Being a Dick Does Not An Anti-Hero Make

Playing "God of War III" reminds me that really, Kratos is a dick. Zeus pretty much sums it up by calling him a petulant child. For those unfamiliar, here is the Cliff Notes version of the story of Kratos:

God of War -- Kratos, nearly defeated in battle, calls upon Ares to help him win. Ares turns him into, essentially, a juggernaut whose sole purpose in life is war (blood for the blood god! Oh wait, wrong series...). Kratos goes home, murders his family and then, realizing what horrible thing he has done, he swears revenge on Ares. Okay, fair enough.

God of War II -- Having killed Ares in GoW, Kratos is now the new god of war (wow! No one saw THAT coming!!) and is fairly bored with his position. He acts like a jerk to all the other gods and seems to seek out war for war's sake. Annoyed, Zeus tricks Kratos into giving up his powers and kills Kratos. Not one to let death get him down, Kratos proceeds to swear revenge (apparently there's money to be made in the revenge business) on Zeus, and with the help of his new found friends the Titans, he rages war on Olympus. Oh yeah, he kills Athena along the way. Oooookay...

So that brings us up to GoWIII where Kratos has spent the first hour of the game swearing revenge (*yawn*) and throwing his toys around the room. Athena shows up briefly to, apparently, give credence to what Kratos is trying to do, but at this point, there is very little to like about Kratos.

The gameplay is fun, as always, and even though every game since GoW has instilled the dreaded quick time event (i.e. "press X to not die"), the original is still the best and GoWIII manages to make the quick time events fun and rather exciting. The action is great, attacks are fun and all the other shiny things a game is supposed to have.

But it's hard to get really sucked into the game when the voice actor went to the Christian Bale school of constipated grunt acting and over-emphasizes every word out of his mouth. Oh, and the fact that he's a giant dick who can't seem to get over all the wrongs visited upon him by ... oh wait, isn't this all his fault?? Again, just because you're a dick doesn't mean you're an anti-hero -- it's means you're a poster child for frat boys with too much testosterone.

Borderlands was a game that was thin on story, but great on gameplay and that worked because you were probably playing with a buddy and it was funny as hell. I don't care what the haters say, the clap-traps were funny. GoWIII is thin on story, but even great gameplay isn't saving it for me. Even some of the most beautiful backgrounds, amazing camera work and spiffy quicktime events can't hide the crappy voice acting and "Uh... so yeah, then this happens..." storyline. I've heard more interesting stories from three-year olds.

I'm an hour in and I can already tell what's going to happen: Kratos will kill all the gods. I just hope they manage to slap a little more meat on these bones.

A Spectacular Romp in Merely Adequate Land

So after waiting months for Dragon Age: Origins "Awakening" expansion pack, I have to say in a nutshell that it's good but bland. For those who remember their SATs, Awakening is to Dragon Age as Tribunal was to Morrowind. That is to say, it's a good, solid expansion pack, but at the end of the day it doesn't feel like anything riveting, groundbreaking and new. It's not "Bloodmoon."

The game opens with you, the High-Commander of the Grey Wardens, returning to Vigil's Keep which was once Arl Howe's land, and was given to the Grey after the end of DA:O. In a nice turn you can opt to either start a new character from Orlais, or import your old character from DA:O, assuming you didn't die in the end. This, I have to say, makes me happy because I'm rather attached to my Dalish Rogue, Arshes.

Of course as soon as you arrive you discover the Keep has been overrun with darkspawn, and nearly all of the Grey Wardens are dead. Gosh, I hope my character hadn't been pouring her sweat and blood into rebuilding the order while she was waiting for the expansion pack. What a let-down that would have been! Once again you're surrounded by darkspawn, petty politics and annoying companions.

And this is where the banality of the game starts in. Oghren makes a return appearance, joining the Grey Wardens, which begs the question: why didn't you just turn him into a Grey Warden in the first damn game if it was possible? Oh, I guess he'd be dead with the others ... Anyway, he's back as the token drunk, crude-humor aspect. While Oghren is definitely funny to listen to, and provides some good campside humor, I have a huge problem with him: I can never seem to guess what is going to get approval/disapproval with him. I know a lot of people had that complain with Sten from last game, but I always found Sten to be ridiculously easy to get along with and truthfully he was my favorite character. It was Oghren that did and continues to baffle me. Taking the nice route gains disapproval, as does the negative route. Talking to him makes me pine for the idiot-friendly system of Mass Effect 1 & 2 that clearly points out the Paragon, Renegade options. Grrrr...

You pick up an apostate mage named Anders who is already on my sh*t list for a variety of reasons. For one: I swear to God he is voiced by the same guy who did Alistair. That, in and of itself, is annoying and creepy. But the character is an amalgam of Alistair and Morrigan: he has the cocky, wise-cracking attitude of Alistair and the "I hate the chantry and Circle of Magi," "oh my God those evil templars are at it again," attitude of Morrigan. It's like they were trying to kill 2 birds with one stone and failed miserably.

Next is Arl Howe's whiney, emo son Nathaniel. He is, quite literally, the male counterpart to Leiliana. A decent rouge who's constantly promising the darkspawn and undead creatures that he wants to be merciful to them and hates the fight. Wth?! He is coming to grips with his father's evil, treacherous ways and his new role as a Grey Warden. *yawn* I foresee him spending a great deal of time at camp.

*** Mild Spoiler *** The only mildly interesting character thus far as been the personification of Justice, who is trapped in a dead Grey Warden's body. Don't ask, it's a long story. However the reason I like him is that he is basically Sten reborn; in fact I have taking to calling him Sten #2. He's stoic, confused by our world/customs/feelings, and doesn't like to waste time talking. He is also oblivious to Oghren's constant jokes. Excuse me while I bang my head against my desk.

There are no romance options in this game, either. Bioware said they wanted players to concentrate on the story rather than the interactions. Okay, if I wanted to concentrate on story and not interactions, I wouldn't be playing a Bioware game. That's the whole reason we shell out money for their product! The chance to RP it up and romance NPCs! What's the purpose of me gaining approval, giving gifts, and talking to these people if there's no chance for romance!

Oh yeah, while we're on that topic, the gifts are suddenly very obvious as to whom they belong to. In the last game you had to kind of guess, and talk and play around. Now they might as well be labeled "for so-and-so."

AND ANOTHER THING!!! It was nice to see Oghren in his Armor of the Legion from last game, but goddammit if I knew I was going to lose my inventory, I would have gone ahead and put the Warden Commander's armor ON my rogue, rather than having it sit in my pack. *grumble*

I'm about half-way through at this point, so I'll keep griping, er, updating on it. :)

To Final Fantasy or Not to Final Fantasy, that is the question...

So I'm always torn on Final Fantasy games. For the most part I think people fall into two categories: those who think Final Fantasy games are the ultimate expression of video game awesomness and the type of thing Jesus Christ would play if he played games, and those who think Final Fantasy is teh awful lameness.

For the most part I tend to agree with the latter group. I enjoyed FFVII in high school, but what self-respecting nerd didn't? I liked FF X "okay," though I feel I need to point out that my favorite part of FFX was the damn blitz ball mini-game. That's not exactly a glowing review for a game. I liked Final Fantasy X-2 because if you ignored the horrible plot, and the fact that it was, essentially, a crappy attempt on SquareEnix's part to appease its fans who were distraught over Titus and Yuna NOT getting together in FFX, the collection aspect of the game was rather fun. I'm typically anti-kawaii when it comes to my games, and I'm certainly not a girly-girl, but I did really enjoy collecting new costumes and playing with them. Though once I did get them all (like Pokemon...) I figured out very quickly that the dark knight and samurai = win, and pretty much never changed them. Ah well.

But that's it. The other games have done absolutely nothing for me and here's why: they're the same fucking game.

The same characters are in every game. Don't waste my time trying to say they're not. The androgynous hero who is a tortured soul and more often than not has some glaring familial issue (almost always daddy); the love interest who is either too proud or too callow to admit their feelings until the very end of the game when the whole point is moot anyway; the plucky female character who takes on a strange pseudo-sexual little sister role; the cocky male buddy/bromance; the dark, mysterious person who, it will always be revealed, has some sort of connection with the evil entity in the game; the serious, dark, morose, emo voice of reason (this character can be male or female depending); and "the other," who is generally a different race altogether. It's as if they take the characters, dip them in bleach, paint new faces and hit play. Oh joy.

The same world/scenery/scenario is in every game. Oh sure it has a different name, different ethnicities (except those damn chocobos and cactaurs. They are apparently universal) and different fun diversions, but no matter how many cutesy mini-games, or words or vehicles they put into a game, it's the same story every time: Happy, harmonious people are suddenly disrupted by an evil being/corporation and it's up to our heroes to save the world. Really?

I've not played FFXIII, but looking at it, I can tell it's going to be the same thing. But, like a glutton for punishment, I'm going to rent the damn thing and spend my evenings cursing the banality and triteness of the game, and wishing a pox upon the first born children of SquareEnix.

So I guess the real question is who's the bigger fool: SquareEnix, or me? Don't answer that.

Paragon vs. Renegade

After pondering the possibility of Mother Theresa eating babies, it got me thinking about my least favorite aspect of Mass Effect 2: the paragon and renegade options. For those unfamiliar, in any given conversation you are at some point presented with three options of dialog, the paragon, the neutral and the renegade. Using paragon responses gain you (wait for it...) paragon points. The higher your paragon score, the more agreeable people find you and therefore the more willing they are to take your word. On the adverse, using renegade options increases your renegade score which makes you more intimidating and therefore people are more willing to back down and accept your word for it. Neutral responses do exactly dick for you, so even having a neutral response option seems silly. So here are the two big problems with this system:

1) First, and foremost, once you choose a path, you'd better stick with it. If you try to spice up your life and bounce between paragon and renegade scores, you'll end up in that master-of-none zone where both scores are low until you do a billion side quests in which case you'll still only be 1/2 & 1/2. The problem with this is that you need a certain score to open certain responses. In some conversations I found myself with the paragon response open, but the renegade response closed to me. Or in the play-through where I experimented with going 1/2 & 1/2, I found myself in a sticky situation. *** Spoiler warning *** After completing Miranda's and Jack's loyalty missions, you return to the ship to find the two ladies fighting. You walk in to break it up. If you have a high enough paragon skill you remind them of the bigger battle, if you have a high enough renegade you tell them to shut up and deal. Both ladies part ways, angry, but still loyal to you. However if neither score is high enough, your option is to tell Miranda to back down, or tell Jack to back down. Whichever lady you side with will remain loyal, and you lose the loyalty of the other. *** Spoiler end *** So this kinda breaks the illusion of freedom of choice in dialog which is occasionally a problem as illustrated in point two.

2) The conversation options generally suck. As an RPGer I tend to approach dialog choices from the "What would I say in this situation?" standpoint. Mass Effect 2 I find myself thinking "Okay, well I need to paragon/renegade points so I guess I'm goin' with this!" That's not much of a choice, is it? And in some instances the options are so grossly black and white it's laughable. I can't tell you how many choices I made and cringed while they were spoken. I much preferred the like/dislike system of Dragon Age where there was the warm fuzzy option, two neutral-ish options and the asshole option. You could, on occasion, use the neutral option and still gain approval of a certain character. That is, the neutral options served a purpose. I have yet to find a situation in Mass Effect 2 where the neutral option was of any use to me. Again, you're either polishing your halo or wiping blood off your pitchfork.

I'm not sure if my point is that the dialog writing for Mass Effect 2 was weak, or if the whole good/bad system is too simplistic for my tastes. Or maybe it's a whole lotta both.

Mother Theresa eating babies...

At the risk of sounding a little too much like Yahtzee's review of the first Bioshock, I have to express disappointment in the ending of Bioshock 2. Once again the endings boil down into two camps: good good good and evil evil evil; as Yahtzee said, you're either Mother Theresa or Hitler eating babies. Occasionally it would be nice to have a grey area.

And the Mother Theresa ending has me at odds. On one hand the hippie-flower-child ending of the first game seemed a little out of place with the game itself, but it had a nice sense of satisfaction. Truly, having shot, flamed & shocked my way through Rapture, it seemed a little strange; touch of the deus ex machina, if you will. However there's a lot to be said for that hunky dory feeling it instilled in the player.

BioShock 2's good ending gave me a brief sense of satisfaction but it seemed like it was trying too hard. Completely opposite of Bioshock, the ending seemed very much in tune with the rest of the game. Without giving too much away, it's one of the few endings where my character dies and it makes sense. It doesn't feel cheap. However the openness of the ending leaves much to be desired, and a whole host of unanswered questions. Meh.

Bioshock 2's evil ending is almost the exact same as Bioshock's evil ending. **(Not) Spoiler Warning ** You become a giant evil madman who takes over the world in a reign of bloodshed. **End ** Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Of course I will take a quick moment to defend the crappiness of the evil ending: it's obvious the game does not want you to get the evil ending. The evil ending is obtained by killing Little Sisters, an act that never sits well with me for obvious reasons. The reward for doing evil should be a crappy ending.

On the adverse, doing good should reward you with something with a little more meat.

Hi ho hi ho, it's off to scan we go...

So while I still try to formulate my opinion of the Bioshock 2 ending (summary: eh?), I'd like to rant about the scan/probe system of Mass Effect 2, as I begin my second play through.

Harvesting resources has long been a staple of RPGs. That I have to gather resources is of little surprise and I'm okay with it. What I'm not okay with is when farming becomes a chore. Nothing is worse than feeling like you have to do something in a game; feeling like part of it is work. I'm playing a game! I shouldn't feel like ripping my hair out over something as static and necessary as farming.

Oblivion had one of my favorite harvesting systems because at its heart it was simple: run around and pick flowers. It was the video game equivalent of busy work, but that is why it worked. Sure I have to get flowers to get my potions skill up, but I'm also exploring the world and meeting strange new people and creatures which I then kill for exp. It killed three birds with one stone.

Mass Effect 2's system is annoying on a few levels. The system is very simple: come across a planet, scan and launch probes. However the scanning system takes for-bloody-ever to do correctly. Since I'm fairly OCD when it comes to stuff like this, I'm not satisfied until the "Rich" planet becomes "Depleted." (Somewhere the Avatar cat people are crying) So this means sloooooooooowly moving your scanner back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, around the entire rotation of the planet in hopes of finding elements. Then launching probes and collecting them.

I'm going to digress here for one second. Launching a probe to collect a mineral? Yet there are mining colonies across the entire galaxy because they've been mentioned and I've visited a couple. If ships can launch probes from space to gather the entirety of the planet's resources, I have two questions: 1) why the %$#@ would there still be mining colonies, and 2) why the %$#@ hasn't every ship this side of Illium ravaged every world in the sector WITH THEIR PROBES? Apparently Shepherd is the only cool cat with this technology. Right.

Anyway, this is expected to be done on every planet in the game so that you can both acquire enough resources to upgrade your ship, and in the vain hopes of discovering an "anomaly." Which is generally a wrecked ship or the case of the most boring mission ever, a planet where a shield of some type is down and you gotta repair it for them. Huh? But I've digressed again. The point is that this is quite possibly my least favorite mining system in the history of gaming. Nothing puts me to sleep quicker than scanning and probing.

I would, in all honesty, prefer to drop onto a planet and run around with a goddamn pick, or even the stupid probes that magically place the minerals in my ship, than scan. At least running around gives the player a sense of DOING something. And wasn't that what was great about Mass Effect? Dropping down and exploring planets? Sure sometimes you explored a 5'-square patch of grass, but you were exploring! And doing something! Hell, maybe you'll even find some interesting people to kill. This is what makes RPGs fun.

Random Musing on Movie Quotes

Everyone I know quotes movies in some manner or another. Be it the incessant "one time, at band camp," or the cringe-inducing faux-Borat "very nice," everyone quotes for some reason or another. As the husband and I fired up Borderlands for shits and giggles, it occurred to me that we never quote movies in the same way most people do. That is, we never use movie quotes for comedic value. We use quotes as our personal language. A language that totally makes sense to us, but to an outsider it would sound downright strange. And we never use the popular quotes (e.g. the band camp line, anything from Borat, etc.), we always use the obscure ones that you might not pick up on at first. In a way, we have our own cockney-esque system going, and oddly enough it's a very important part of us playing together. Here's a brief primer, should you ever find yourself trapped in a game with us:

Quote: "Psychos? Do they look like psychos, Ray?"

Movie: From Dusk 'Til Dawn

Situation: Any time you happen into a room or area and a horde of angry mobs attacks you. It helps for them to be human, and gains extra points if they're zombies.

Quote: "I didn't want to. I felt I owed it to them."

Movie: Caddyshack

Situation: Any brutal kill; headshot, death from above, flame thrower, etc.

Quote: "Twenty-metre spread. No sound."

Movie: Predator

Situation: One of us needs to go right, the other needs to go left to fully cover the area.

Quote: "It shoots through schools."

Movie: Johnny Dangerously

Situation: Finding any awesome new weapon. Doesn't matter if it's melee or aimed, it's gonna shoot through schools.

Quote: "I'm chasing this guy. No, he's chasing me."

Movie: Memento

Situation: You don't have the upperhand you quite thought you had and need help.

Quote: "They're coming out of the goddamn walls!" or "How could they cut the power?"

Movie: Aliens

Situation: Any time you have lost the upperhand and are quickly being surrounded by mobs.

Quote: "If Matrix were here, he'd laugh, too."

Movie: Commando

Situation: That ginormous boss that looked really tough? He wasn't so tough.

Quote: "Don't do that, that'll just make him angry."

Movie: Blazing Saddles

Situation: The boss is HUGE!

Quote: "Follow me, Tinkerbell."

Movie: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

Situation: Annoying-ass flying mobs.

Quote: "I like money."

Movie: Idiocracy

Situation: When your partner tries to NOT pick up money that falls from a chest. Sure you're at the point in the game where you could wallpaper your house with money but c'mon. You can never have enough.

Quote: "It could be filled with chocolate, okay?"

Movie: Muppets From Space

Situation: Your partner doesn't want to bother opening a chest/box/safe or exploring a seemingly dead end room.

There are a dozen or so more, I'll add as they come back to me. I'm drawing a blank right now, but you get the idea. :)