Category Archives: Video Game

THE LAST OF US 2

I had forgotten that THE LAST OF US was only a mildly entertaining game, so I foolishly believed that THE LAST OF US 2 was going to be a great game (because people I knew were talking about it excitedly).
The fist sign of a terrible experience was that the game for PS4 has two discs. One is just a data disc that has to be loaded first. This made me cringe.
My apprehension was well-founded. That extra data was for a bad story. Not only was the writing bad – it was also political. This is a social agenda propagandist tool, not a game. I was going to instantly return it, but I decided to play it because I was streaming on Twitch and perhaps I could entertain my subscribers by insulting the extremely bad writing.
Even if the game weren’t political, the movie parts are as long as a mini-series, and it didn’t take long for me to fantasize about beating up anyone who was responsible for the creation of this annoying game. Seriously, it’s about 2 hours of actual gameplay, and 5 million hours of listening to retarded dialogue while watching an uninspired video that would make anyone walk out of a theater.
95% of the game is pointless. It’s made even worse because it is inescapable. You are forced to endure the maddening stupidity. I am not joking. It actually feels like a nightmare because your character can’t run. He or she can only walk slowly until all of the ridiculous dialogue is exhausted.
During some parts, you can opt to “skip cinematic.” Would you like to guess what that does? It brings you to a 3-minute loading screen, and INTO ANOTHER cinematic that you can’t escape, unless it brings you to another 3-minute loading screen, which then brings you to a cinematic that you can’t escape/quit!!!

I made the mistake of quitting the game after I couldn’t take any more of the incessant cinematics – when I restarted the game, I had to endure EVERYTHING all over again. I almost cried.
You get about 15 minutes of actually playing a game, then an hour and a half of being hopelessly stuck in a flashback scene, and then you play for maybe 15 minutes, and then another hour and a half of flashback scene, rinse-and-repeat.
Why did I continue playing? It was like losing money in a casino. I had lost hours, hours of hating every second of the game, but if I ejected the disc I would probably run until I saw a dog or homeless person and kick it in the head. THAT is how angry I was. I had to play just a little bit more in order to get SOME form of payoff. It really was the only reason to continue. I could not accept that I got fooled into playing the worst game ever made.

At least the intermissions in Pac Man were funny and short – and FAR SUPERIOR to the cinematics in LAST OF US 2.
By the way, how stupid is it for you to die in a flashback? Did a Polak come up with this “clever” idea?
You play several characters. I forgot how many because the only thing that I can think of right now is how to get rid of my copy of this game. I deleted all traces of it from PS4.

I imagine that the writers thought that they were groundbreaking by making you play the protagonist and the antagonist (both want to kill each other), as well as any of the man-bun faggots who depict this future as the gay version of the planet of the apes.

I would seriously rather turn into a zombie and get shot than live in that man-bun world. Also, it is more multicultural than the Barney the Dinosaur world, which means that it is not authentic – it is 100% contrived. It’s an embarrassing gimmick, wouldn’t you say?
The game is linear, and it is made even more annoying by having only ONE solution to any problem or puzzle. If you don’t figure it out, you’re fucked and stuck.

The game is also anal. In many of the flashbacks… let me give you ONE example, but multiply that by ten million (the amount of similar times it will trap you) – in one flashback, a twat and a fag with lots of hair gel, in a world that is post-apocalyptic, are on a date. They don’t discuss why all the men have hair gel and man buns, or why women don’t understand what ladylike behavior is or why the female antagonist has more muscles than a man on steroids… no, they go to an abandoned aquarium, and you, the player, MUST touch every fucking goddamn exhibit or you the scene will not end. Seriously, you MUST touch EVERY exhibit, of which there are many, and you hear trivia about each. Normally I pet the dolphin every day, but in this game you have to go through five floors of displays, unable to escape until you suffer through the explanations of each boring one.

If that weren’t pointless, you also have to find a chew-toy and make a dog play fetch. You also have to strum a guitar. Eject the game and play Guitar Hero instead.
Many of these horrible “cinematics” make me wonder why the developers didn’t just make those areas playable. Instead, we are forced to watch awful scenes that drag on and on.
I hated the zombies, and I never was much into monsters that can kill you in one shot. Wow, that’s not frustrating at all. (sarcasm) Yes, I am a fan of the Dark Souls games, but the seemingly impossible foes in that game are a joy to figure out and to defeat, and you can do so in many creative ways, but in LAST OF US 2, there is only ONE way to do this or that.
The only fun in the game is when you fight humans, but each such encounter lasts only minutes, and then you are subject to the torture of an inescapable flashback of SEVERAL aggravating scenes that last 90 minutes, as I mentioned before. I’d rather watch a faucet drip.
There are leftover mechanics that should have been written out of the code. For example, if you run toward a tight squeeze between two buildings, do you really need to press a button on your controller in order for you to go through it? There are a lot of these needless things that just pad the game time. It’s like telling the same bad joke every 5 minutes.
I seriously wonder if I can get a refund, or if I can sue for mental anguish.

Sekiro

This game should be called “Suck Kiro

I wanted to love this game. It didn’t take long for me to see the signs that this wasn’t going to be the case.

The button configuration is vastly different from the other “Souls” games. When I finally quit playing this game, I launched the first DARK SOULS, and it took me an hour to unlearn the stupid button assignment from aforementioned game.

So yes, the first irritating thing about this game is the unlearning of the previous games.

When I played Bloodborne, I hated it because it had a gun. I love to use shields, but even if I didn’t, I hate the idea of a gun in a game like that. Still, the button configuration was familiar, and playing this second-rate Souls game made me better at two-handing weapons when I returned to the traditional Souls games.

Another difference is that you recover stamina by holding a guard position, which is the opposite of a souls game.

Some people have praised the combat, but playing this game is like playing Robotron – just shooting blindly. I tested this by just blindly hitting the R1 button repeatedly. How can a game be this bad? The predecessors were games in which there was some thought put into the combat, but this new installment is a button-masher.

The previous games allowed for a variety of playing styles, but this one modifies your behavior into a chaotic hit-the-button-repeatedly drone, This is not fun.

Boss battles are different in two ways. The first is that you have to perform two attacks that smell like backstabs and parries, but they are called “death blows” which is a stupid idea. You can hit all you want, but you have perform these actions, or so it seems.

This is well suited for an anally retentive player, but I like freedom in my games. The frustration is even greater when each boss seems to be conquered best in a specific way. I liked challenge-runs in previous games, defeating a Hydra, for example, with a dagger instead of the longest weapon possible. Good luck with that in this bad game.

The treasure items are meaningless. The first half out of the game felt like a Mario game, and after a few found items, I discovered that i didn’t care about them. In Dark Souls, it was like an episode of “Let’s Make A Deal” whenever a shiny thingy was seen. Does one risk death in order to obtain what can be behind the curtain?

In Sekiro. I didn’t care about any item, no matter which boost it gave.

I don’t like being forced to play with one weapon. I kept reminding myself that this is a Japanese game, not a medieval horror fantasy, but I hated the combat. There are animations that may impress a kid, or someone who likes stupid action movies, but the animations are random, not something that I choose, and even if I could choose specific attacks, the gameplay seems more like Mortal Combat than a Souls game.

Word of advice – turn auto-target off. Actually, scratch that. It turns on by itself anyway. This was endlessly annoying after I committed a sneak attack and then tried to get away. Instead of running to freedom, my character auto-targeted someone BEHIND me ten million miles away, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

The stealth is stupid. Sekiro doesn’t have artificial intelligence. It has artificial retardation. When I was in stealth mode, three stories high on a roof, enemies for far away detected me, yet when I WASN’T in stealth, I was as close as two feet away, almost facing the opponent, and I wasn’t noticed.

Sekiro is a fake-stealth game, and it copied an annoying part of those games. When combat starts, whether stealth was broken or I charged in, the same annoying music started. In Dark Souls, there is only special music for boss fights, and each one has a different theme.

This musical cue for any combat became so painful that I was like a Pavlovian dog – but instead of salivating at the sound, I cried tears of agony. I hated this so much that I went into the game options and turned the music down to volume zero. Same with the dialogue, but that didn’t work too well.

The game was a bit less annoying with the music off, but it was still a tedious experience.

Another silly aspect is the grappling hook, which makes the game into a wanna-be Spider Man. Why would I play something like that?

The character can fall 10,000 feet in some instances and bear not even a scratch, but in others a player can die by falling ten feet.

Another bad thing about combat is that some opponents have attacks that will succeed no matter what you do. I was twenty feet away from someone who tried to grab me. I jumped anyway, but the animation suddenly gliched into me being caught by the arms. Apparently, you have to be anal and press only ONE type of button at ONE possible moment, or you die.

I have played the Dark Souls games, and while some parts were frustrating, I ultimately enjoyed most of the experiences. In Sekiro, the reason why I continued playing despite never having enjoyed a single moment was because I didn’t want to admit that I lost $60, and I wanted to get SOME kind of feeling that I didn’t waste me time.

Stephen R. Donaldson wrote books in the “Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever” trilogies. I wanted to like them, but I ended up only reading them to say that I had read them. I even re-read the first book recently to see if maybe I would like them now that i am older. Nope. Sekiro is like Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. Do it for bragging rights, but not for the experience.

Coincidentally, Stephen R. Donaldson wrote “Mirror of Her Dreams” and “A Man Rides Through” which were of a pleasurable writing style and were amazing stories, so they are like Dark Souls games, while Sekiro is bad.

In Dark Souls, when I died, I cared. This didn’t happen in Sekiro. I had absolutely no thrills or tension. It was a bad game that just kept getting worse. I didn’t finish it because I already feel stupid for having wasted time on it.

Sekiro is something to erase from your mind and from your hard drive. Don’t make the mistake that I did.

I fired up a game of Dark Souls to help erase the foul taste of Sekiro from my mouth.

Seriously, I have to state it again – I killed enemies simply by button-mashing, not caring at all what I did, and not blocking. Try that in any other Souls game and you will be toast. In Sekiro, I was victorious. A stupid game for stupid people.

Fallout 76

When I played Fallout 3, I wondered why there wasn’t a massive multiplayer world like World of Warcraft that was set in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of Fallout.

When Fallout 76 was announced, I felt like a dream came true.  But the dream became a nightmare.

The disappointment was immediate., however,  I forced myself to play because I hoped that the disillusionment was just a matter of me not being accustomed to the changes.

The social aspect was retarded.  When I encountered the first actual person, he communicated with the equivalent of an emo-gee.   By the way, anyone who uses an emo-gee when writing to me is immediately dismissed as a simpleton.  Adults use words.

I was a fool for expecting the social experience of World of Warcraft.  I don’t expect games that are played on consoles to bear the same text-chat of the Blizzard game, but the emo-gee limitation was almost enough for me to take the disc out and sell it.

I had imagined bands of people grouping together to become raiders, protectors, and other options.  There was not even a hint of this. In the time that I have been playing, the only interactions have been the handful of retarded emo-gee communication, and the three times that I was attacked, which seemed more like player boredom than malice.

The social aspect was non-existent.

The worst part of the game is a nag to eat and drink.  I don’t know why the game forces a player to do this.  When Grand Theft Auto introduced that, it made me hate the game.  But it is far worse in Fallout 76. You get nagged EVERY 10 MINUTES !!!  You even get nagged when you are in combat!!!  This is not an exaggeration.

Yes, I would have complained if I had to eat and drink even if it was a nag once a week.  Why not have a nag to defecate and urinate?  The game is not realistic.  I fall five stories without a scratch in some areas, and in other areas I fall ten feet and die.  My character can hop up five feet, but cannot walk over a small branch (I have to jump over that tiny obstacle).

I tried to love the game despite the frustration and disappointment.  There were a couple of hours when I pretended that I know nothing about Fallout games and that I was in a Walking Dead episode, but the nag for eating and drinking kept taking me out of the pretend -reminding me that the game isn’t anything like I thought it would be, and even there were no predecessors, this game is just a time sink.

I stopped playing because I realized that it’s not going to get better unless there is a new game and I get a refund for what I have suffered.

Dark Souls Remaster

When I first purchased Dark Souls, it was because I wanted to play a medieval-flavored game.  I had played Word of Warcraft a bit TOO much, and I had a disappointing run with Elder Scrolls.

My frustration mounted due to the difficulty level.  The game came with no manual, which added to my distress.  It didn’t take long for the game to become impossible, and my rage built to the point where I threw my controller into a wall.

Why make a game that is impossible?

As I seethed, the rational part of me wondered if this game were designed as a rebellion against the button-mashing games like World of Warcraft.  I searched on the Internet, and I discovered a game community that offered help.

The walkthrough videos, like Ghey for Games  were a much-enjoyed crutch.  The game was challenging, and the difficulty made the seemingly-impossible victories so intense that I actually jumped out of my seat and roared.

Dark Souls
Dark Souls

When I heard about a remaster, I was excited.  I was going to buy it even if it were the exact same game simply because my PS3 is rarely used in favor of the PS4.

As it turns out, it is identical to the original in many respects.  Some of the game mechanics seem improved, but I did not conduct an actual test to determine that.  It could be an illusion.

The look of the game is noticeably enhanced in some areas, and that means a lot because the original was rather nice to behold.

I have been unable to tear myself away from the game.  I had played the original a million times, so the new character I made went down a path that I never tried before, and it was exhilarating.

One gripe is that there are only two ring slots instead of four.

The online improvements don’t really matter to me, but they are noticeable.

Ultimately, I am happy with my purchase, and yes, I bought it for the full price.

In the middle part of my playing past,  I sought videos of the masters, like this guy, but I started to enjoy the casual gameplay vids of this girl and this girl.

If you are new to this game series, I urge you to get the aforementioned walkthrough paused on your computer so that when you suffer a heart attack, you can then see what had escaped you.

It’s a new way to play.  Every part of the game is to be taken seriously until you become a master and know the tricks.  Until then, you will not dismiss any foes as you would in other games.

I have a warning.  The combat system will make you hate the mechanics of other games, like the Morrowind series.  I liken it to Budweiser.  Yes, when you were younger, that was beer.  But when you discovered higher quality, you still drank Bud if nothing else were offered, but you thought about how much better it would be to hold something different in your hand.  (insert my penis in that line to make that into the joke that surely you were thinking).

Dishonored 2 (Bethesda)

When I first played DISHONORED on PS3, I did so in order to relive the extreme fun of THIEF, a game that i had played on XBOX years earlier. Unfortunately, this didn’t have the same feeling, and I didn’t like the gameplay at all. DISHONORED had a lot of character abilities that negated the sense of tension. In THIEF (the old game), the character was distinctly human and had to rely on stealth. Everything could kick his ass easily. In DISHONORED, the character had supernatural abilities which made him seem almost invulnerable, at least compared to the beloved THIEF game. As much as I hated the differences, I grew to love DISHONORED as a game unto itself. If I stopped comparing it to THIEF, then it was fun as its own thing.
Surprisingly, THIEF came out for PS3 that year. I actually cancelled all other plans for the first week, but I did so seemingly for nothing. The new version of THIEF had exactly the same gameplay as DISHONORED. I almost threw the game into the wall. It’s as if the same game “engine’ was just transferred to a different story.
I performed a cursory search to find an explanation for this insult. Apparently THIEF was under new management, so-to-speak. The new company did not seem to realize what had made THIEF on Xbox so amazing.
I continued playing the new THIEF, hating the stupid changes, but eventually I learned to discard my love of the earlier version and to accept that such a game might never exist again. This helped me to enjoy the game and I finished it with a hunger for more.

This brings us to DISHONORED 2 (for PS4).  I purchased this on the very first day of release, and have only now finished it, some weeks later. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I had no preconceived notions to dispel.
This time around i decided to use stealth only as a means to kill. In the very early THIEF, the character was not an assassin per se. The goals were largely non-lethal. The DISHONORED games make the character that yo play able to easily fight opponents, so I used stealth only as a sort of cheating method to exact revenge. 
Let me explain. If the fiction shows that a kind ruler were usurped by a brutal one, why would his officers remain? Wouldn’t they flee, or pretend to go along with the new rules until they could do something positive?

Further, if the officers of the new regime were brutal as well, following orders instead of trying to rescue the the benevolent ruler who was imprisoned, should my character spare them? The story in the game disallowed those characters from reverting to their nicer ways. Why leave that kind of character alive, who would stop at nothing to prevent the rescue?
I became the vengeful hero, or anti-hero, depending on how you see things. on the gamer side of the decision. The game was not like THIEF (the earlier version) in an important difference. in THIEF I had to use stealth to survive,. In DISHONORED, DISHONORED 2, and the New THIEF, stealth just provides different rewards. It is not necessary for life.  The tension is not caused by fear of death – it is fear of game status.

I must confess that it was fun to play this way. I may play again in a few months, trying to take the nonlethal approach. But even if I never play again, this experience was worth the $50.