. Kinda like the Judge Dredd of the galaxy.

Another thing about your character. He/She/It (because you can be a robot with a shiny forehead) is revived from centuries of death-sleep, and gets right back on that killing game with little questions. Again, critical thinking is next to nil. Destiny would fit with the silent protagonist trope except your character also talks during movies and has a paper-thin "badass" personality. Other story characters aren't well developed such as the queen and her brother who are hostile and arrogant. They send you to near certain death, and your character shrugs, "Sure, I can do that." There's also a mysterious stranger who tells you to go places and you follow without second thought.

Liberal Arts education must be really rare in the future.

Your Ghost companion is sometimes really vapid (e.g. "I wonder how all this stuff looked before the Collapse" -> no, you don't you mindless automaton), and sometimes really insightful/humorous (e.g. "Remember when ______ was our biggest problem. A lot has changed" when you go through a recycled environment and see a destroyed boss).

In sum, there's generally a mushy story in Destiny with some occasionally engaging parts like the character who is trapped in the cavern of the dead for several years and is kind of a prophet foretelling the return of a great enemy. Also, the wisecracking Nathan Fillion, as a space robot rogue, is hilarious. Lance Reddick reprises his role as the "no-nonsense" boss, so you could see Nathan Filion as a more charming space McNulty. The head of the PVP arena is Morgan Jones from AMC's The Walking Dead. So, the celeb game is strong.

Final Thought: Isn't gravity different on other planets? No, not in Destiny.

Mars Should (g)et Bigger,

Leonard Bogus Jonathanson

Dead Island: Riptide

Dead Island is a compellingly torturous game. It has the same level up system and random weapon pickups as Borderlands which makes it kind of annoying as well. Enemies are always harder and weapon pickups you get are rarely better than the ones you have at the moment of acquisition.

Stealh and Stealthibility - Alpha Protocol and Deus Ex

Hey, ya'll, have you played Alpha Protocol? Well, it was like $5 at EB, I mean Gamespot 'cause I'm old.

What's great about Alpha Protocol?

The story (and the US or, as the game puts it, the people who claim to represent the US is/are the bad guy while other criminal/terrorist organizations are the sympathetic fall guys). The characters. The interactive conversations. The choices you can make in the game that have real effects on the rest of the game. The skills you get. The way you can customize your playing style to stun or kill. The lockpick, bypass, and hack minigames that feel like they could actually be real. The way the game progressively gets difficult. The endurance and health system. The action-packed finale (I WAS QUITE EXCITED THROUGHOUT IT!)

What sucks about Alpha Protocol?

The graphics. The lack of an ability to jump. The AI that does a poor job of pretending not to know where you are unless you max out your conceal skill and get accessories to further lower your enemy sight range so that you can be in your enemy's peripheral vision, but he or she never sees you. The fact that the developers don't seem to have had time to tweek the "move body" system so that instead bodies just disappear after a set amount of time. Add onto that the inability to climb boxes that you take cover behind. The long load times. The lack of a quick-save or save feature between checkpoints and the varying length of quick-saves so that you have to take down two bosses with no checkpoint in between but there is a section later in the same level with only one flunky to takedown. Glitches (which the wikia can brief you on better than I) which can cause you to turn friendlies into enemies just by going up the wrong ladder.

AND I LOVE THIS GAME!


And I guess Deus Ex: Human Revolution is everything Alpha Protocol could have been if AP had been an established series and had the backing of a producer (is that right?) like Square Enix which loves it some good graphics and tight gameplay. Even the start screen of Deus Ex is really compelling with a haunting theme and shattered glass in a mosiac of the main character's profile.

Where does Deus Ex fall short? I dunno. Haven't found anything yet. I didn't know how bad the graphics of Alpha Protocol were until I started playing Deus Ex. The fact that enemies can look down on you over boxes is something that AP couldn't handle. AP would have been a great PS2 title and would have brought interesting twists to the Metal Gear franchise (it's hard for me to talk about stealth games without mentioning or thinking about Metal Gear). It's still a great game, but it's a flawed giant like Heavenly Sword or KOTOR2. That's why there's companies like Blizzard who take years developing their games and make bajillions off of each one.

More Sug(g)estions after Boy and man can settle time conflicts of fun and responsibility.

-Lorry Boe Jarabia

Morality in a video game - Dragon's Age: Origins

There's a part in the Warden's Keep expansion of Dragon's Age: Origins where you're given a pretty complex moral dilemna.
You're in a demon-infested old fortress slaughtering the undead when you run into a demon who's taken possesion of a long dead general. The demon doesn't attack you. It asks for parley and explains that in possesing the general, it has taken the general's memories as well and were it not for the barrier that's keeping the demon in the tower, it would go out to all the places in the general's memories just to experience everything and feed on some mortal souls in the process. The demon says that it will close the breach in the barrier between this world and the demon world if you agree to let it go out into the world. It's a trade of one loose demon to prevent a mass exodus. The demon sends you into a tower and tells you to kill everything in it: "grind the tower into dust if you can."
You then meet the counter-proposal, an old mage who has been experimenting on his soldiers, fellow men, and demons for over a hundred years to extend his life and grant him greater power. His excuse is that he's been fighting the demons in the tower and keeping them from going out into the world.
The game gives you a chance to decide for yourself after hearing both parties stories. I found the mage to be the more evil of the two, but I had a few secondary motives.
1. The demon also promised to reveal the location of a secret stash of gold if you helped it.
2. I wanted to get the most amount of experience points out of the whole situation.*
3. I wanted to see if I could kill the old mage badass. The demon seemed like less of a challenge.
4. It's a video game, not real life.

I ended up killiing the mage and helping the demon. (Actually I would have killed the demon and mage both if I thought I could get the stash and kill the demon in order to get max experience points. The game tends to not let you attack people you talk to unless you're given an "attack" dialogue option). I did it for the cash. I did it for the experience and the glory. I figured one demon let out into the real world wasn't going to cause as much trouble as a power-crazed mage willing to sacrifice his fellow man to live longer. Actually the game world has a lot of different groups that hunt demons, so it's possible to assume that others could have eventually taken the demon down, and I felt sorry for the demon a little bit. Demons and spirts are trapped in a world called The Fade where anything they think becomes reality but they lack the imagination to make anything other than what they already see.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Demons are obsessed with the human world because there's so much there that they don't have. The Fade has no hardships for one with great power, but the hardships of the natural world give humanity its complexity, imagination, and ingenuity. I felt sorry for the demon, but in the back of the mind I was thinking, "The game won't remember this."

In the same way that you crash into someone's car in GTA or some other Rockstar game, and you don't get out and trade insurance information. That car is gonna dissapear after you travel a certain amount of feet away. Games constantly erase and recreate people. I let this demon out, I'm not likely to see the consequences of that action because it's a game. One character said later, "You've probably not seen the last of that demon," and I actually got excited like "Ooh! I wonder what happens. I wonder what it will do." At the end of your time playing a game, you turn it off and maybe a choice you've made in a game haunts you later. This has happened to me. I have lived down actions in games for days, wracked with guilt (In Arcanum, many players have confessed to killing the nice old man near the beginning of the game who lets the player stay in his house in the forest and gives you some work to do. The old man gives a fair amount of experience and a very useful item when killed and there's no one around to see you do it. Guilt.)

The other thing that's interesting about this whole situation is the context. In the game world, the whole country is about to be attacked by a dragon and its goblin horde. The attack can only be stopped if your character can kill the dragon and stop the invasion, which makes you pretty damn important in the moral relativism of things and the more powerful you can become, the better the chance you can save the world. What's are the lives of one demon's victims worth compared with the lives of the country and continent?

Complicated moral choices like this make a game like this interesting as hell even though it's just a game. Compare that with a movie where the male lead chooses to side with the mage only to be betrayed and attacked. Stupid male lead. I wouldn't have done things that way. Stupid male lead, your belief in codes of honor is going to get a lot of people killed.

Compare this whole situation with another game I recently forced myself to stop playing (I stupidly pledge to finish any game I start no matter it's cost in time) called Yakuza 3 where the game crammed the moral good of being an overbearing parent and not judging people by their looks down my throat. The moral decision above was part of an optional quest. The following was part of the main story, as in I had to willingly press buttons and spend time to go through the long cutscenes and pointless walking from area to another in order to progress the game and I thereafter forced myself to find a new game to play.

When a game seems like work or a pointless assembly that you have to sit through for work, then you shouldn't be playing it.

The main character has retired from his life of being a Yakuza gangster (for further reference see Yakuza 1 & the much less fun Yakuza 2) in order to run the orphanage he was raised in. In the orphanage, a young darker -skinned boy takes a liking to an older lighter-skinned girl and wants to take her to the movies, but unfortunately she doesn't seem to reciprocate. The gangster and his friend go out to buy the darker-skinned (sorry to repeat this so often but it will be important to the story later) younger boy new clothes to wow the older girl. Neither the gangster nor the friend knows anything about fashion, so the new clothes don't work (given a choice, this player would have tabled that idea from the start although it does give a short cutscene of a little boy dressed up in a cowboy hat and t-shirt made from the American flag. Giggle. Giggle.). The older girl gives the younger boy the cold shoulder and instead goes out with her friends. The gangster, being a sound father figure with nothing else to do with his time, then decides to follow the girl into town to see what she's doing with her friends (the player's skill involved here is exploring the town to find out where the goddamn movie theater is as the map does not explicitly state where it is. The player feels proud of his/her ability to randomly roam around until a cutscene triggers.). The gangster catches up with the girl and her friends about to enter a movie theater, but after catching sight of the older girl's stain from being scalded by a stove, the girl's friends call her ugly and push her to the ground (you would think that her friends would have seen and accepted the scar before, but then you'd be forgetting that some games/movies have convenient memories about their characters prior to the game/movie's beginning). The friends enter the movie theater, leaving the older girl crying in a public street. The gangster is about to intercede when the darker-skinned younger boy steps in and comforts the older girl saying "You're scarred on your arm? Look at me! I'm scarred and dark all over!" The gangster talks it over with his friend and believes that the older girl will understand the younger boy's feelings now. The two are seen talking together amicably.

This is not a bad lesson in itself, but it's a very shallow discussion of a very deep problem. Not to mention heavy-handed and preaching to the choir and what makes it less effective as a morality preaching technique is there was no choice on the part of the player whatsoever nor did the situation seem realistic in the context of urban Japan. Discrimination is subtle. Most kids know better than to openly and violently attack someone they see as lesser than themselves because of physical characteristics, and our lead is so worried about his charges experiencing heartbreak that he follows them and breaches their privacy instead of waiting for them to come to him for help. It's flat. It's unimaginative and feels unrealistic. It's also not very interesting for the player as the player can do nothing in this situation but watch his/her avatar make decisions for him/her. It's something you would see in a movie rather than something you might play in a video game.

IT TOOK OVER AN HOUR OF DULL EYES AND SLACK POSTURE TO GET THROUGH THIS AND THERE WAS NO BRAWLING WHATSOEVER WITHIN THAT TIME WHICH IS THE GAME'S ENTIRE DRAW! STREET BRAWLS! SMASH PEOPLE THROUGH WINDOWS! USE A TRAFFIC CONE TO BASH SKULLS! BE MOTHERFUCKING GANGSTA! IN A CUTSCENE OF THE FIRST GAME, THE MAIN CHARACTER USES A DOORMAN AS A HUMAN SHIELD AGAINST AN UZI BURST THEN THROWS THE DOORMAN AT THE UZI-WIELDER TO SUBDUE HIM! THEN THE PLAYER FIGHTS A SERIES OF GOONS! THE CHARACTER HAS A HEAT GAUGE THAT POWERS UP WHEN YOU DO COOL STUFF AND MISSY ELLIOT'S "I'm really really hot" WAS ON AND I WAS REALLY INTO BUSTING HEADS AT THAT MOMENT! THAT'S GOOD GAMING, SON!

Then you could compare all of this with a game like God of War where the player can't make moral choice either, but is instead drawn to the game by the morality of the character a.k.a. throw the blame on others and go kill them, but Kratos is a more complicated character. Born a Spartan, his only recourse for pain and regret is murder, and by the end of the third game he starts to understand "more murder, more problems" and begins to accept that he's his own greatest enemy, but where does that leave you? How does one escape one's habits and forgive oneself? The fourth game is coming out sometime.

The Last Starfighter was a terrible weapon that wiped out an entire race a la Ender's Game, Xenocide, etc.

Research - Demon's Souls, Dragon's Age, Another World, IWBtG (RPGs in general)

Demon's souls is getting a lot of hype for being difficult. I'm now hooked on difficult as easy feels like watching TV or the latest  Hollywood movie. A game that gets me killed must be a good game except Another World pisses me off because it seems to be mostly about remembering patterns rather than acting quickly given a set of advantages/disadvantages. Another World is kinda like I Wanna Be the Guy.

Well, actually, if you look it up online Demon's Souls is kinda like both of them, but your character can be made to be a lot more capable over time.

You start off having to rely on shield ripostes and backstabs, but then as you rapidly make yourself a slash-and-go killer things get easier until they get harder again when you're fighting large festering giants with giant clubs that knock you off your balance as you trudge through a poisonous swamp (that poisons you and then poisons you again after you've gotten better but is the only way to get through the level. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcXLyMVz-nI). After finishing your first playthrough, the game lets you play again with your beefed-up character only the enemies are much more beefed up and the game has a concept of diminishing returns where the benefits of raising stats past 40 become incremental.
Demon's Souls lets you improve your stats by collecting the souls of your dead enemies. You can improve strength which lets you equip heavier equipment. You can improve endurance which allows you to strike with your weapon more often, run farther, and dodge more times. You can improve dexterity which reduces fall damage and boosts the attack power of some weapons. Magic boost magic power. Intelligence boosts total magic points. Faith boosts magic defense and Miracle powers (which are like magic but connected to the realm's religion). There are shitloads of things to do with the demon's souls that you get, but as time goes on it takes more and more to improve your stats.
I spent thirty hours trying to balance having an armored character who could use magic and still dodge and have a big shield before finding one sword that boosted my sword damage by my magic stat. Great, but I wasted all the stat boosts in too many different categories and now the enemies are harder and I'm fucked and every time you die you lose all your souls unless you can reach the spot where you died and I keep dying where this specter shoots a beamgun of light from his spectral bullshit and it knocks you off the ledge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oBq0ef2V7Y&feature=watch_response
So there's two or three nights where I'm sitting down hoping to relax and have a little fun where instead I die at the same place every time and lose my souls and have nothing to show for the time I've used.
So, at this point I casually threw my controller against the wall.
FUCK THIS SHIT!
Demon's Souls is a great game, but to complete the game without research (a.k.a. Gamefaqs, Gamespot, Demon'sSoulswiki), relying solely on trial-and-error requires more time than your average working adult has to spend on a video game.
I just got my refurbished PS3 and a copy of Dragon's Age: Origins. I will not make the same mistake again. I've read three guides already about the character I want to make and in doing so have ruined parts of the plot, but saved myself tens of hours (a.k.a. several nights) of frustration in trial-and-error and reboot.
Shit pays off.

Alex Rogan (a.k.a. The Last Starfighter) can make it through Demon's Souls 1-5 at Soul Level 7 upside-down with his underwear on his head and Mom screaming at him to come eat Dinner already.

Basement of the Last Starfighter

A quick couple of changes to focus on what the blog's been about. Yep. When MS(g)B gets going, we'll make a new site.

Electro-nic a.k.a. Fly to Korea and check into a WoW clinic

I'm unemployed these days, or, to my credit, I'm waiting for the notification of a second interview. In the meantime I could be giving private lessons or searching for other work, but I've found laying around listening to music and playing Tactics Ogre is pulling me deeper and deeper into the shallow hole of Tactical RPGs. Why shallow? Because at some point the fact that you could have let the game play itself (there's an option to turn on the AI for your characters) for the last sixty or so hours hits you like a shovel to the back of your head and you wake up wondering where your time has gone taking meager satisfaction in the fact that the AI is often dumb as bricks frequently adding unnecessary time between your character's turns, attacking the strongest unit with the weakest weapons, wasting items, or having a mage charge blindly into a beserker's axe.
I recently wiped the floor with my mother at Scrabble (non-sequitor that eventually will have a point), and she noted that it was surprising that someone who often spoke another language was quite good at using English. I neglected to respond with "learning a foreign language generally improves the knowledge of your first language and, more importantly games are what I do. Scrabble is less about linguistic ability and more about short game (maximizing points per turn) and long game (keeping vowels and consonants balanced in your letter tray while waiting to use higher scoring letters on multiplier spaces). Valkyrie Profile is a dungeon crawler where you have limited time to train characters to send to Valhalla so playing the game becomes about maximizing the amount of experience you get per battle by organizing the combination of your party's attacks so that your characters either hit enemies up into or in the air almost every attack. The enemies drop experience crystals when they are hit into the air. These crystals multiply the total number of experience points you receive in each fight. Fighting battles like this becomes very tedious. My characters in that game are now several levels above the enemies and while I usually could finish an encounter in one turn, it pays more to farm crystals and this process takes about three times as much time.
Last night, all I could dream about was Tactics Ogre. Two months ago I was almost yelling at my girlfriend because she was keeping me from playing Valkyrie Profile. A month ago I was being really awkward with friends because I wanted to play Dead Space 2 every night all night. In high school, I had a similar addiction to the .Hack and KOTOR series where in a week I had finished a game that took developers years to make. Back then we said we were hooked on the electronic nicotine or the electro-nic.
Now, I have so many things I want to do like get buff; learn to play the guitar and drums; read books; and hang out with people, but I'm hooked on staying in and playing games. It's the thing I've done the most consistently in my life, and is consequently the easiest thing to do and, for some reason, still the most fun thing to do. I found seven or more other games on the internet that I've wanted to play for a long time, and thank god for the godless sin of pirating because I can play them affordably. The other thing I've been doing is going through a song collection of almost 30000 while playing said games, and that is something I've wanted to do for a long time. Before I was playing games and watching TV shows, and that was great too. I've seen some good stuff that I'm happy with and I'm glad to say that I don't need to watch TV anymore. It's better as a group activity like when watching Thai soaps with the girlfriend and family.

So, as much as I'm sad that I've used so much time to play games I think it's always worked for me. Every time I start a new game I feel somewhat intimidated (albeit wildly excited) by the game's system and the possibilities it represents, which is a similar feeling when first experiencing anything new. I feel less challenged by new things as given time I always seem to find some way to get a handle on it.

The other solution to the electro-nic problem is the Less-is-More approach that I found great in The 3rd Birthday (PE3). It's essentially a squad-based 3rd person RPG where you change the unit you control by "diving" into another unit's body. Unlike Ghost Recon or some of those other games that were really popular but I never appreciated when they were popular, when you are not controlling a unit that unit becomes as silly as a toddler and will frequently do tactically stupid shit that causes that unit to die quickly [Sidenote: I didn't like Ghost Recon so much 'cause the AI-controlled units kept stealing my kills. I should get over this.]. You can remedy this by diving into that unit or aiming your selected weapon at an enemy (The Twisted!) and waiting for a "Crossfire" gauge to charge. When the gauge is full, all units in the area who are behind cover will fire simultaneously and continuously on that particular enemy until the gauge runs down again. You are also given certain genetic abilities which are passive (like an energy shield that provides some defense from attacks) or have a chance to activate when you fulfill certain conditions (Crisis Core has a similar system). The chance these powers have to activate depends on their level and the game's difficulty. At higher levels, the powers are less likely to activate. You also have a Liberation gauge which activates after your character sustains or deals a certain amount of damage depending on the weapon (pistols raise the liberation gauge higher). You also have the ability to buy and customize weapons that you bring along with you into the body you've died (yeah, it's a little bit of a weird concept). There are five basic types of weapons (pistols, rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, and the special type like a machine gun or laser weapon). Some weapons are powerful than others. Other weapons have a higher impact on your enemy and allow you to perform an "overdive kill" where you dive into your enemy's body and attempt to implode it from the inside. Sniper rifles allow you to target weakpoints on an enemy's body. Hitting these weakpoints has a high impact on the enemy that also allows you to perform an "overdive kill."
Does it sound intense? I fucking thought it was. It's also damn hard to figure out when to use what and why and how and a bitch to level up your passive and activated special powers, but the game itself only has five levels. Rather than spend all the time to create a longer experience, the developing team focused on making a really-refined short experience. They tried their damndest to make an interesting if not somewhat confusing and bizarre story. The music in the game is great. The voice-acting is pretty damn good. The scenarios in the game are varied and well thought out. I was find with playing the same parts over and over again because I enjoyed the experience of it all. It also gave me an excuse to put the PSP down every once and a while before repeating a sequence. I feel like a better gamer after completing that game.
So, I don't get why people didn't like it. I really liked it. I still wanna beat it on "Genocide" difficulty where they give you an even smaller tactical advantage over The Twisted.

If you make a tighter game shorter, it will be more fulfilling. Parasite Eve 1 was short and still a great game. Fighting an evil floating mitochondria bitch in a New York City carriage with the horses pulling on carriage on fire and screaming like hell was an outstanding experience. Dead Space 2 was shorter than its predecessor but the battles were intense and it was fucking scary throughout. Portal 1 was short, but fucking on-point.

Less is more.

Moving' Swiftly (g)aming Badassly.

The Older Gamer - Resistance: Retribution

I turned 24 yesterday, which makes me older but not old. As I have almost reached my mid 20s, it's important to take a bit of stock and think about what habits I should keep or shed, and...video games aren't going to be one of those for a while. I will be the adult playing the gun game at the arcade, greeted and pestered by his mallrat students. I will be the guy who pulls out a PSP in the back of a taxi or sitting on a train. That's me and if you're reading this, maybe it's you too. I've been playing games since Nintendo now and I've seen video games change. They're implemented more into other everyday devices like cellphones or social networks like Facebook. Video games are easier to play and more attractive either in their lifelike or surreal presentation. The biggest change for me is I want to be challenged.
When I was younger, I could never understand the idea of a hard mode. Why the hell would I want to repeat the same level over and over just to make sure I "got it right?" And the answer I've found is that it (A) makes the game last longer, (B) it brings a level of realism to the game to be seemingly disadvantaged against overwhelming odds, and (C) it is more in line with the developers' idea of how the game should be played because the player must learn to use any advantage given to his disposal. The best example of (C) I can think of is Baldur's Gate 2 where the toughest battles are won by the smallest margins.
Resistance: Retribution is another really good example. Unlike the ps3 iterations where you play a human/chimera hybrid in Resistance: Retribution you're human, a grunt. What makes your character special is his diehard determination to avenge his brother by killing every alien fucker to step in his sights. To win the game on its highest difficulty, you have to learn how to use each weapon and its secondary function, but also when to use said weapon and when ammo is short you better have a backup plan. In doing this, I found myself drawn further into the game. Running out into the middle of combat was suicide. Firing non-stop instead of carefully timing bursts from cover got me killed quite often. It felt more real. One of the bosses is a human/chimera hybrid who taunts you with his new power. Your character's response is "Do you know how many chimera I've killed? Today alone?" and I agreed, "Do you know, shitbitch? A fucking lot! And they weren't no pushovers neither." If you've read Preacher, think of that last fight between Cassidy and Preacher.
In many ways, starting and finishing a game is like finishing a school project so that at the end, you grade yourself on how well you've done. If you've beaten it on easy, you can say "I got to the end. I beat that," but it's a lot more satisfying if you can say, "That game had nothing I couldn't handle." I think that's a bit more rare. I definitely got lucky sometimes in Retribution, but I spent an hour and a half with the final boss, getting down the pattern of pushing the button to knock down the boss' shields without getting hit or fried to death by her bighead lightning bullshit then doing as much damage as I could before she raised her shields back up and I had to deal with a swarm of lesser enemies then knocking her shields down again, doing as much damage to her as possible, then dealing with the swarms, and taking off the last of her health. As a bonus handicap, I had to deal with my PSP's quirky joypad which likes to get stuck so that the character takes a dainty stroll instead of running for his life.
I've watched kids play games and cringed at their lack of timing and strategy, their lack of regard for how long an attack will take and how vulnerable they are while performing said attack, their willful refusal to use the block button, their mismanaged hand-eye coordination that pushes buttons out of fear and excitement instead of as a result of cool collected concentration. So, yeah, I still play games, but I don't play them like a child. The games I play are hard and I make them harder, so I'm fucking good unless you're talking about FIFA or something where I have no idea how to get the stupid ball in the goal and I still think slide-tackling the goalie is funny as fuck.

I'm also a pretty shit driver.

Money-making Shouldn't make you (g)ive up your hobbies from Before,

Lynny not Brawny Johnson

The other sister

Square released Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep. It had some really poor writing, poor voice-acting, the characters were barely three dimensional, but otherwise it's a solid game. It's a Kingdom Hearts game. If you've played them before, you'll like this one. It's fun. It's colorful. Your attacks are damn cool. The enemies are kind of interesting. The ones I hate the most are the ones that throw shit at you continuously. The biggest difference from other Kingdom Hearts is that instead of only having basic magics and timed button presses to do special attacks, you choose, make, and utilize up to 8 out of over a hundred different attacks plus finish commands and if you use a set of certain commands your command style changes. You go from normal attacks to Diamond Dust, Wingblade, or Ghost Drive attacks. You can also d-link and use another character's attacks and finish commands. You can also Shotlock which is where you lock on to the enemies and shoot magic out of your keyblade or dash through them. If you don't play the game on its hardest difficulty, you are seriously overpowered compared to the enemies in the game. While playing through the story, you go to the same worlds as three different people. Each character has a different set of events in each world, but I did feel some bad deja vu at some points. Finishing all three parts unlocks a final episode and will make you badly want to play the next game.
In comparison, Crisis Core is Square's ugly, down syndrome baby. The story is bizarre and only really touching at those moments when Zack knows he's working for an evil company, but knows that the evil he's fighting is worse. Otherwise it's all pretty goddamn cliche. They keep making these FF7 games and movies, but they don't put in as much effort as they did into FF7 itself. The experience system is interesting as your character and materia level up at random according to a slot machine. Winning battles gives you points that will help you meld your materia, which become very important towards the end of the game. On top of the story, there are missions you can go to. There are about five different environments for this mission, and they aren't that unique. It's very similar to Mass Effect's side-mission system. Feels like laziness, poor craftmanship, deja vu, and all that when you compare it to other games with very unique side missions like...the original Final Fantasy 7, Ratchet & Clank, or Knights of the Old Republic. I still haven't finished the story yet. I'm at the point where I killed the main baddy, but now it looks like I actually didn't kill him.

Japan you need to relearn how to tell a good fucking story, and quit this cookie-cutter make really impressive visuals and good gameplay, but tie it together with a cheesy cliche story bullshit.

The same can be said for that new Alice movie, especially with that fucking Wizard of Oz ending.

Migrating to Southeast asia is hazardous to (g)aming Believers