Vane

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/29/2019
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

VanePublisher: Friend & Foe6.0

Developer: Friend & Foe

Release Date: 01/15/19 (PS4), 07/22/19 (PC)

Rating: Everyone 10+

MSRP: $19.99

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Sony is well known for their “artsy-fartsy” games that started way back on the PS1 with titles such as Intelligent Qube and Vib-Ribbon. Later games such as echochrome and Unfinished Swan pushed this further as indie-friendly games that are all about art and vision rather than sales. Vane is another game in this…vain…ha! It sadly misses the mark on what these other art house games do.

You play as a girl who can turn into a crow and you start out flying around a valley and the direction of what to do is unclear just like the story itself. Most of these artsy games have some clear story through visual or audio representation and by the end, you get the message, but Vane doesn’t have either of these. We open up with the girl delivering a gold something to a large crow elder in a storm and she gets shunned away and gets eaten by the storm. As we fly around as the crow we are attracted to shiny objects in the distance on windmills and these release gold leaves and more crows follow you to the centerpiece windmill that requires enough crows to release a gold ball.

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As this ball is released you are taken prisoner and somehow you must free more crows and the gold stuff turn you into a little girl that can walk around. This second area is the last time you will use your flying skills as the entire back half of the game sees you just walking around and rolling a giant gold ball around. So that’s the entirety of the game. There’s no point to it all and the ending doesn’t answer anything either. There are a few push/pull puzzles with the giant ball as you need to find more girls to use your scream powers to rewind time in a large enough area to recreate bridges. After that it’s more stuff with the gold and no explanation as to what it’s used for, who are these crow elders, why are we bringing this gold ball to the top of a tower? Nothing, there’s no investment for the 2 hours of your life you will never get back.

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If you’re going to do an artsy game at least give us a story at the bare minimum. Journey did this wonderfully and was memorable because of the visuals, music, and visual story it told. The problems don’t end there with Vane however, there are glitches and bugs that require restarts such as physics issues in which I would get stuck on something or the giant gold ball would roll in the wrong direction and not be retrievable. One time my crow wouldn’t transform into a girl and required a manual restart.

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At least the visuals are nice with an abstract fractal typesetting with some great lighting and well-designed characters, but it’s all for naught if there’s nothing to care about in the game. Vane is a sadly missed opportunity with too much emphasis on visuals and less on something the player needs to strive for. We know these girls are desperate to save something, but what? It’s never clear and not really worth the time to play through.

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Watch Dogs 2

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/23/2019
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

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Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 11/15/2016

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Do you trust your government? Do you trust your social media outlets? Do you trust anyone with money or power? That’s what Watch Dogs 2 constantly asks you as you play through the campaign. You play as a hacker named Marcus who is trying to take over what Aiden Pierce did in the first Watch Dogs and take down the corporate conglomerate Blume and their ctOS 2.0 system that is continuously monitoring the people’s every move and step to a creepy factor.

Watch Dogs 2, now set in San Fransisco instead of Chicago, is a gorgeous open-world game full of many activities as well as side missions to complete next to the main campaign. There are also collectibles and various shops in which you can deck Marcus out in cool hip threads. But, that’s not what I want to talk about first. Let’s first talk about this whole “hack anything” gameplay feature that Ubisoft bragged about for Watch Dogs 1 and didn’t deliver. Your main weapon is your cell phone and when you move the camera a white line will connect to everything around you from cars to electrical boxes to people and let you either control it or the citizen’s cell phones in various ways. Steal cash from their bank account, burn their phone up (and kill them in the process), set the police or gangs on them, and even listen in on texts and audio calls. It’s really neat and works much better than the first game and it’s integral for combat when going into restricted areas which are about 90% of every mission’s contents.

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When you get to a restricted area it can be as small as a house or as large as a rocket building facility or even a boat. You can either go in guns blazing which is impossible early on as the better weapons are really expensive to buy and you must unlock weapon slots. Your main tools are your RC Jumper Car and your RC Copter. The RC Copter comes in halfway through the campaign, but you get the car immediately and you can complete entire missions with this thing without ever having to walk in. Set up just outside the restricted boundaries and control your RC car through vents, doors, have it hack laptops, and even distract guards by making their cell phone ring so you can roll on by. The RC car has physical capabilities that the copter can not do such as pick up items and physically hack certain things that require access through to main objectives.

The RC copter is great for scouting and remotely hacking things that don’t require physical interaction. Now, there are some missions in which Marcus must physically hack into something himself and these can get a little though. You don’t last very long in this game by shooting as you die after a few shots. It’s better to maybe call in the mafia on a guard and have them shoot it out and thin the herd a bit, or use the cameras around the building and maybe rig electrical boxes and have guards go out that way. Sometimes I would just remotely have a car rampage its way through an area which is a lot of fun. There are so many ways to complete objectives and it’s basically a fun sandbox of hacking and shooting. The RC car and RC copter are a Godsend as some facilities are just too difficult for Marcus to enter without dying constantly.

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Then there are a few missions where you just hack your way through via scripted puzzles which are a blast. Making people suffer or humiliating them through various hacking scenarios is just so much fun and I always wanted more. Outside of these missions, scenarios are how you escape from the cops and that’s a whole thing. You do have a cooldown timer when you are caught and once you hid long enough everyone will break off, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. In the city, running from the cops requires either hiding away from streets or ducking down in a car. I would sometimes duck down in a car and when a cop car strolled by I would hack their car and kick it into reverse before they spotted me. It’s really cool to see so many ways to play around with the game from having cranes lift you hundreds of feet into the air and onto a building, to using a forklift to deliver an explosive canister to a group of guards and have them blow up.

That’s what the game is mostly made up of with some side activities such as races, hacking events, real-time co-op side missions, and situations in which another player enters your area and you must find them with your hacker vision before they steal your followers. Outside of this, the story is great with memorable characters that I really cared about thanks to the amazing voice acting and well-written dialog. The cut scenes kept me pushing through this game through an entire week and I didn’t want to put it down. The game uses fake groups that represent real-life corporations such as Nudle (Google), !Nvite (Facebook), and the overall social media trend being used to manipulate the public. It really makes you think about what’s going on in the world today and I have to commend Ubisoft for making real-world problems like racism, sexism, and various social issues present in the game to wake up gamers.

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The game also looks fantastic with a very realistic San Francisco such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the famous hairpin street, various monuments, and buildings. The game, however, suffers from a poorly optimized engine with even two GPU generations ahead of what’s required struggling to keep up at max settings at 4K. MSAA anti-aliasing cripples anything but multiple GPU setups and I constantly would go from 90FPS and dip into the 30s during driving scenes or climbing buildings for no apparent reason. Despite all of this, the game looks fantastic.

Overall, Watch Dogs 2 is a sandbox of hacking and shooting with so many fun scenarios and ways to complete them. The story, characters, and dialog are all well written and keep you coming for more and using real-world problems to deliver this story is a plus. Despite the poorly optimized engine, the game looks amazing and the rebuilt San Francisco is a blast. I just didn’t care much for the tedious activities and collecting spray cans and hacker points to max out my research. It just felt incredibly tedious.

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Alan Wake

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/17/2019
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, Xbox360. Leave a comment

220px-Alan_Wake_Game_CoverPublisher: Remedy Entertainment/Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Remedy Entertainment/Nordic Studios

Release Date: 02/16/2012 (PC), 05/18/2010 (X360)

MSRP: $29.99 (PC), $59.99 (X360)

Rating: Teen

Also Available On

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I always come back to Alan Wake every few years because it’s just such a good game. Great combat, storytelling, varied gameplay, well-written characters, and overall solid experience. Almost a decade after the original release I went ahead and played through the PC version again and it’s helped up surprisingly well. Despite its graphical age, it feels like it could have been released yesterday.

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You play as Alan Wake who is a writer that takes a vacation to the Pacific Northwest in Washington and stays at a cabin in Cauldron Lake. Alan has a scuffle with his wife and wakes up not really himself or anything around him for the matter. Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around darkness and always wondering whether what’s happening to Alan is real or it’s all in his head as you will see major story landings in which this question comes up. Even at the end of the game this is never really answered, and maybe it’s best to leave the player guessing a little.

The story is well told and might take a couple of playthroughs to get everything, but it does keep you pushing through the 6-hour story until the end. Characters such as Barry, Alice, Sherriff Wheeler, and even the doctors and radio station host are all just so well written and memorable. Other story tidbits include finding manuscript pages, watching live-action episodes of “Night Springs” clearly inspired by “The Twilight Zone” and radio station bits by finding radios. It’s nice to see the story unfold outside of cutscenes and it really gives you an insight to what’s going out in Bright Falls outside of what Alan is doing. The whole premise of Alan Wake feels special to me as I originally played this living in Southern California and not really caring where it was set. Almost ten years later I now live in the PNW just outside Snoqualiamie, WA where the setting was inspired. It’s awesome to personally experience this setting and then coming back to the game, I appreciated it so much more.

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The main gameplay element here is your flashlight and guns. Light is a huge role in this game as the story is centered around it and your flashlight is a weapon. You can boost the flashlights beam and a circle will get smaller on enemies and once the circle is gone, and you beamed away from the darkness, they become vulnerable and can be shot with the gun. There are easy and hard enemies, a few fast ones, and inanimate objects become enemies later on in the game such as boss fights with harvesters, cranes, trucks, and barrels. It’s interesting how the combat is designed and you have to be afraid of everything around you, even birds! The use of the flashlight and guns is just so well done with great controls and the guns feel satisfying to shoot. You always have to be on your toes and every gunfight is never the same with limited ammo, no flashlight, and then some times tons of ammo to make you feel powerful. There are even lights in the environment you can use to take the Taken down such as spotlights, floodlights, and headlights on cars in the few driving sequences.

The game, however, is extremely linear and you rarely get to stray off the beaten path. These are only seen in the car sequences where you can stop at a house or two to find collectibles and then continue on. Despite this, the heavily scripted events are fun and there’s so much variety and the pacing is spot on. Going from chaotic dark forests to a New York apartment and then the psych ward and even a cafe is a nice touch. It let you breathe.

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Overall, Alan Wake is one of the best games during the Xbox 360 generation with fantastic character dialogue, an interesting story, and fun gunplay with variety in level design and great pacing. The PC version adds DirectX 10 lighting and features such as ultra-widescreen support, FOV slider, slightly better textures, and character models. Overall though, the textures still look really muddy, even during its release, and there’s obvious LOD and draw distance issues with pop in that the PC didn’t need to experience.

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Super Mario Odyssey

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/16/2019
Posted in: Editor's Choice, Nintendo Consoles, Switch. Leave a comment

141694bPublisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo

Release Date: 10/27/2017

Rating: Everyone 10+

MSRP: $59.99

Available Exclusively On

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Nintendo always has a knack for making one huge innovation to their franchises per console cycle and the Switch is no exception. Odyssey is a well-crafted game taking many years of experience and gameplay honing and creating one of the best video game experiences in the last decade. Odyssey is massive with dozens of hours of content and a variety of things to do.

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Like all Mario games, there’s not much of a story, just your typical Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach story again with no cut scenes or anything else, but that’s fine as Mario is all about the gameplay. The main gameplay hook in this Mario game is his hat. He can throw it to take control of enemies, for combat, and to get out of reach items. The hat works so naturally and feels great to use that I never had any issues. Once you arrive in the Cap Kingdom you will be leaping and bounding similarly to Super Mario Galaxy in the way Mario moves and jumps. Taking control of certain enemies give you special combat abilities or allows you to access certain areas Mario can’t. It’s so much fun and I always looked forward to the next thing I could control.

Another element is the new 2D levels. These are hidden throughout the game and give you moons which are needed to power up your Odyssey ship to get to Bowser. There are 880 moons in the world. I know it’s a monster of a task, but it’s so much fun. Your first playthrough allows you to get the first batch, then after you beat the game, there are meteor rocks that you can smash in each world and they send the rest of the moons flying. Anyways, these 2D levels are just like the 8-bit games with Mario wrapped around the 3D world jumping and hopping along.

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Mario can also swim, fly (with controller enemies), and pretty much do anything you can imagine as the game is so varied and there’s so much to see and do. Not one world is alike and each one has new things to do and discover. Mario can also change his hats and outfits this time around by buying them with coins or using special world-specific coins. Some outfits are needed to access bonus areas. These bonus areas are actually the most fun and challenging, but well worth it for the moons.

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There are boss fights with Bowsers minions the Boonals which are evil bunnies. The boss fights are really easy and so is Bowser at the end of the game. It’s clear that the game doesn’t rely on bosses for challenges as some bonus areas had me stuck for over an hour restarting until I got all the jumps right. Thankfully most of the game is a perfect challenge and some of the challenges are just figuring out how to get to the next moon or bonus area. Some are in plain sight while others require you to think a little bit and do certain things. There are music note challenges as well as scarecrow timer challenges. All of these things combined make for an exciting game that is incredibly hard to put down.

I really can’t find anything negative to say except that all you do is collect moons and there’s no other end goal. There are at least fast travel points in each world so even that isn’t a problem. The visuals are fantastic and the entire games just feel alive with character and personality. It’s hard to hate a game made this well, 30 years of perfection really shows with zero control issues, framerate problems, or anything else. No matter how you slice it this is essentially a perfect game. The amount of variety just boggles my mind and I don’t know how the developers managed to make every bonus area, challenge, and the world completely unique, especially to house 880 moons.

Overall, Super Mario Odyssey is a must-own for Switch fans and a good reason to buy one. There is no other platform that offers this kind of gaming perfection other than Nintendo. They are masters of video games and it shows in every one of their unique main title games.

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Rogue Trooper Redux

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/07/2019
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Switch, Xbox One. Leave a comment

91eicFlNDnL._AC_SX430_Publisher: Sold Out6.0

Developer: Rebellion

Release Date: 10/17/2017

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $19.99

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When playing Rogue Trooper I kept asking myself “Why?” to everything. Why is there no plot? Why was this game even considered good enough to remaster? Why did this game exist in the first place? It’s not all bad, definitely playable and has some challenging gameplay, but it could have been so much more, right? Well, meet Rebellion! Famous for some of the most mediocre games in the early to mid-2000’s that weren’t horrible, but barely passable and very forgettable. I played the original on PC back in 2009 and it wasn’t all that great back then either.

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You play as a GI named Rogue (how original) who is a blue alien dude stuck in the middle of a war with a race called the Norts. There’s your story, have a nice day! I’m not kidding at all. This game has more plot holes than a screen door and it boggles my mind as to why they even bothered. These GIs are immune to every poison known to exist, okay…but why? Then there is a single poison that was found to work and the Norts want to mass produce it to wipe out the GIs, again, why? There are no answers just lines of dialog that needs a lot of back story to explain what is even going on. The characters are paper thin, don’t have much screen time, and the voice acting is atrocious. So the only reason to play Rogue Trooper is for the shooting and that’s average at best.

Rogue has a gun that is “smart” as well as his backpack and helmet. He installs chips that are cut out from dead comrades and it gives his equipment an AI. That’s a pretty neat idea and it’s the only thing in this game that seemed to have been fully fleshed out. Rogue gathers salvage from dead bodies and piles and uses these to craft ammo, new weapons, and upgrades. You don’t pick up any ammo in the game as you can only craft it. You do have a pistol on hand that has infinite ammo in case you run out, but there’s a constant challenge of keeping your supply up and looting dead bodies. There are a few on-rails levels to mix things up, so the game isn’t boring ever, and the challenge is quite nice as standing out in the open for too long will get you dead and there’s a halfway decent cover system in place.

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Rogue can also equip a silencer to his machine gun and sniper rifle as well as use a decoy and attraction tool, but I never actually used these. The game even has a stealth mechanic in place, but after I got the silencer I didn’t bother sneaking around as sniper shots are one hit kills. You can also place your Gunnar as a turret so it can cover doors that get unlocked, but again, this seemed like a wasted mechanic as the game isn’t quite sure if it wanted to be a tactical stealth game or a run and gun shooter. This game is a living breathing embodiment of early to mid-2000’s third-person shooters and it hasn’t aged very well. Extremely linear level design, awkward animations, barely manageable aiming, and lots of on rails and scripted events.

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At least the game had a marginal graphics update and looks decent enough but you can still see the age of the game behind the shiny new surface. There’s also a multiplayer mode that is basically pointless since no one is playing this online, and never really did, and the entire game can be beaten in just 4 hours. There’s absolutely no reason to go back either. So I go back to my original question, why? Why should you play a dated 15-year-old game in 2019? Maybe to experience a type of shooter that was incredibly popular at the height of the PS2 era? Maybe you have curious memories of this game and want to relive them? The answer is, you’re not missing out on anything if you skip this, and you don’t gain anything from playing it. Thankfully it’s dirt cheap, and I can only recommend this to the curious.

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Shadow of the Colossus

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/05/2019
Posted in: PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles. Leave a comment

Shadow_of_the_Colossus_PS4_coverPublisher: SIE

Developer: Bluepoint Games

Release Date: 02/06/2018

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $39.99

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The PlayStation is well known for its artsy games and games that push the boundaries of the medium. Team Ico already did this with Ico for the PlayStation 2 and then again with Shadow of the Colossus. Pushing the PS2 beyond its limits they were able to create a huge world with massive colossi that must be wrangled and toppled in hopes to save a nameless girl from an endless sleep. You play as a boy only known as Wander and with your trusty sword, bow, and horse Agro, you follow the light from your sword to each colossus to figure out how to take them down.

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Each colossus is a puzzle unto itself that requires using the environment, wits, skill, and thinking. One colossus may require agitating it and having it expose a weak point at which you use your bow to make a graspable part low enough to reach. You then climb the colossus, with some being climbing puzzles, and stab each weak point while they buck and try to toss you off. You can hang on by holding R2 and using X to jump. It’s not as easy as it sounds as letting go of R2 can drop you to your death or make you start a climbing puzzle all over again. The controls have slightly improved with the remaster, but the animations are irritating, sluggish, and towards the end of the game the frustration really starts to set in.

While the game doesn’t run at 10FPS like in the PS2 version, trying to do more advanced combat and relying on quick controls is not possible and it gets really frustrating at around colossus 12 or 13. One colossus is a small bull that must be chased off a cliff to knock off its armor and then jumping on it just right from that cliff to land on its back is no easy feat. The issue here is that Wander just doesn’t have the agility to dodge attacks as no matter how much I rolled or jumped the bull always hit me. I missed the cliff jump the first time and I died before making it back up to try again. Wander’s get up animations are incredibly slow with around 7 seconds passing before he gets up. Some colossi can hit you again and kill you quickly if you don’t know what to do. Outside of combat the animations to jump around and grab on are wonky as long climbing puzzles towards the end have to restarted if you so much as get a jump at the wrong angle. You can adjust Wander mid-jump so he will go in that direction until he hits the ground.

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Outside of taking down these massive colossi, there’s literally nothing else to do. This large open world is completely void of life outside of some birds and it’s my biggest gripe about this game. As beautiful as it is I wanted more, as the story in of itself is pretty bare bones and vague in terms of what’s going on, even towards the end. I feel like this world could have been fully lived in with lore and people whether they’re alive or dead. It takes around 10 minutes to get to each colossus and that time is spent controlling Agro who has sluggish animations and terrible controls still and staring at a barren wasteland. I understand it’s cursed, but it could have been more.

The visual upgrade is probably the most noticeable as it looks amazing with flowing grass, Nvidia HairWorks on the colossi, HDR lighting, and high-resolution models and textures. On my 65″ LG OLED TV it just pops using the PS4 Pro. That’s also another thing, the game has framerate issues and doesn’t look as good in the original PS4, so the Pro is the way to go here.

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Overall, Shadow of the Colossus is well worth a purchase for newcomers and anyone who played the previous two versions. The visual upgrade alone and higher framerate is well worth it and I feel this is the version that the developers originally envisioned, but just couldn’t pull it off with the technology at the time. Shadow of the Colossus is a piece of gaming history. Pushing gaming conventions to their limits as well as an underpowered piece of hardware, and a vision that was bigger than life, Shadow of the Colossus is a must play for any PlayStation fan.

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Detroit: Become Human

Posted by binarymessiah on 07/05/2019
Posted in: PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles. Leave a comment

81rLtmfYG2L._AC_SX215_Publisher: SIE

Developer: Quantic Dream

Release Date: 05/18/2018

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

Also Available On

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David Cage has been well known for fascinating stories that talk about the boundaries of the human mind and what humanity is capable of. Our destructive nature and so much emotion that goes into making us what we are. Detroit is easily his best work with fantastic characters, tense scenes, and gripping dialog with moral choices that will test any gamer and really make them think and regret.

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Detroit is a game about the fight between Androids and humans. There’s always been a theory that eventually AI will surpass us and get the upper hand. Isaac Asimov wrote about it a lot and created stories in which he blurred the boundary between human emotion and algorithms. Detroit does an amazing job doing this with a well-crafted story and really questioning the absolute core of humanity and addressing problems that we are facing in the real world today with racism, classism, and prejudice. You play as three separate androids and each has its own goal and path. Markus, who starts as an android serving an older famous artist and lives in upper-class society. Kara, who is a maid for an abusive drug-addicted father in the slums of Detroit, and Conner, who is a brand new prototype android that is used in investigations for the Detroit Police Department.

Like all of David Cage’s games, each level is a scene in which you play a different character, the scenes rotate and as you make your choices you unlock new paths that involve hatred or love for your character or cause. The player walks their character around and can interact with some of the environment by manipulating objects via button commands (like all of David Cage’s games) and each scene is played out with quick time events and missing them can actually impact the storyline as well. It’s a very sensitive timeline with different outcomes for each character. I honestly can’t get too in-depth with how my timeline went, but let’s just say none of my characters survived and part of this is because the timeline/path system isn’t explained well enough.

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As you make choices and either succeed or fail in quick time events characters around you will hate you or love you and there are a few levels of this. If a character hates you too much, and you try to really fix it towards the end and it feels like you’re succeeding, once you unlock that path you can’t really change it. There is an arrow at the top right screen that will point up or down when a choice is made and small arrows are little movements and large arrows will sway in bigger increments, but we never know how far that is as eventually, you will get a status update of how that character feels instead of a meter. It would be nice to know so if we go too far down a path we can just keep going down that way instead of trying to change things and ultimately get an ending we don’t like or weren’t working towards. The story does feel very organic despite all of this, and I think it’s because of how many micro choices you can make. However, no matter what choices you make once down a certain path you can’t fix it.

Outside of this core path system, the is more story than gameplay. The entire game is made of quick time events and nothing else. This is really a game where you enjoy the story more than gameplay, but it works well here and has for all of David Cage’s games. I actually sat through the entire game and didn’t stop because of how interesting the story and characters were. There is a constant sense of urgency, fear, dread, and sadness, I even teared up towards the end of the game! You never quite know what your exact outcome will be as I made some choices on the fly and I realized if I chose another option things would have turned out fairly bad. It really tests you as a person and how you think and feel, especially for how political the game gets.

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Visually the game is second to none. Outside of God of War, there is no other game this generation that looks this good. The facial animations are incredibly realistic with beautiful skin textures and minute details and twitches in faces that I have never seen in a game before. It just looks so amazing and is sadly overlooked. The voice acting is phenomenal thanks to the B grade actors that were used here, and they’re actors that you say, “Hey! I know that guy from this movie!” but don’t actually know the actor’s name.

In the end, Detroit: Become Human is one of the best games storywise I have played in the last 10 years. While it severely lacks in the gameplay department, it thrives in story and character and fantastic visuals. I highly recommend this for all gamer types as stories are the fundamentals of video games and are what makes video games such a unique medium.

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