Weekly Update #20 - Look Mr. Bubbles - Quantum Powered Sky Fanatics!

'Twas another good gaming week for yours truly.

First, a quick correction to my assessment of Outer Wilds. The game lingered on my mind for another day or two after completion since the things I enjoyed about it were truly great. I realized that I totally misread an important point and it made me realize I misinterpreted the ending. One of the Nomai writings tells the player that what they had first mistaken for distant supernovae were, in fact, galaxies exploding and another writing says that the entire universe is dying. I don't know how or why I didn't put two and two together with this one, but my initial conclusion about the game's ending was that once I warped to the Eye of the Universe and did the weird dream state in the woods with my buds around the campfire I somehow prevented the supernova. I concluded that because the last image the game shows is of planet bodies and stars beyond a campfire millions of years later, rather than nothingness. I now realize that what's really going on is that the universe of the player character is indeed dying and the supernova is not stopped, but the player somehow is witnessing the birth of a new universe... maybe? sort of? It's kind of nebulous (ha, see what I did there?) and artsy. This one last "aha" moment from Outer Wilds made me feel silly for missing the obvious, but I don't think it changes my overall assessment of the game or story much at all.

Moving on!

---------------------

Completion!



BioShock Infinite
Main + Extras: 21H 22M
Rating: 8/10

I have now finished the final installment of this great series along with the two Burial at Sea DLC chapters, and I enjoyed the experience of all three games immensely. I definitely have to give the nod of best game in the series to BioShock over 2 and Infinite, no question, but all were good. I think in the end I ever so slightly prefer Infinite over 2, but it's close. Infinite is definitely the most unique of the series, but on the other hand it leans on some plot cliches I am not personally a fan of.

---------------------

Aesthetics: 9/10

Let's be real: Columbia isn't quite as cool as Rapture, but it is great! The player character's arrival at the lighthouse and then the city is really cool and sets the mood of Columbia right away so tension can build to the breaking point at the raffle. This installment did a great job with all the same things the first two laid the groundwork for. Phenomenal voice acting, vividly immersive setting and characters, a rich soundscape, etc. I love the imagination with the sky city details, such as the freight lines, the interlocking plates, the buildings docking on a schedule, and so on. I did also appreciate the jump backwards in time from the post-war era to early 20th century and I thought it was pulled off really well. Furthermore, It wouldn't be a BioShock game without some creepy moments, and Infinite does deliver, although I thought it was telling that this is most well done in the DLC when I was back in Rapture.

---------------------

Gameplay: 8/10

Here I felt a bit of improvement over BioShock 2, and in some ways even over the original. The two biggest hang-ups I had with the gameplay in the first two games were A) the clumsy map and navigation, and B) the plasmid, gun, and ammo switching. Infinite fixed both issues admirably. The total elimination of a map does trigger my fear of missing out and loot goblin itchiness, but it was fine and I don't think I could have missed very much as a result of not having a map. Reducing the number of weapons I can carry to two and ditching ammo types completely was the right decision for this series. Honestly, it made the FPS nature of this game feel more like Halo, which feels like home to me.

The reason I don't rate Infinite's gameplay more highly than the first two games is because there was quite clearly a difficulty dip. This game is good but remarkably easy, especially when held up to the first two games. I was frustrated by some of the difficulty spikes in 2, but I feel like Infinite overcorrected. The ostensibly most difficult enemy types - the Handymen and the Patriots - were a bit of a joke really. They've got nothing on Big Daddies. Game difficulty is a slippery thing, of course, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I wish this installment in the series would have been a little more skill testing. Too easy isn't fun, too hard isn't fun, and Goldilocks gamers like me are always wanting the difficulty to be just right.

---------------------

Narrative: 7/10

I think the execution of Infinite's narrative is incredibly well done, but I'm not into some of it's style.

It starts out with a strong sense of mystery as you are exploring and thinking about who the player character is, what's behind this city, etc, and then it quickly becomes a travesty of themes devoid of the slightest bit of subtlety, layered with some pretty transparent modern day commentary. Really blatant stuff like: white people are racist, religious people are crazy, capitalism is only ever exploitative and evil, and so on. To be completely fair, BioShock hinged on a purposeful straw-manning of an ultra libertarian and hyper capitalistic meritocracy, but it didn't come across as 21st century social grandstanding quite like Infinite did at first. I'm not going to lie, I thought for a minute that was where the story of Infinite was going to dwell, but I'm glad to say it did develop further. As soon as the Vox Populi make their move, the narrative shifts to a more BioShock-esque theme of "all extremism is catastrophic in it's own way".

I must mention that I really enjoyed the dynamic between Booker and Elizabeth, and the game did a good job of shrouding both of their stories in mystery with only subtle and gradual revelations as the plot wore on.

The twist in Infinite was delicious, but not quite as tasty as in the original BioShock. The big reveal moment when it becomes clear that Booker is Comstock was definitely effective and gets the jaw to drop.

However, I simply can not get past the two primary plot devices, which I despise with every fiber of my being: the time loop and the multiverse. They have been done to death, they never make sense or truly work in any story that uses them, they feel cheap and unsatisfying, and I simply hate them. That being said, BioShock Infinite was probably one of the top three uses of either of them I've ever seen.

The DLCs once again executed their narratives quite well, but stylistically left me wanting something different. The DLCs don't even work as a story if time loops and multiverses were functional plot devices to begin with, but the characters and mysteries were strong enough to make it good anyway. I begrudgingly confess that, while I do not generally enjoy time loops, I was a fan of how the DLCs tied the stories of Rapture and Columbia together and did not see it coming. Watching Suchong get run through by a Big Daddy while recording an audio log that I vividly remember picking up in the original game was great - and as long as I work my hardest to not think about how it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever - Elizabeth delivering Jack Ryan's trigger phrase to Atlas/Fontaine and the segue into the beginning of BioShock was a sensational ending for Infinite and its DLC.

There is a lot more to Infinite's story than what I've touched on here, but none of it worth opining much about except for one other thing: the Lutece siblings. For a while I thought they were just ridiculous comic relief, but it becomes pretty clear that they are largely responsible for so much of what happens. The problem I have with this is that they don't have any stance on anything whatsoever. They just kind of tinker around with temporal mad science and could care less about Columbia, Rapture, Booker, Elizabeth, Jack, little sisters, etc. This is pretty unfulfilling not only for their character non-arcs, but also because the implication is that all of the events in the entire franchise can be traced back to the Lutece sister discovering time travel. It certainly does speak volumes about the creativity and genius of the writers that they squeezed so much great story out of just that and some sea slugs though.

---------------------

I'd like to say my thoughts about the BioShock series and it's storyline are complex, but really they are probably just more jumbled than anything. Objectively I'd have to say that they are all really great games, and I'm glad I played them all, but deep down I think my head canon is just going to be the original BioShock. What a banger. I will absolutely be replaying that game, but probably won't ever bother with the sequels again. I just think they are overshadowed by the first. It's like having two plates in front of you: one with a good burger, and the other with a delectably juicy, thick, and perfectly grilled steak. There's nothing wrong with the burger, but I'm going to be ignoring it in favor of the steak nevertheless.

Next for me is finishing up SubNautica. After that I'll see how I feel and the plan is to either play Bastion - a rather short game - or just jump straight into the Mass Effect series. I'm quite excited for that since I don't think I've heard a whisper of a bad thing about ME except for the fourth game in the series, which is supposedly poop soup.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself - especially since I'll probably be on the ME games for a good chunk of the start of 2025 - but I think one aim for next year is to grind out all of the Final Fantasy games. I haven't decided yet if I want that to include replays of VII - IX and XII, but it's high time I played I - VI, X/X-2, XIII trilogy, and perhaps XIV.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I have added links to all my completions in the OP of this thread if you are interested in checking out what games I've blogged about without hunting through every post. Hopefully it will make my ramblings more reader friendly to the poor souls who stumble upon this thread.

Until next time nerds!

That's a fair point about subjectivity. For that proposed category I was mostly getting at my desire for more of the challenge to focus on story rather than arbitrary stuff like what letter the game begins with. That said, games are experienced subjectively, which is why folks rate them differently. Most categories should of course be objective, but a small selection being subjective is not a problem IMO.

I do think there is more to chew on with this idea of having some number of categories unable to be planned around. If every category can be planned, then the only real challenge is list curation, budget, and amount of time spent gaming, which isn't a gaming challenge per se, but a planning challenge. Making a small handful of the categories more spontaneous, reactionary, subjective, or whatever word we want to use is a tasty bit of spice that reminds us that games are a fun experience and not just a checklist item. With the tier system, those who don't like these categories can just ignore them anyhow. Otherwise, when you play that game you planned for your zombie category and it ends up having an epic opening hook, you can just shift your list a bit and find a second zombie game if you want.

Okay still settling in to my new home so maybe sproadiac with my plays but anyway had my first session of Outer Wilds:

Jumped on a geyser and died. End of the game

Okay the more serious session after that:

Made it to brittle hollow and found the crashed ship and it's escape pods before following into the black hole and then reaching the white hole station and thus the north pole station on brittle hollow. Translated everything there and found the tablet in the white hole to see the other items in the area not exactly sure what they mean and then the sun collapsed and the loop repeated

Okay very opened ended will need to follow a few leads I think but will see where this leads me. Finding the controls a bit floaty although I am in space so maybe I can be more forgiving of it. Dependent on how annoying it gets

I see that you are playing on PC, so I will tell you right now: the space bar is your friend. A quick 2-3 second hold on it while in your ship or suit matches your velocity to the nearby environment. Drastically cuts down on the "floaty" feelings. I wish I had realized the usefulness of that and the "R" + mouse-movement-to-rotate function a lot sooner in my playthrough.

I do think challenges should generally be ones you plan around, since if you're just playing a bunch of games and applying categories retroactively then it isn't a challenge, it's incredibly simple. Those challenges basically require you to know the plot of a game before you play it, which ruins the enjoyment of experiencing a story in many ways.

"Generally" being the operative word. Having 1 or 2 categories like this actually enhances the challenge because you can't plan absolutely everything out in advance. If every single category is so rigid that it must be meticulously planned around then the "challenge" is only in the curation of a list at the start of the year, then setting aside the time to play. We need some sort of mix. Not 50/50, but at least some.

That's a good one, but Finnedorb said in response to bgalon that this time challenges like these where you can only really select it after the game was beaten were gonna be avoided. These definitely fit into that, can't really plan around them.

I think that's a good principle up to a point, but can be overdone. If for no other reason because not everyone participating in the challenge is necessarily going to plan every category and will instead play their 20-50 games in 2025 and fit them into categories as they go(like yours truly). I do understand your point though. Maybe splitting a category like that with an option one could plan around and one that could be categorized after the fact? It's not necessary to twist into a pretzel over this, I was mostly suggesting that we should have some categories that had to do with game stories and not just more arbitrary stuff like length, sequel status, genre, age, stats, etc.

Just a thought for a category to appeal to story driven gamers like me:

#-1. A game with a gripping opening hook
#-2. A game with a great plot twist
#-3. A game with a shocking ending

Or something along those lines.

Looking forward to your Halo writeups.

Wort wort wort

I nominated this one, then finished it before it won the vote. I wrote pretty extensively about it in my blog thread. I had very mixed feelings. A substantial portion of the game is delightful and amazing, but just enough of the gameplay was insufferably frustrating that I can't give it all the same rave reviews I hear others give it. That said, I definitely understand why folks adore this game and it's worth experiencing if you haven't yet.

I heartily agree with the challenge tiers or medals idea. I essentially did this for myself in the 2024 challenge since I knew I wasn't going to come anywhere close to completing 50+ games, so I set my personal challenge at 25 games. Setting up some "official" tiers would just make that more user friendly and might get more participants.

Not even taking into consideration the excellent points bgalon makes about available time and commitment to gaming as a hobby, there is the obvious point that the challenge list incentivizes shorter and easier games. I like the idea of a challenge list structure to get me out of my comfort zone a bit and get me trying new things, but I really don't like the idea of a challenge funneling me away from the 30+ hour RPGs I tend to enjoy just so I can get more game completions and fill out the challenge checklist. Once again, a challenge tier structure solves this and invites more participants of different gaming stripes.

All of that being said, the word challenge is right there in the title. I get it. We're supposed to be completing a challenge, not earning a participation trophy. However, what's challenging for person A is a walk in the park for person B. I think we can pretty easily accommodate different gamers with some flexibility on the sheer quantity of the challenge.

Maybe the first 5-10 challenges could be "core" challenges required for all tiers in order to be considered complete (probably the broadest categories), but past that each user can customize which challenges they select and the tiers could be based upon their target quantity as bgalon suggested.

Weekly Update #19 - Angler Fish And Death Stars

Work was slow this past week, and on top of that with an extra day off I got a good amount of vidya time in. Yesterday my boy beat Portal (GlaDoS is still alive!) and has started Portal 2. I began Outer Wilds and got sucked in pretty hard by it. Once I beat it, I needed a break from the whole investigating deadly alien biomes thing, so no SubNautica this week. I did, however, sink an hour or so into BioShock Infinite yesterday.

Now, on to the good stuff!

Completion!



Outer Wilds
Main + Extras: 24H 37M
Rating: 7/10

This game is tough to neatly categorize. It's a Rogue-like, RPG, Open-World, Story-Driven, 3D Puzzle Platformer I guess? It's unique, I'll give it that. I first heard of it a year or so ago, and have heard nothing but good things about it ever since. Just about all vidya game adjacent content I consume has put this game on a pedestal and told me it's mind-blowing, life-changing, awe-inspiring, unlike any other game out there, etc. To be fair, it is! But... what they didn't mention about Outer Wilds is that all that moist, rich, tender, juicy, sweet cake is frosted with a layer of poop.

I'm sure that after that, dear reader, you can't help but want to find out what MZD means about poop frosting. Read on!

---------------------

Aesthetics: 10/10

As I've mentioned in previous posts, my aesthetics ratings aren't based on game engines, sheer graphical output, AAA budgets, and so on. What I care about is the mood, tone, and immersion the game's audio and visuals create and how effectively it is executed. If a game can communicate the right atmosphere for it's story and gameplay with three pixels and some beep-boops, more power to it. Outer Wilds crushes when it comes to tone-setting. I refuse to detail all the ways, because this post would be far too long, but for an off-the-top-of-my-head list I'll go with:

- Simple, rustic, and gorgeous music that 100% makes you feel like you're sitting around the campfire or wandering the vast reaches of space
- Goofy and lovable rag-tag space ship and equipment that looks like a middle schooler built it
- Absurdly creative environments; discovering and exploring each planets' quirks was probably the highlight of this game
- Visual storytelling that somehow perfectly fits the absurd scenario of doing space archaeology on aliens and artifacts from hundreds of thousands of years ago

This game is about wonder, curiosity, mystery, and exploration (...and death), and the way it looks and sounds perfectly capture those themes in a delightfully and innocently child-like way.

---------------------

Gameplay: 5/10



I have plainly stated over and over that I'm a narrative driven guy who wants to play games with good stories, and that gameplay and aesthetics are secondary to me, but to be more precise: there is a difference between the absence of high quality, engaging gameplay, and the presence of poop quality, disengaging gameplay. If a game's story is captivating but it lacks killer gameplay, I'm still on board. If a game's story is captivating but the gameplay makes me want to set something on fire, the uninstall button starts looking real good. Bad gameplay can absolutely wreck a great story. Outer Wilds has some bad, bad gameplay. It's saving grace is that it also has some incredible gameplay. I met it in the middle of it's 1/10 moments and it's 9/10 moments and rated it a 5/10.

Everything about the universe and narrative of Outer Wilds screams "Go! Explore! Unravel ancient mysteries!", but half or more of my time was actually spent beating my head against the wall trying to complete timed flight simulations combined with disorienting low gravity parkour courses designed to sabotage me with little twists and quirks so that I have to start the run over again twelve times before I complete it and unlock another sliver of story and exploration. For the uninitiated: the fundamental plot point in Outer Wilds is that the player character is stuck in a 22 minute time loop that will always end in disaster, and it's up to them to find out how to break the loop and prevent disaster. During each loop the player has to explore as much as possible to unlock more information, but naturally the game has to introduce challenge to this loop to spice it up. My beef is with how they chose to introduce roughly half of the challenges in this game - namely through gimmicky roadblocks that reset the loop and force the player to replay the same 5 to 15ish minutes of gameplay again and again until they can rush to the correct location early enough in the loop and then time that one jump just right. During this process, half of my brain is giddy with excitement to follow the trail of breadcrumbs to the next Nomai lore dump, and the other half is thinking about how I'm wasting my leisure time repeatedly performing a manufactured pixel chore that I hate. Feels bad man. For those who have played the game and can sympathize with me, the biggest offenders for me were the lakebed caves and getting to the high energy lab on Ember Twin, getting to the Black Hole Forge and Southern Observatory on Brittle Hollow, and pretty much all of Dark Bramble.

Now that I've vented sufficiently about that, I'll praise the great aspects of Outer Wilds gameplay. The progression system in the game is cool because it's all information based. No need for levels or loot or ship upgrades, just knowing stuff. Once I realized this was the case, I couldn't help but compare this aspect of the game to Tunic, which I loved. Something about a cleverly designed meta puzzle within a game where I can suddenly access something I always had available to me simply because I learned some new details is immensely satisfying. Outer Wilds is chock full of these puzzles. I mentioned earlier that exploring each planet's quirks was probably the biggest highlight of the game, and this is why. Games that are full of these little "Aha!" moments are great... when you don't have to slowly and painstakingly figure out how to flawlessly execute a seven minute long parkour run to get to the next area that is...

---------------------

Narrative: 6/10

The hook in Outer Wilds is incredible. I'm stuck in a deadly time loop and I have some intriguing leads and an entire solar system of awesome to explore and figure out how to stop it. Great. The plot device used to unfold more and more information by increments to the player are ancient writings from a long lost alien civilization called the Nomai. I like lore dumps, and it's even better when you get them one piece at a time and have to engage with the story to fit them together. Great. But stories are told ultimately for the purpose of communicating something about the real world, and the problems in this narrative for me were the obvious and clumsy ideological axe the devs had to grind and the weak final payoff. I once heard Brandon Sanderson (a hugely successful fantasy author) say that good writing is all about Promises, Progress, and Payoffs - and I'd say that Outer Wilds nails the first two and whiffs on the third.

It's clear that the writers were astro-physics geeks. Neat. They put cool astro-physics in their game. However, if their game is a reflection of their worldview, then it seems clear that to them everything is science and science is everything. To each his own, but it makes for a pretty flat narrative with flat themes when writers are purely ideologically driven. There is so much to explore in the narrative of Outer Wilds beyond the scientific. The Nomai are the poster children for what I'm talking about. It's like scientists wrote a game and projected their ideal onto the Nomai. A tribe of people who are wholly devoted to the pursuit of scientific knowledge for the sake of scientific knowledge. They do nothing else. They have almost no discernable culture or interests outside of astro-physics. As they develop their understanding and technology, they choose to harness it in the pursuit of the Eye of the Universe for the rest of their lives (and the next generation does the same) rather than reuniting with their other clans. On top of that, there's the obvious moral quandary that arises from their pursuits. A little nod is given to this in a couple of Nomai writings, but it's quickly swept under the rug. At the end of the day, these beings are fine with blowing up a solar system if it means they might get a little closer to some more data.

The game implicitly brings up the idea of God by pointedly doing everything it can to snub the idea of God. It's funny really. A bunch of presumably atheistic science nerds made a really cool science game and it still ended up being about God. "We don't know how the universe came to be, but it certainly WAS NOT God. See, look at these alien scientists we wrote doing science all the time. Aren't they great? They never mention anything supernatural, just science. They know things about the mysteries of the beginnings of the universe and they have NOTHING to do with God! Nevermind that they are functionally the most ardent religious zealots in any video game you've ever played. They take ritualistic pilgrimages to a holy site to contemplate science and stuff and single-mindedly pursue a supposedly inanimate, mindless creative force they believe has communicated something to them but is most certainly NOT God!" The more I think about how the writers fumbled with their intent the more I chuckle.

So what? The controlling theme is forced, transparently ideological, and communicated in a way that is a self-own. Big deal. Such is the case with lots of great games. If the narrative sets up compelling dramatic questions - which Outer Wilds most certainly does - and resolves them satisfactorily, a clumsy thematic gridwork can be a non-issue. That would require resolving the dramatic questions satisfactorily though. I don't think Outer Wilds does, at all. The big questions the narrative asks are: "What's causing this time loop and can I fix it?", and, "What's causing the disaster at the 'end' of the loop and can I stop it?" The answers, as I understood them are: The Nomai's warp core at the Ash Twin project is causing the time loop, and I can end the loop by removing it. Easy peasy. The game made me think for a long time that the Nomai tech must also be the source of the supernova, but it eventually clarifies that the Nomai failed to cause a supernova and the one I saw repeatedly is natural and is simply powering some of the Nomai tech as the initial solar activity releases energy. That leaves the question of "can I stop it?" The answer is apparently yes... maybe? With the power of quantum rocks older than the universe (BUT DEFINITELY NOT GOD!), a mystical connection with them at a holy site in what appears to be a surreal fever dream, add in a healthy dose of friendship and some music around a cozy campfire, then anyone can stop their sun from going supernova... metaphorically? I get that the ending is meant to preserve and emphasize some sort of beauty about the sense of mystery regarding the beginnings and end of the universe. Once again though, it's ham-fisted in my opinion. "We don't understand what we have scientifically concluded (and definitely without any bias or speculation, mind you) about our origin or our destruction, but isn't that like, really deep and beautiful and stuff?" is just... trite and misses the mark for me.

All that being said, my quick and dirty synopsis of Outer Wilds' narrative is that it has a great hook and highly gratifying expositional and plot devices, but a fairly shallow and underdeveloped theme with unsatisfying payoffs.

---------------------

Once I decided I was going to give Outer Wilds a 7/10 with my super amazingly perfect and accurate rating system, it got me thinking. Generally I think of a 6 or 7 as mediocre across the board, as in it does everything decently but not great. The truth is, a game can do some things amazingly well and others quite poorly and the aggregate result is a 7/10. In a way that's more frustrating than if it had just been mediocre across the board. I understand why so many people sing Outer Wilds praises and shower it with 9/10 and 10/10 ratings, I really do. I'd say they are looking at the highlights and overlooking the flaws, and they probably share the writers' worldview and are experiencing some echo chamber confirmation bias, but live and let live.

I now turn my attention to BioShock Infinite. I'm perusing a fair in a tranquil but cultish sky city one minute and I've started setting people on fire the next. This will be interesting if nothing else.

Two completions for me this November.

BioShock 2 Remastered - 02. An old game (released 10+ years ago)

Outer Wilds - 12. A game recommended to you by someone else

That puts me at 21 games so far this year. It will have to be a really ambitious December in order to hit my goal of 25, especially since I only have 1 short game planned for the near future. If I make it, great. If not, this challenge has still been fun for me to plot out my gaming for the year.

My Collection.

Weekly Update #18 - Sea Slugs and Supercomputers

During our weekly game night, my son discovered that the cake in Portal is for sure a lie. He's working his way through a maze of pipes and fans now, and loving it. He's definitely hit his stride and is highly motivated to solve the puzzles.

SubNautica has been progressing nicely. I've discovered an alien anti-air gun battery, an infectious disease, and an angry glowing squid. On top of that, I've built a submarine and a 500m deep habitat. It's great fun, and there's a lot left to explore and discover from what I can tell.

More importantly however...

Completion!



BioShock 2 Remastered
Main + Extras: 22H 38M
Rating: 8/10

My evaluation of this game is almost completely based off of my experience with the first BioShock. How could it not be? This is a true sequel with the story taking place just after the events of the first game, and nearly all of the graphics and game mechanics being the same. The short version is: it's quite good, but not as incredible as BioShock was.

---------------------

Aesthetics: 10/10

No real changes in my opinion of the series here. There is flawless voice acting in all the audio logs to drive the story forward. There is music, architecture, costumes, technology, and everything else one could imagine that totally immersed me into the mid century world, to the point that it's easy to suspend disbelief on the major points such as the whole oceanic city thing. Creepy and horrific tonality is most definitely achieved throughout. The visual storytelling elements aren't quite as potent in the sequel, but they're still present and clever. I think this installment in the series included more original musical scoring and it was very well done.

---------------------

Gameplay: 7/10

Not a whole lot changed with the actual gameplay from the original, but what did change was a downgrade in my opinion. The map and navigation is still iffy. Some of the fights in the sequel are much more annoying for an FPS scrub like me. The big sisters and brute splicers were a big difficulty spike and the waves of splicers/alphas when you set a sister down to harvest were pretty intense. I get that the game is pushing the player to think tactically with trap rivets, trap spears, mini turrets, and plasmids, but it nevertheless opened up the avenue to a lot of hair pulling for me. There were a number of deaths when the sister was 99% done harvesting and I respawned with none of my trap ammo and have to try again. Ugh. I did get the hang of it eventually, but the learning curve wasn't always fun.

I do have to say I like the customization of plasmids. I'm not sure if there was that much more to explore in the second game, or I just didn't notice as much in the first, but the player really can build their character any number of ways. With some planning and budgeting ADAM accordingly, I was even able to have a couple builds ready to go that just need some switches at a gene bank. For example, I'd go all out on my MG, shotgun, and rivet gun with all the hacking, turret, and bot gene tonics equipped for a while, then when ammo was scarce I'd switch to a Drill Specialist build with a couple high level elemental plasmids. Very cool stuff. It was a shame that the only reason I ended up doing it originally is because of the frustration of nearly always being out of ammo, money, health packs, or EVE. This is an FPS, sure, but make no mistake - it is very much a resource management game too.

---------------------

Narrative: 7/10

I kind of knew early on that BioShock 2 wasn't going to get to the same level as the original with its story. It's perfectly serviceable, but it's really just a rehashing of the first with some adjustments. Basically the writers just did several "plug and play" moves: Lamb in the role Ryan, her utopian psychobabble pantheism for his extreme capitalist libertarianism, The Family subbed for Rapture as a whole, Eleanor was the "new" ADAM, Delta took Jack's place, and the collective or death of self replaced The Great Chain. The theme of extremist whackos getting it wrong was still very much a thing, only a little more supernatural this time. The story beats were very similar and were definitely well paced, it just all hit like the original game's story but watered down a bit. There wasn't a particularly juicy twist either, which was a bit disappointing. The ending was satisfying, but paled in comparison to the first game's 10/10 ending.

The DLC, Minerva's Den, was exceptional. That story was quite a bit more condensed, but it was totally original except for the setting and did feature a great twist similar to the first game. I really liked how it put a nice bow on Tenenbaum's redemption arc between BioShock and BioShock 2. I'm quite happy I decided to not skip out on it.

---------------------

I'm excited for BioShock Infinite since it looks like a whole new setting. That said, I did start getting a bit burnt out in the last few hours of BioShock 2's main story and the mid point of the DLC, so I'm going to go for a (hopefully) quick palette cleanse with Outer Wilds. I've heard every glowing comment ever about this game, so hopefully the overhyping won't make reality seem disappointing. I'm optimistic.

Till next time nerds!

I'll nominate Outer Wilds.

Weekly Update #17 - We Do What We Must Because We Can

Yet again, my week had very little vidya game action in it. What little gaming time I had was dedicated to BioShock 2. I finished the level at Pauper's Drop and I'm probably halfway or so through the next one, which I forget the name of. I don't want to judge too prematurely, especially since the first game had such delicious twists, but I'm thinking that BioShock 2 is not going to be nearly as awesome for me when all is said and done as BioShock was. The gameplay is more frustrating so far, and the story a little lackluster in comparison, though both aspects of the game are still good.

I've settled on continuing with SubNautica on Sunday afternoons though. I'm only able to get little 45-60 min bursts of gaming throughout the week lately, and SubNautica is only really enjoyable in a 2-3 hour chunk I'm finding. So, this is me for a little while:



The only other thing of note is that I've now moved on to doing a vidya game night with my younger son (8) one night a week and decided he was ready for Portal. He's doing well so far, but he has not yet discovered whether or not the cake is a lie.

Till next time nerds!

Weekly Update #16 - Calamity From the Sky, Terrors in the Deep

I have once again not been focused at all and have not made any progress on BioShock 2. Part of that is due to work and family obligations, but the other part is due to the fact that one day while my wife needed to use the PC, thus making BioShock unavailable to me, I randomly decided to start playing SubNautica on my Switch. To say I got hooked is a bit of an understatement. I've sunk a dozen or so hours into it since then and I really enjoy it. Great exploration, crafting, and survival gameplay loops. However, I told myself when I started tracking things on HLBT that the whole point was to keep me focused on one game at a time, and so I don't want to get bogged down in this switching back and forth between games nonsense. So, back to focusing on BioShock!

The only other vidya game stuff of note is that my oldest son (12) has been playing through Final Fantasy 7 with me one night a week. FF7 is my all time favorite game, and I wanted to be there with him when he experienced it. This week he beat it. The game is still amazing to me after all these years. Clunky and aged, sure, but the GOAT in my eyes nevertheless. Watching someone play through it with no previous understanding of the story was a bit of an eye opener for me regarding just how much content which is crucial to properly grasping the story is hidden/optional (Gast's notes at Icicle Inn, the Shinra Mansion basement with Zack and Cloud's story, Lucrecia's cave and Vincent, etc). In any case, I've created a monster, and now he's playing through FF9 on his own.

Until next time nerds!

I had 3 completions for October:

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - 01. A new game (released within the past year)

BioShock Remastered - 09-1. A remake or remaster of a game

Tunic - 22. A game without any humans

My collection.

Weekly Update #15 - The One Where I Have Nothing To Say, But I Say It Anyway

It's been a slow week for MZD's vidya game exploits what with work, family, and social activities.

I did start BioShock 2, but haven't progressed too far at all. The player character is a Big Daddy, which is cool. Some of the gang from the first game are back in audio log form - namely Tenenbaum and Ryan so far - as well as some new characters. From what I can figure out so far, the story is mostly going to hinge on this gal Lamb and the Little Sisters.

The only other thing of note for this week's installment is some hauls from recent sales:

System Shock and System Shock 2 - These are exciting because I understand that SS2 was a sort of forerunner to BioShock.

Commandos trilogy - Here's some old school tactical nostalgia that will make me feel 12 years old again

Dead Space trilogy - Got these on a recommendation from a friend. I'm generally not a horror or jump-scare enthusiast, so we'll see...

Death's Door - Another recommendation from the same friend after I told him about Tunic and described it a bit for him. He says this should be at least slightly comparable.

Hollow Knight - I hear about this game all the time and feel like I've been living under a rock. I'm assuming it's goated.

Inscryption - A card game? I've heard it's incredible from multiple sources, so I'm just trusting.

Jade Empire - Old school BioWare that I hope will meet the high standards the KotOR games and DA:O set for me.

Shenmue trilogy - Again, these were recommendations from a friend, but a different one this time. When me and everybody else were locked in on PS1 and N64 from '99-'01, he was living his best life on the Dreamcast with these games. He said just about any RPG fan should enjoy them. We'll see lol.

Final Fantasy III and IV 3D remakes and FFXIII - I eventually want to beat the whole series, so I nab these whenever I see a good sale. This puts me at 6 FF titles that I now own but haven't beaten. I think 2025 is going to be a pretty FF dense year for me.

Funny how these backlogs seem to grow more often than they shrink.

Weekly Update #14 - Geometry Again; This Time With Foxes

Completion!



Tunic
Main + Extras (very nearly 100%!): 24H 49M
Rating: 9.5/10

I got used to Final Fantasy and Dragon Age length games with the quick hits of Halo in between, so suddenly reaching a pace of completing a game per week feels weird.

Also, going from chibi Zelda in Echoes of Wisdom, to the dystopian horror of BioShock, then back again to the cutsie look of Tunic has given me some visual whiplash. Part of me thinks I should have just kept the BioShock momentum going and plowed through the whole series.

That is neither here nor there - I'm here to talk about Tunic. What a great game! I was very pleasantly surprised at the depth and beauty of this experience. My remarks here will be pretty bare bones by my standards, since almost every aspect of this game can be spoiled.

Not to cross the streams too much, but I would say this game is what a AAA title in the vein of Echoes of Wisdom should have been. More specifically, Tunic takes many of the winning ideas I see in action/adventure RPG and puzzle games that prioritize gameplay over narrative then darn near perfects them with a liberal helping of it's secret sauce: mystery and the absolute, unbridled joy of discovery throughout the entire game. I mean that quite literally. The continuous understanding of new concepts in the world and gameplay of Tunic did not stop from the time I hit New Game until the credits rolled. Best of all is the fact that the vast majority of that understanding is completely player driven since you are given little more than bread crumbs and an invitation to start peeling back the many layers of the game.

---------------------

Aesthetics: 10/10

I have mentioned before that the chibi/hello kitty/cute look in games is generally not my thing, but I can appreciate it when it is obviously well executed and appropriately fitting. Tunic checks both of those boxes. That's not the real highlight of this game's visuals though. Even though it is a low res and blocky or polygonal in a lot of ways, Tunic makes it all seem perfect with the way lighting is seamless and natural, movement is graceful and intuitive, and you could probably spend a whole day doing nothing but finding a hundred little details in the graphic presentation of this game that all add up gloriously. The high standard is consistent throughout all the different areas of the game as well, so the lush sunny temperate zone you start in is no more stunning than the coast, forests, dungeons, mountaintops, factories, and so on, each with some cool visual hook.

The soundtrack is worthy of being added to every chill, lo-fi, relaxing playlist ever created. There is no great complexity to it. If anything, many of the ambient melodies I heard throughout the game were just really elegantly arpeggiated chord progressions. The music is quite simply a perfect fit for the atmosphere of the game and is positively beautiful.

---------------------

Gameplay: 9/10

There is absolutely no denying that Tunic is borrowing straight from The Legend of Zelda's playbook. I mean, just go look at the cover. It's a young hero in a green outfit with a sword and shield. Not far into the game and you realize that your first main objective is to get some gear and stat boosts, then retrieve some missing geometrical shapes of great ethereal power. What it "lacks" in innovation, however, Tunic makes up for in optimization. It takes nearly everything great about comparable Zelda-esque games and makes those things juicier. Cool combat techniques and powers? Yeah. Cool zones and dungeons with challenging puzzles? Fistfuls of them. Epic boss fights that are puzzles in their own right? Buckle up.

The overwhelming bounty of Aha! moments and ever present opportunities to discover something new are what really pushes Tunic to great heights of gameplay. I would argue that the real game I was playing was not the typical adventure RPG sequence of get-the-maguffins-then-get-more-maguffins-then-fight-the-bad-guy, but rather a constant stream of figuring stuff out in the most satisfying ways. The game is structured so that you literally have to rebuild the instruction manual from scratch - one of the coolest hooks and fourth wall breaks I've ever experienced. Hints and foreshadowing are everywhere, and I've never seen a game with more hidden in plain sight. The effect it had on me was highly enjoyable.

I can't personally give the gameplay full marks though. There are some intense difficulty spikes with the boss fights and puzzles - more than I would consider "normal" at least.

The bosses are all eminently beatable without using guides as long as the player is either great at this style of combat or willing to bang their head against the wall of trial and error for a long while they figure out each bosses strengths/weaknesses and attack patterns. I went through the trial and error process on two out of the three big bosses. Once I figured out the optimal strategy they were a breeze, but boy howdy did it take some time and frustration to figure each one out. I couldn't bring myself to repeat that process on the third big boss, and after my first five or so attempts I let the internet tell me the gimmick and nailed it two attempts later.

The vast majority of puzzles in the game are appropriately challenging and a joy to solve, but the handful which aren't reasonably solvable left a sour taste in my mouth. In a cruel twist of fate, if I didn't love the game so much as I was moving through it I wouldn't have decided to pursue a bunch of the extras, which is where the truly bonkers puzzles that frustrated me happen to exist. The problem with these spikes in puzzle difficulty are that they come in groups. So, I was able to solve 18/20 end-game puzzles on my own, but that does no good since you need the full 20 completed for the reward. Similarly, there was a separate group of 12 end-game puzzles (that I later found out were basically just bragging right achievements plus an easter egg) that do you no good if left incomplete, and I could only do 8 or so of them without a nudge in the right direction. I guess I can't really complain much since the puzzle difficulty wasn't outrageous until I got to optional stuff. However, the game made it pretty clear that one of those optional batches of puzzles is what controlled how you beat the game and I wanted the full/good/true ending, so there was going to be no stopping me. Once again, the internet saved the day.

The only other critique I would have of the gameplay is that there was a lot of backtracking through areas, and that was made more tedious by the fact that nearly every area has loops and weird paths because they have to in order to be puzzles the first time you encounter them. The fifteenth time you are traversing the weird loop or hidden path is just annoying though.

That's all just the squeaky wheel getting the grease though since overall the gameplay loop in Tunic was magnificent.

---------------------

Narrative: 9/10

I made a big deal about Echoes of Wisdom having uninspired, archetypal, and arbitrary conflict and themes a few weeks ago, and here I am giving a higher rating to a game with arguably less narrative. Am I stupid? Don't answer that.

In my opinion, Tunic - like Zelda - is not primarily about the narrative. The narrative is simply a scaffolding or framework that gives a pretense for what actually matters about this kind of game, which is the gameplay. I rate it's story higher than I typically do Zelda games (the closes comparison I know of) because of how intentionally and artistically bare bones it is while remaining coherent, and because of how much more it leverages exploration, mystery, and discovery.

Tunic delivers its narrative almost entirely visually and sonically. I think I only read something like 30 English words throughout the entire game. There is almost no dialogue, and what little there is contains only about 5% readable language. I was able to get the gist of what was going on in terms of the main plot, and I think the gist is all the writers were interested in giving. Again, the narrative is not the point of this game. I guess it was refreshing to me that they didn't try to make it more than what it needed to be for their purposes, and thus avoided being corny or pretentious in order to be "complete". It trimmed the fat from the game and also heightened the already amped up sense of mystery. Honestly, I ended the game with more questions about the setting and it's backstory than when I started, but I think the game hints strongly enough at a satisfactory reason for those questions to be irrelevant, which I'll share in spoilers below.

The other reason I give Tunic higher marks for it's narrative than comparable games is that it is doing some meta stuff by breaking the fourth wall with the player through the instruction booklet and the overall focus on constant mystery and discovery. Put more simply, the player is the story in Tunic. Yes, there are characters and plot points and twists throughout the game, but really the narrative presented to me as I played this game was the flow of compounding discovery as I'd solve one mystery that would remind me of two other things that I saw earlier but could now understand and do something about, etc. over and over again. The developers were brilliant to turn down the volume on the narrative of the game and crank up the volume on the narrative of the player, so to speak.

All that said, there were obvious gaps and questions raised. Where exactly am I and why did I wake up on a beach? Why is no one else here? Who is the bigger, spirit fox? Who imprisoned it? Who are the scavengers, exactly? Who are the cultists, exactly? What is up with the weird purple power grid and powered up obelisks? What are those things being imprisoned in the obelisks? Why were there no warnings to not free the bigger, spirit fox? How does showing it a completed instruction manual pacify it, exactly?

Being a story nerd, I have a sort of instinctive negative reaction to all those gaps and questions, but I barely let them detract from my rating of Tunic's narrative by the time I was done. My take on what's really going on is that the game is messing around with the fourth wall through the instruction manual and focus on the player over the fox avatar/character and plot for a very definite reason. Every time you open the manual there is a split second where you can see an old tube tv with the game screen on pause, simulating a kid from the 80's/90's pausing their game to look up something in the book. The hand made scribbles and notes on all the pages of the manual obviously reinforce this. By the end of the game, at least in the "share your wisdom" route that I took, it seems clear that what the game is really about is "saving" an older sibling by reminding them of the joy you shared with them playing games together. This was kind of reinforced for me as the credits rolled and the fox siblings were doing sibling stuff together - including side by side in front of the old tube tv. The net result is that all those questions about what freaky stuff is taking place on this island of fox spirits is completely beside the point and has nothing to do with the actual narrative of the young gamer and older sibling. Maybe that's all a reach, but it seemed pretty obvious at least in my eyes.

---------------------

That's two extraordinarily good vidya games in a row that I've played! I love it. Now, I'm excited to continue with BioShock 2. I haven't decided yet if I'll try to just follow it up with BioShock Infinite, or throw Outer Wilds in-between them. I think there's a good case to be made for playing a series straight through and keeping the momentum going, but there's also a good case for taking a break and not getting burnt out on a series. I guess it's case by case. Whether it's BioShock 2 --> Infinite --> Outer Wilds, or BioShock 2 --> Outer Wilds --> Infinite, I'm almost certainly following up with Mass Effect as my next series.

Until next week nerds!

I'm going to nominate Bastion

Weekly Update #13 - Would You Kindly Make More Games Like BioShock?

Completion!



BioShock Remastered
Main + Extras: 17H 36M
Rating: 9.5/10

Now THAT was a vidya game right there boy-os! I'm so glad I played this one. After three 7/10's in a row I was ready for a banger.

---------------------

Aesthetics: 10/10

No, it's not the most graphically advanced or gorgeous game ever, and it doesn't have a breathtaking musical score or any such thing, but absolutely everything about the way this game is presented is a perfect fit for the setting and story. From the ambience of bubbling deep sea currents washing over Rapture's walkways and causing the structures to creak and groan, to the 50's vibe in every poster and song, to the incredible voice acting of mad scientists, sycophants, gangsters, and creepy little girls, this game nailed it. I haven't been so immersed in a video game for a while. Amazing.

Here's two examples that just blew me away:



The use of light at the end of a dark hallway and an ominous shadow being cast to get me primed for stuff to hit the fan was perfect. What made it even juicier was the fact that when I rounded the bend, the figure wasn't there! Obviously, that prompted me to look up right away and see the hole in the ceiling the upstanding denizen of rapture scurried into, and I spent the rest of the level on edge and looking not only 360 degrees around for enemies, but now up and down as well. Masterfully done.



I found an audio log or two from a Russian woman hysterical over her daughter being turned into a Little Sister. In one of the logs she gives the code to her and her husbands room. When you track it down you see the corpses, the photo of their daughter, and the pills. These bits of environmental storytelling all over the place pulled me deeper and deeper into the story and the horror of it all.

---------------------

Gameplay: 8/10

Apart from the story, BioShock is fairly standard FPS fare with a bit of a "caster" twist with the Plasmids. I enjoyed the variety of weapons, abilities, and loadouts that allowed you to tailor your playstyle and experiment with several different approaches. For example, I played a good portion of the game with either the Shotgun and MG, then switched to every stealth and Wrench ability equipped and relied on the combo of stun/freeze plasmid + bash face, then switched again to a pyromaniac strategy with napalm and fire plasmids. All were very fun.

I really only had a few qualms with the gameplay, but they haunted me the entire playthrough.

First, the map is not very intuitive. Since I didn't want to miss any audio logs and needed to explore just about everywhere, I ended up spending a LOT of time menuing onto the map screen to figure out which way I was supposed to go and which staircase led where, etc. Often when I figured the routing out I'd realize that the map was actually more confusing than just navigating by sight, but again I was too afraid to miss something. The level design was generally very good from a gameplay perspective (even better from a story perspective), but could be tedious or obnoxious here and there. There was one spot where I could see an audiolog and some ammo/consumables under a set of stairs and simply could not find how to reach them. I cleared the entire level and combed every inch of it multiple times but could not get under those stairs. As far as I know it's the only audio log I missed.

Second, hotkeys just didn't agree with me. I should have bit the bullet and just customized my bindings, but I didn't want to figure it all out and just assumed the defaults were ideal. I really struggled with the F1-4 keys being my plasmids and, more importantly, them changing their order whenever you equipped a different one. Very frustrating in the heat of battle. Also, each weapon having multiple ammo types to efficiently deal with certain enemies and situations is cool in theory, but is another frustrating thing to deal with in the middle of a fight trying to madly hit "b" for your armor piercing rounds only to find that it switched to anti-personnel rounds. Honestly, this is more of a "me" thing and I readily confess I'm not good at twitchy, reflex based, high octane combat focused gameplay. I'm more of a turned based and strategy guy ya know? It wasn't until the last level of the game that I realized I could just do all my switching in menus with combat paused and didn't need the hotkeys at all. Derp.

Thirdly, the difficulty level of the Big Daddy fights was a bit steep for an FPS noob like me. I stayed on the default "normal" difficulty, but died SO much to these beasts. I get that's kind of the point that these hulking genetically augmented monstrosities are a problem you must solve, but it was definitely frustrating. I finally figured out their weaknesses though and eventually I just came to terms with the fact that I needed to deal with 2-3 of them per level, so I made sure to always have access to enough Electric Gel, Electric Buck, EVE, and AP rounds for the MG for a Big Daddy fight. Basically I had to cheese them and keep it stun locked while I whittled them down between stuns.

Obviously, these are all nitpicks and very surmountable, so I still rate the gameplay highly.

---------------------

Narrative: 10/10

BioShock is easily one of the best video game stories I've ever experienced. I don't even want to write too much about it because this post would just be a wall of spoiler redactions. That, and there's just so many layers of awesome that I can't do it justice. I'll just hit some high points.

Rapture as a setting is just cool and perfect for a dystopian, war torn hellscape. The suspension of disbelief required to accept that I was in a city on the bottom of the ocean ended up not being a problem at all for me and it was by far one of the most immersive (heh) worlds I've ever experienced in fiction. The post WW2 industrial aesthetic was also right on the money for this story.

The plot was gripping and absolutely perfectly paced with the right amount of mystery. The opening hook of the plane crash and the lighthouse amidst the wreckage was spectacular. The balance between a sense of foreboding and "well, I HAVE to know more" was exquisite. I'm not going to lie, I did think in the first level or two that the player character was going to be a lame avatar or an arbitrarily inserted plot device, and I couldn't have been happier that I was wrong. The twists in this game! Chef's kiss.

The conflicts and themes of the game are a bit tougher to accurately nail down because there's a number of ways one could interpret them. In my opinion, the game is essentially telling two separate but related stories: first, the events of Rapture's recent past that led it to it's current state of dysfunction and disintegration, and second, the events the player character is presently going through in order to escape the madness in one piece. The conflict driving the narrative of the preceding events is basically Andrew Ryan's various ideologies vs. reality and human nature. I'd phrase the theme of that part of the story as something like "Extreme ideologies may function in theory, but are almost never sustainable in the real world with real people". The conflict driving the second story that is focused on the player character is something like compulsion vs. freedom. I'll just borrow a phrase from the game to sum up the theme of the player character's story arc: "A man chooses, a slave obeys". All of the themes and conflicts in BioShock work amazingly well because, even though the narrative is set in a wildly unrealistic time and place with absurd personalities, the controlling ideas underneath them all are very real to our lives. God, government, money, science, morality, work, leisure, industry, innovation, crime, power, desperation, propaganda, opportunism, deceit, progress, social unrest, politics, exploitation, and altruism are all woven together in a glorious tapestry of story. It's incredible. I don't even want to start down the rabbit hole of how this game incorporates a wealth of Christian ideas and Greek mythology throughout because it would just take too long. Suffice to say, it's all glorious.

None of what I've been gushing about would be possible without the creme de la creme of BioShock that is it's characters. Wow. There wasn't a single bad or boring or filler character. I'll refrain from opining about some of the side personalities like Suchong and Cohen and just focus on the heavy hitters and their arcs.

Andrew Ryan - This guy kind of IS BioShock. Everything hinges on him. My understanding is that he is based off of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, which I have not read, and the ideology she developed which is commonly called objectivism. I have no idea if the game accurately represented Rand's work or objectivism (Ryan feels like a caricature and strawman if I'm being honest, but it works). For the purposes of the game it is essentially extreme - and I do emphasize extreme - merit based capitalism, industrialism, libertarianism, and atheistic humanism.

What I find very cool about Andrew Ryan is that he is one of the best flat character arcs I've ever come across. Basically that means that the character doesn't change or grow much if at all throughout the narrative despite all external forces pressing against them. This can be done positively or negatively, and in Ryan's case it's definitely negative as he stubbornly and catastrophically clings to his ideologies despite all the evidence of their many failures. He refuses to moderate his beliefs even in the face of his own instinctive violation of them in a few instances and really cements himself as a fanatical ideologue and hypocrite.

All of that said, Ryan is oddly commendable at times despite how utterly contemptible he is in general. One can't deny, the man has vision, conviction, intellect, and some serious guts to back it all up. The writers seemed to be going for a larger than life Ford/Rockefeller/Disney tycoon type on steroids and I think they succeeded.

I mentioned above that I saw BioShock as two separate, but related stories, and I see part of the brilliance of Andrew Ryan as the fact that he glues the two stories together perfectly in what is easily the best scene in the game. Ryan's ideologies have failed when set free in the real world with flawed people and now he knows the fix is in as his assassin closes in, Atlas has all the leverage, and Rapture is a leaking, ruined shell of what it once was. He has an ace up his sleeve though and reveals that he knows all about Jack, their relation to each other, and the trigger phrase to mind control Jack. Then he drops the big line: "A man chooses. A slave obeys." In his last act of defiance Ryan refuses to be a victim or loser, but rather chooses suicide at Jack's hand while making it clear that he sees Jack as his "biggest disappointment" and nothing but a slave. What an amazing way to glue together the ending of Ryan's arc and the conflict of ideology vs. reality with the midpoint of Jack's arc and the conflict of compulsion vs. freedom and setting up the final act of the game. Goosebumps.

Atlas - How bad do you have to be to make me sympathize with and miss Andrew Ryan? Frank Fontaine levels of bad, that's how bad. What a piece of work. I must say that I really appreciate a despicable and well written villain, and Atlas/Fontaine is that in spades. Diabolical, conniving, opportunistic, power hungry, remorseless, deceitful, and great with accents. Incredible. The big reveal was great, though I must admit I found myself thinking pretty early on that there was more to this Atlas fella than he let on. Then you start seeing stuff like this:



Yeah, sure buddy.

Fontaine makes such a great foil to Andrew Ryan because, while Ryan would zealously eliminate all that runs counter to his beliefs, Fontaine is the type of sleazeball that has no beliefs apart from selfishness and will seize any opportunity whatsoever. Fontaine is the true fulfillment and outworking of Ryan's extremism, and Ryan just can't see it with all his pseudo-principled idealism in the way.

After beating the game I did consume some review content out of curiosity, and apparently the final boss fight is considered somewhat lackluster by a lot of folks. I'll agree that it wasn't particularly difficult, but I could get behind the whole "juiced up, power mad psycopath on the run from an assassin HE created" vibe the writers were going for at the end. I loved the poetic justice of the hung-on-his-own-gallows end to Fontaine's arc as he died at the hands of Jack in a Big Daddy suit and an onslaught of Little Sisters harvesting Adam - all monsters of Fontaine's making.

Jack - Our hero, and the big positive character arc. I'm aware there is an alternative ending, but I don't know what it entails because I have a conscience and of course chose to rescue all of the Little Sisters. I bring that up to say that it was positively genius for the writers to put the choice to rescue or harvest the sisters at such an early point in the narrative. It really is the only highly relevant choice you are given in the whole game, aside from what weapons and skills to use. It sets up Jack's arc perfectly. After all, a man chooses and a slave obeys. Did the player choose the humane thing and rescue the innocent little girl who is a victim, or did they slavishly obey Atlas's suggestion to get every drop of Adam they can and murder her? Once you reach the point in the game that you realize Jack is only acting out of compulsion, it really gives some depth to his character to realize that, despite being a genetically augmented test tube baby sleeper cell assassin under a type of hypnotic mind control, he is actually a free agent. This dovetails beautifully with his shifting goals (from "kill Ryan" to "kill Fontaine") and shifting motivations (from "obey compulsion" to "break free from compulsion").

I must say that I approve highly of that ending cutscene too. Through his choices, Jack became more of a man than his radical father and more free than his opportunistic creator who was enslaved to his own selfishness. Jack ends up being the only really altruistic character in the story, and his reward of seeing the Little Sisters he saved grow up and be there for him by his deathbed is cinematically top notch.

---------------------

I'm sure I could find more to say, but I'll leave it at that. What a game. I will absolutely replay it someday. I'm not sure if I can bring myself to pursue the alternate ending by harvesting the Little Sisters. We'll see, lol. In the meantime, I'm excited to get to BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite.

First, a quick palette cleanse with Tunic. I'm around a third or halfway through it and am loving it. Much more aesthetics/gameplay than story, but even the story has it's charm and plenty of mystery thus far. The soundtrack is outrageously chill and good. I'm digging how the gameplay is a sort of meta puzzle as you solve puzzles to unlock information in the form of an instruction manual. The chain of dopamine hits from aha moments is a great experience. Between Tunic and BioShock, I've been riding some high quality vidya games for the last week or so, that's for sure.

Until next time nerds!

Love the triangle, that works just about perfectly. Zelda games despite being very pretty aren't well known for their narrative or story, Majora's Mask is probably the only one that has an outstanding narrative for me. So I can completely understand where your coming from. I think that's a pretty good way of splitting up the different aspects of games, and I'm sure for others the ideal balance is different too.

Thanks! Like I mentioned in my reply to your review, I think more gamers will rate Echoes higher than I did. I'm the weird one.

In other words, I think the average gamer puts greater weight on gameplay and aesthetics at the expense of narrative while I am the exact opposite. Just my hunch. It adds up when you consider that successful game studios are making games balanced that way though.

Weekly Update #12 - How Zelda and Geometry Helped Me To Better Understand My Video Game Preferences

Completion!



The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
Main + Extras: 29H 28M
Rating: 7/10

Well I finished the new Legend of Zelda hotness that Nintendo dropped late last month and found it to be... just ok.

BUT! I thought a lot about why it didn't give me the same wow factor that other Zelda games have and managed to learn a lot about why, and how that reflects more on me than the game. So, I'll just jump right in to breaking this thing down.

---------------------

Aesthetics: 9/10

Nintendo knows their stuff, especially when it comes to their heavy hitting franchises, and they don't really miss when it comes to how good the games look and sound. The music in this game is spectacular, there's no way around it. The use of leitmotifs and gentle musical references to old standby tunes from Zelda classics is delicious, and it's done without overpowering the novelty of the new tunes. It must also be said that those new tunes are earworms in their own right. All of the music is atmospherically appropriate, and I can really only think of one section where I didn't like the music (the Faron temple), but even then I have to admit it did fit the theme and feel of the area.

The look of the game is naturally going to be very different from the Zelda games I have played before - those being Ocarina of Time, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom - by virtue of doing the "2D-ish-but-kind-of-3D-ish" thing this game does. That said, it doesn't just look "retro" like the older pixelated entries in the series. It's more like a "re-skin" - sort of how Windwaker or the Paper Mario games were - and Echoes of Wisdom is most definitely going for a "cute" look with the textures they used. Naturally, Nintendo pulled it off masterfully and just about everything in this game looks "cute". I admire the execution but personally it just isn't my style, so I can't give it a full 10/10.

---------------------

Gameplay: 7/10

The big marketing hook for this game was "You get to play as Zelda instead of Link! How novel and fun!". I'll admit, I took the bait and was pumped about the idea. It's not a bad idea at all to take a beloved franchise and give it one solid twist to keep things fresh. The problem is how playing as Zelda was implemented. In terms of the puzzle solving portion of the game, the novelty of playing as Zelda is you get to copy and replicate (or "echo") various items in the game, then manipulate them and Zelda with Navi's Tri's bind ability. This was great fun and superbly implemented. It made the puzzle solutions somewhat reminiscent of Magnesis/Stasis/Ultrahand/Recall from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom where the game essentially becomes an engineering and physics sandbox where all problems have multiple solutions. Absolute heaps of fun to be had with echoes and bind. . . outside of combat.

Fighting with Zelda in this game, in my opinion, is just worse Link or worse Pokemon. You either put out an echo of a monster ("Sword Moblin, I choose you!") and then watch it's clumsy AI script slowly take out the enemy monsters - emphasis on slowly until you get some of the heavy hitting echoes - or you switch to swordsman form (ie: become Link but with a gradually depleting energy bar) and play out the combat as if you are Link instead of Zelda - which kind of defeats the purpose of the novelty of playing as Zelda.

In the "worse Pokemon" scenario, it's worse than playing actual pokemon because in actual pokemon you get to choose which abilities they use, how they target, etc, but in EoW you just kite with Zelda while you watch the AI do it's thing and frequently fail at it, forcing you to summon another and hope for a better result. There is the variability of the sheer number of available echoes, so one might argue that the fun of combat in EoW is coming up with the right echo or combination of echoes to fit the situation, but my counter to that is that at any given point of the game it's pretty darn clear which of your monster echoes is objectively most efficient for the combat you are in. I feel like the creativity of using different combos of echoes in combat is going to mostly be for memes and challenge runs where you try to beat the whole game with a Crow, Crab, or a Rope or whatever.

In the "worse Link" scenario, you activate your swordsman form and become an avatar of Link that uses his moves and equipment at the expense of an energy bar. The idea is that you can only do this in quick bursts before running out of energy - hence the "worse" aspect of this version of Link - but the catch is that you can just upgrade your energy bar, wear gear that improves energy efficiency, and purchase/craft energy potions. Thus, the downside of the energy bar is barely a downside except in the earliest parts of the game. On top of that, pretty significant portions of the game are in areas where certain monster types drop more energy bits for you than you expended to kill them in swordsman form in the first place, negating the energy bar in those areas.

Additionally, there's the fact that SO many enemies are just completely skippable if you aren't a completionist or loot goblin (I'm guilty. I did nearly 100% this thing after all). Fighting enemies does give you more rupees and ingredients overall, but I found both of those resources to be remarkably plentiful and with steep diminishing returns. You can practically run past most things and use sword form for the rest.

The net result of these two to three, in my opinion, massive design flaws with the combat in this game - which is supposed to be centered on the fact that you are playing as Zelda - is that I just ended up always approaching combat by summoning 1-3 generically good echoes with very little variation except where it was obvious (underwater, flying or elemental enemies, etc) and switching to swordsman form to speed things up. So... did I actually play as Zelda? I would argue no.

Now, this is not to say that one couldn't approach the combat with a more purist attitude and rarely use swordsman form and keep using different combinations of monster echoes. I just think it would be a huge sacrifice in efficiency and speed and thus more for the memes and challenges.

All of that said, there are absolutely some killer boss fights in this game.

Another nitpick is the menuing for echoes. They basically repeated the Tears of the Kingdom horizontal item selection menu for the Fuse ability. This is a major party foul since that was one of the most tedious things in that game. It seems particularly silly to do it this way when we already know from stuff like the Tears of the Kingdom Autobuild ability that they can implement a favorites menu. It seems like I should be able to push the d-pad button which opens the echoes menu, then A, B, X, Y, L, ZL, R, ZR for one of my eight customized favorites instead of scrolling through all 100+ echoes for the exact one I want.

My last gameplay nitpick is the rehashing of quest loops. The most recent three Zelda games have pretty much been: go do a thing in desert land, then go do a thing in water place, then go do a thing in fire mountain, then go do a thing in snowy fields, perhaps with a slight adjustment to the order you do them, or an addition of one other locale (for example, jungle land is mandatory in Echoes but was optional in Breath/Tears). I can't be the only one who was disappointed that Echoes rehashed this for the third time in a row, can I? For Nintendo to be SO innovative with a physics engine and puzzles but so basic in other ways really perplexes me.

To summarize the gameplay: exquisite puzzle platformer, but worse Legend of Zelda/Pokemon combat emulator. Poop UI and samey quest progression in a few regards.

---------------------

Narrative: 5/10

This is the part of the game I found myself most disappointed in. The gameplay faux pas were at least partially made up for by the marvelous time I was having solving puzzles and navigating movement creatively. The story, however, is very basic and rings a bit hollow with only - you guessed it - the clever puzzles and spectacular music to keep me from caring too much. It is executed very well, flowing nicely through a well paced plot but without any big payoff. I'll tackle the major pieces of setting, plot, character, conflict, and theme as I saw them.

The setting is good old medieval fantasy Hyrule, which is just by default cool and evocative and nostalgic. The rift world / shadow realm is kind of neat too I guess, but nothing particularly awesome. I don't pretend to know where Echoes of Wisdom lands in the Legend of Zelda timeline. I'm not deep enough into the lore to know or care too much, and I just view each Zelda game as it's own standalone installment. I'm sure there's folks out there that will argue that it matters for the story, but I think that could only be argued for the series as a whole and not just this single installment, which is what I care about.

The plot is pretty clearly a 3 act structure in my view. Act one has an incredible hook in the opening minutes of the game where we switch from Zelda being the damsel in distress and Link winning the "final boss fight" in the dungeon, to Link being the dude in distress and Zelda being the heroine who escapes in the nick of time. We then move into a pretty good inciting incident where the King and his top officials are swallowed up by the rifts and there is a point of no return where Zelda can't be a passive princess but must take action to save Link, her father, and Hyrule. Act two begins somewhere in the first two major areas of Hyrule you have to travel to, and reaches the midpoint of the game when you deal with the rift at Hyrule castle, fight Ganon, and discover he was just an echo. Who's the real baddie behind all of this rift business then? That complication is then followed by another complication as three new areas of concern open up. At one of those three areas Act Three finally begins when one of the goddesses tells you about Null and it's desire to devour creation and reduce everything to a state of nothingness and void because. . . it likes it that way. . . because. . . well, just because. A little more questing to do, and then we're ready for the climax and resolution. The point is, the story is very well structured, flows elegantly from plot point to plot point, and is paced nicely for the most part. I will say that I think they might have held on to some of the mystery of the narrative and what is actually happening in Hyrule a little bit too long, but it works.

Character is where I begin to have a few issues with this game's narrative. As with any Legend of Zelda game, the protagonist is silent with some talkative helpers. This works fine for the most part, but naturally makes for a flatter protagonist that is much more reliant on the supporting characters and antagonist to spice up the story. The supporting characters all have mini arcs, but most are pretty dang cheesy with themes like "be your unique self" and "cooperation and friendship is good, actually" emerging from their questlines. That leaves the big bad to give us some rich character for our narrative. Alas, as with Ganon and Ganondorf in previous Zelda games, the antagonistic forces in Echoes of Wisdom are very one dimensional, seeking destruction for it's own sake with no motive beyond Nintendo needing an archetypal evil to give them a reason for Zelda and Tri to go on a quest. Please just give your bad guys a real motive Nintendo, k thx bye. Sigh. Let me be fair here though: Nintendo has to make games for a very wide audience, so they have to be incredibly accessible and basically spoiler resistant if not spoiler proof in our social media age. This means nothing too spicy or controversial, and no crazy revelations or plot twists. This doesn't mean the characters are "bad", it just means they are shallower by design and not particularly suited to my tastes.

Naturally, shallower characters make for simpler conflict. Something wants to gobble up Hyrule and Zelda objects. Easy peasy. Later in the narrative we learn that the actual conflict is the three goddesses and their creation vs Null and it's void/oblivion/nothingness. Link, Zelda, and Ganon are just avatars of their struggle. In both cases the conflict is pretty straightforward and can simply be stated as life vs death, or existence vs nonexistence, or, if you want to be cheeky, wisdom (see what I did there?) vs foolishness. Again, this isn't necessarily "bad" conflict in a story, just simple and not my preference.

To absolutely no one's surprise, shallow characters and simple conflicts make for shallow and simple themes. The main conflict being as straightforward as life vs death implies a theme of something like "Life is beautiful and worth protecting even at great cost", which is very Hallmark and corny. I think there's more here though. If you look at the theme of the game from the perspective of Zelda and her implied internal conflict between the initial misbelief that she is the "passive princess in the status quo world where the King and Link take care of business" vs her emergent realization that "literally no one but me can save the world", then the theme of the game is pretty clearly something like "Everyone has great dignity and worth despite their station and other's perception of them, and everyone has something unique and beneficial to offer the world around them". Once again, very cheesy and Hallmark and self-evidently true, but hey, who am I to say that there aren't gamers out there who will love to have this exact message delivered to them by a Chibi lady with a neat stick and her pixie friend? I think this makes more sense as the true theme of the game because it is also abundantly clear that the game is playing into the subversion of a damsel in distress trope and is definitely doing the girlboss thing. Ironically, I think Nintendo subverted their subversion with the design issues with Zelda's combat gameplay I mentioned earlier. Whoopsies.

---------------------

I conclude all of this by saying the game was a bit of a let down for me, but not a terrible game by any stretch of the imagination. The bar is just incredibly high for Legend of Zelda. I suppose I should be used to well structured and well paced but lighter narratives from Zelda games at this point, but it still surprises me every time when the big bad is so blandly one dimensional. I need to just accept that a Legend of Zelda game is not about a rich narrative, but rather a functional one that exists almost solely to support addictive gameplay and gorgeous music and graphics.

Mulling all of this over made me realize that, for me, nearly every video game can be neatly divided into the three categories of Aesthetics, Gameplay, and Narrative and appeal to different psychographics or player personalities. It can be visualized quite nicely with a triangle. Imagine Aesthetics at one point, Gameplay at another, and Narrative at the third. A theoretically perfect game could be represented by a single point in the dead center of the triangle, where Aesthetics, Gameplay, and Narrative are all well executed and perfectly balanced. That's theoretical though, and even if such a "perfect" game existed the premise wouldn't be entirely true because, for one thing, these three aspects of a video game aren't zero sum and don't have to be balanced to be ideal, and for another thing, gamers have subjective tastes and will value these three qualities differently.

It's more complex than a simple triangle then. It's more like there are regions within that triangle that represent my "perfect" game with my ideal balance of Aesthetics, Gameplay, and Narrative, and there are different regions within that triangle that represent someone else's "perfect" game with their ideal balance. Is there a way to divide this up into a fairly representative pattern of player psychographics? I think so.

I believe you would have to take into account four basic divisions of players: the first three would be players that favor a range trending towards one component over the other two, and the fourth would be players that trend more towards "balance" and favor a range of all three components with a possible bias toward two of the three. They might be represented thus: Agn, aGn, agN, and AGn/AgN/aGN. That looks kind of dumb and clumsy though. Apropos of absolutely nothing, I'll return to my original triangle and modify it to include all four divisions. It will look something like this:



Magnificent, isn't it?

TL;DR, MZD is the type of gamer that loves the triangle that is biased toward Narrative over Aesthetics and Gameplay, but The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom lives in the center triangle in the tip far away from Narrative.

Until next time nerds!

Out of curiosity, how much do you think previously playing the entire series influenced your impressions of Echoes of Wisdom? I've only played OoT, BotW, and TotK through to completion previously, and found myself relatively disappointed in Echoes. Not because it was 2D-ish either.

I'm still settling my thoughts on it for my post in a day or two, but I'm feeling like 7/10 feels right for me. Honestly, I think most players will lean higher than that though.

Edit: to clarify, this isn't meant to sound snooty or adversarial lol. Games hit different to different players, no big deal. I was just wondering if deep cuts in lore (like the map layout callbacks and various Easter eggs throughout Echoes) play a big part in someone's take

Weekly Update #11

I'll counteract last week's excessively long post with a short one this go around.

The "one game at a time" plan got de-railed a bit this week. I started The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom with the intention of just playing it straight through (new release hype! lol I never play brand new games). My darling 12 year old son - a massive Zelda fan that cut his video game teeth on Breath of the Wild - promptly expressed his fear of suffering the indignity of his father beating the game before he did. I decided to give the ol' boy the W and switched gears to BioShock after 5ish hours sunk into Echoes. These games are NOT similar, to put it mildly. My brain was thrown through more loops when my wife needed the PC for some important projects throughout the week, so I spent a little more time with Zelda as my son got way ahead of me and was confident I wouldn't beat him. The result is that I've spent about half of my vidya time for the week on each game. The lad has beaten Zelda as of a day or two ago, so I've shifted focus completely to Zelda now since I'm at a decent pause point in BioShock.

Echoes is fun, but I'm withholding judgement as to where it stands in my personal Zelda tier list until after I've beaten it and thought about it for a while. Obvious pros for the game are 1) it's a Zelda game, so naturally the visuals, music, and gameplay are very well crafted and 2) it's a Zelda game, so puzzles are the name of the game and this installment is once again doing cool things with abilities that allow you to completely re-think physics, space, movement, and combat. The obvious con for the game is... it's a Zelda game, so the narrative is pretty darn basic. That is not a "bad" thing per se, I just happen to prefer story rich games. I have reached the point where I have fought Ganon as Zelda (lol, jk, all the relevant bits of the fight are spent in Swordsman form) and there are three new rifts to deal with in Eldin, Faron, and Lanayru.

Speaking of story-rich games, holy BioShock batman. What a trip so far. I've been equal parts horrified, amused, curious, and definitely impressed up to this point. Not to be a total cheeseball, but I'll sound artsy fartsy for a second and admit that this game is a masterclass in visual storytelling. It reminded me of how I felt the first time playing through Fallout 3 and New Vegas with all the different hidden data logs/voice recordings and evocative scenes telling the story. All the posters and signs throughout Rapture are reminiscent of some of the vaults in Fallout complete with 1950's energy. The Splicers also remind me of Fallout's Fiends and Borderland's Psychos.

I'll add that - even though I'm not generally a fan - when horror is done extremely well like it has been so far in BioShock, I can't help but love it. It reminds me of one of my favorite films, Alien, in a weird way. The content and tone are wildly different, but the way they build tension and set scenes is similar in a way, at least to my pea brain. Again, I'll reserve judgement until I'm through it all, especially since I can't help but imagine some plot twists or big reveals are in my future. I just finished the Arcadia level with all the tree farms and what not and just arrived at a level where it seems I won't be dealing with Atlas/Ryan, but some other guy that sees himself as cultured and a sort of connoisseur. Can't wait. It seems that the game is really setting me up for the question of who the heck the player character/protagonist really is (Ryan keeps asking and speculating, and it just seems too random that we managed to find a mid-Atlantic underwater city), who Atlas really is, and who will win the power struggle between him and Andrew Ryan.

Fun stuff, and I'm excited to keep playing both of these games. Until next time nerds!

September was good for gaming by my standards with 4 completions:

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
48. A game that has been a HLTB Game of the Month

Halo: Reach
38. A game with a subtitle

Dragon Age II Ultimate Edition
36. A game that heavily features either fire or ice
I'm taking liberty with this one. The game itself doesn't heavily feature fire or ice, but my elemental mage build definitely did.

Halo 4
20-2. A game set in the far future

That puts me at 16/50 with 3 months to go. My goal is 25/50, and I've got some shorter games - compared to these RPGs I've been playing - on the immediate horizon, so I should hit or exceed that target.