Ubisoft E3 Press Conference: #girlwood

I was pleased with Ubisoft's main spokeswoman, who remained on the floor throughout the whole conference as opposed to the multiples of spokesmen we've received so far at E3... eh. I don't feel like writing this post, as I mentioned in my EA post, so I am going to be more concise. But I will say that I felt a big risk in having a spokeswoman was thankfully kept from transforming into an awkward disaster at the Ubisoft press conference, as the gaming environment has been known for pretty awful misogynistic portrayals and shameful levels of fanservicing at times.

Ubisoft began by showing off the next Rocksmith, which started with Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains performing a mini-concert on guitar. At first, I feared this was going to devolve into the all too familiar embarrassment of giving a game like Rock Band to someone from Black Sabbath and watching in sheer awkwardness as the band member fails at getting the controls right. Thankfully, the advantage to Rocksmith is that you use an actual guitar as a controller, allowing for Jerry Cantrell to avoid the trap of awkward controls. The real thing they were showing off here was that Jerry didn't actually pick a song, he chose a group of instruments and began playing on his own. From what he played, the game learned what he was playing and used the instruments to form a full band to play what he was playing. I liked this idea, although I really have no interest in these music games anymore.

The first real game they showed was Splinter Cell: Blacklist. From what I know about Splinter Cell, this game seems true to the stealth-action gameplay. There is an interesting plot of assassinations of different military officers across the world, but beyond that I hadn't much else to say for the game. The next game they showed off was Rayman Legends, which looked absolutely beautiful (due to art style, not just simple graphics alone). I also don't have much to say about Rayman, though. It will be a side-scroller, and to me it seemed like a heavily stylized, indie-game feel of Donkey Kong Country. They said "the different heroes will star in this game," which surprised me because I had no idea there were other protagonists in the Rayman series. I mean, I thought the viking girl and the weird alien things were side characters. Maybe they are and I'm overthinking it. The only Rayman I ever played was one for the Nintendo 64, though, so of course I have no idea what is going on. I liked how the viking woman was the one to save the Rayman in the trailer, though this is probably going to be overlooked as nothing in the long run of things.

The next game they (barely) showed was some game called The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot (I think). There was hardly any gameplay, but they did show a pretty weird trailer where one of the characters goes behind the scenes and talks about his castle and his experiences raiding other castles. All throughout this was some slapstick and somewhat juvenile humor, which only left me with camp in mind and barely a grasp at what the gameplay is like. And then immediately after, this game was overshadowed by the upcoming South Park RPG. Once again, gameplay was traded in for humor as all we really see is a scene where Randy shares with a pupil the martial art of the Nagasaki Fart. South Park may be stupid, but when you place the humor of South Park next to the humor of a game attempting humor, you've overshadowed that other game.

Following this was what appeared to be Ubisoft's following of the trend of showing off ANOTHER racing game. I was about to turn off the conference altogether, because I was sick of all the damn racing games, but Ubisoft actually managed to impress. Unlike every other racing game ever made, The Crew features something quite incredible: thanks to the power of next-gen consoles (people say as if computers lacked this capability), the entire United States mainland is an open world track for a racing game. That's right, from the Mojave Desert to the beaches of Miami to the Redwood Forest, the near-entirety of this country is accessible to your vehicle, presumably without any loading times. If this wasn't mind blowing alone, they have many other features not present in your typical racing game. Similar to Titanfall, which seems to incorporate story mode into multiplayer, The Crew will have this always online feature where you can simultaneously play the game on single player while your friends are out driving in other parts of the country. I think that, unlike the Xbox One (unless you play this on the Xbox One, for some reason), this game won't require you to always be online, so you can still play the single-player stuff.

But it gets better from there. Throughout the map are many different "skills" and challenges, essentially sidequests and other missions from the main missions in the game. These can be done to improve your vehicle's performance or get you some new and better equipment for you to build your car with. What they offer in this game which I have yet to see fully realized in any other racing game is the realism of having different cars for different situations. So let's say you are in a Lamborghini up against a Ford F150 FX2 Sport. Your Lamborghini, obviously, is not meant to be driven off road, but on a track (in this case, an actual road), your car will perform incredibly. Meanwhile, the Ford F150 is designed for off-road use, therefore the driver's optimal method of winning the race against you is not by road, but by driving off-road. This sets up for some really dynamic gameplay where the driver of the high-performance vehicle suddenly has his track crossed by the driver of the off-road vehicle, who emerges from a forest and zooms across the road and over a grassy hill on the other side.

Then there are missions where you can form a squad of different vehicles, each tailored to do their own thing and use their own skills to take down criminal vehicles, all while avoiding the police. That's right, this is a role-playing racing game! And then along with all this is the ability to customize your car on the go with a mobile device. I was so impressed by this fresh take on the standard racing game, and I really do look forward to seeing more of this game in the future.

The next game Ubisoft announces is Watch Dogs, which has an interesting concept. You play as a man who uses his smartphone to hack nearly everything in the city to track down criminals and bring them to justice. In the trailer, which was all cutscenes, we see this man nearly get arrested, only to secretly hack the whole city and cause a blackout before beating up the cops and getting away. There was no gameplay shown at the Ubisoft conference, but some will appear in the Sony conference.

I sort of dozed off afterward, however, because all of what they were showing was seriously uninteresting. Following the current trends, Ubisoft announced a TV show based off some video game, although they did add a little twist by also making it an interactive game. But it was still not all that interesting.

Next, Ubisoft discusses Pirates of the Caribbean Assassin's Creed 4. I've lost all interest in Assassin's Creed after they out of nowhere made Leonardo da Vinci a weapons dealer, but I still gave the newest installment a look. There really isn't much to say about the game at this point, because all they show are more trailers consisting only of cutscenes and little gameplay. We see epic pirate ship battles and swashbuckling action, but how much of that will players actually be able to play. Before they close the segment for Assassin's Creed, the developer on the game gave another video, calling it in-game gameplay. However, it was all just more cutscenes!

Next, they showcased the next two installments in Trials, which will be linked between the console and a mobile device. However, these games are entirely overshadowed by the last big game they had under their sleeves to close with, called The Division (which also falls under the Tom Clancy titles). This game is also a fully integrated online-story mode experience, something of a recurring theme of this E3. It is set in a post apocalyptic, modern USA where resources are low and people fight each other for them. This is all pretty much the insane visions of the New World Order that my uncle and many other extreme rightists envision, but the cause in this game isn't actually economic collapse at its core. It's all caused by a flu virus that spread from a single dollar bill. Within two days, many people across the country fall ill, and then the day afterward, the economy just collapses out of nowhere. So right away we have a world of nonsense which, if it gets shoved in my face enough times, will make me see the game as the stupidest thing ever made and not worth playing, but thankfully the gameplay trumps this awful storytelling. Thankfully, it doesn't seem that story-telling is that big of a deal here.

This game is an open world rpg, kind of reminiscent of Dead Island. In the demo, a few players used some kind of map like out of Tony Stark's garage in Iron Man 3 to find the source of a conflict where possible supplies such as food and medicine were located. So the two players headed, at a ridiculously slow pace, to the building, where they met up with some other player and a friend who was controlling a scouting robot through a mobile device. Together, they took out some enemy NPC's before entering a police station, which offered the players some weapons from the armory. Honestly, this is the kind of game you have to see to get the full picture, as I can describe everything these players were doing and sound like I'm describing a typical shooter. Also, throughout the whole demo, the players gave the most wooden voice chat I have ever heard. Nobody talks like how they did when they played the game. This happens all the time with people who get on to play these demos, leading me to think that they really don't play games at all or they don't play with any people.

To close, the director of the game, I think, gives a dramatic little speech about how our world is already collapsing, and ends it by dropping fake money from the ceiling. Obviously, he was just being dramatic and not making a real statement about current society, but his tone was so normal that it sounded like he was literally trying to get a message across, haha. If he was, I have no idea how anyone would've taken him seriously after that whole nonsense of the virus from the dollar bill.

Coming up, I have a post on the two other conferences that mattered: the Sony E3 press conference and the Nintendo Direct at E3. This is where the heart of E3 lies, and I am looking forward to fanwanking on this blog about it. Also, I'll have either multiple posts specialized to single or groups of games, or one big post about all the games that I am interested in this year. Stick around, it'll be a while before I get to them.

EA E3 Press Conference: Gaming with the Stars

I originally didn't want to write posts for EA and Ubisoft, because really all I cared about were The Big Three. Still, I decided to cover all five conferences and then write posts that focused in on the things I cared about, so here's a review of the EA press conference.

First of all, I hate EA. Thought Microsoft was bad? This is a company notorious for its dirty deeds, with the authentication codes and the endless DLC and demands to make you spend more money on nonsense. But the way I tried to look at this conference was, each developer might have some affiliation with EA but they are not EA themselves (well, aside from the EA Sports games, obviously), so this allowed me to observe the games. Returning again from Microsoft's miserable conference are Titanfall and Battlefield 4.

So EA began with the next installment in the Plants vs. Zombies series: Garden Warfare. The name alone nearly turned me off from the game, because anything with any semblance to Call of Duty will disgust me, but thankfully they had a demo of the game to show for the audience. We see our usual humanoid plant life starring in a third-person shooter where each plant has its own capabilities, as with every other PvZ game. The group of players combine their own plants' skills to take down waves of zombies in fully navigable, three-dimensional stages with several points of interest, such as objectives to defend or flower turrets to set up, dotted across the stage. After defeating several waves of zombies, the players reach a boss stage, where they fight... a disco zombie? I thought this was kind of like a bonus or joke wave, but it was a cool thing to see in a game where the style can make things like this work. Then they fight the real boss, which is some giant zombie boss and a shorter version of him. At some point, they send in a flying garlic flower that pelts the boss down until finally calling in an airstrike of corn stalks... I think. It looked nice and all, but then they said it was an Xbox One exclusive.

The next thing they showed was... Titanfall. Again? Pretty much. I really do not remember seeing anything new or different from the Microsoft showing of the game, but they did something very interesting. While the Microsoft conference declared the game was an Xbox One exclusive, the developers of the game at the EA conference said it was exclusive to the Xbox One, PC, and even the Xbox 360. Is there a dispute between Microsoft and the developers of Titanfall (note: this is me wishing ill for Microsoft). I think there was just some kind of misunderstanding about the game, but whatever the case, so far there is no word on the game being available for Sony or Nintendo. Not that it really mattered to me, or that it should to anyone else seeing as how this isn't something as big as Halo.

Next, one of the EA spokesmen decided to show some other games they were working on, though all they did was show two games. One of these games was far so important that nothing else about this conference mattered at all, and that was Star Wars: Battlefront! I don't know if it's a remake or a new game... as a matter of fact, nobody knows if it's anything. All you see is a snowy landscape, possibly that of Hoth, and after about ten seconds or so, a Snowspeeder comes crashing down, zipping by the feet of an AT-AT. That is all you see, and then right away, EA moves on to Need for Speed: Yet Another Racing Game. WHO CARES!

Here, I lost track a bit because IGN's broadcast got a little screwy. Honestly, there was nothing about the new Need for Speed that I felt was any different from any racing game I've seen before. It certainly seemed more exciting than Forza 5, since this game is not as contained and since the cops, as always in N4S, are present. This whole game was completely overshadowed by Aaron Paul (Jesse in Breaking Bad) and his out of nowhere appearance, and from here it goes downhill for a while. EA goes from talking about games to talking about a Need for Speed movie, which looks exactly like Fast and Furious except with an actor who is actually a trillion times better than Vin Diesel and The Rock combined. As much as I love Aaron Paul, I found myself asking why was EA wasting their conference?

From here on, EA clutches on celebrities to show off their games. Some basketball star from the Cavaliers talks with a spokesman about dribbling in NBA Live 14,' and that was the best part of the EA Sports segment. Actually, I think the best part of this segment would be the Madden game, since that one didn't have a guest star to show up and talk about it (as far as I can remember). FIFA should've been the better part of this segment, since soccer is a true sport with fans worldwide, but then they get Drake to talk out of nowhere about how he's always been a fan of FIFA. I don't understand, why do we need Drake to tell us that FIFA is a good game? What's even more bizarre, however, was that gameplay footage of the new FIFA was only "Pre-Alpha" footage, and the game is coming out in a couple to few months. By now, we should have like the full game ready to see!

Then we have the EA UFC showcase... *massive facepalm.* This was so corny I thought I was in Kansas. To start, this was a celebrity freakfest, with Bruce Buffer to do a boxing-style announcement of the next spokesmen, and then with head of UFC Dana White, champion Jon Jones, and champion Benson Henderson coming up to introduce the game. Further hindering this performance was the reveal of the new AI system: MMAi... *massive facepalm.* The Head of UFC then talks about how he believes the first sport ever was fighting, which is okay coming from him, but then we get a trailer that feels all too much like the Call of Duty: Ghosts trailer, showcasing boxing in civilizations as ancient as Greece... Please kill me now.

Sure, "boxing" may have existed in Greece, but this is all just too corny.

Thankfully, before I began to contemplate prying my eyes out, they finished the EA Sports segment and closed with another look at Battlefield 4. At first, I was about to shut off the conference, because who the hell cares about the Battlefield 4 campaign? Why am I going to watch the same thing I've seen countless times before twice in one day? This showcase started off badly enough, with the two spokesmen showing up without applause and with one of them still thanking the audience anyway. Then they go on to say they try to make shooters that aren't just about pretty graphics, setting up a promise which, believe it or not, most have failed to deliver.

Thankfully, they actually did something different from the Microsoft press conference. They showed off the multiplayer and the new "Commander Mode" made for mobile devices, and what better way to do this than by showing it, on the PC, in a full-blown sixty-four player match? They played a match in a map called Siege of Shanghai, a metropolitan city map based in, well, Shanghai. A lot of it looked like "souped up Battlefield 3" as I said before, but that's not such a bad thing. The dynamic environment and capability of destroying structures has improved greatly, from being able to destroy underground support beams for roads (which was used to trap a tank) to toppling down full blown skyscrapers. The closest thing Battlefield 3 got to this was that tower in that Russian countryside map. We also see how Commander Mode is integrated into the multiplayer, where the player in the role of the Commander on the mobile device has a cartographic view of the action, where the enemy is, where the objectives and other things are located, and with the ability to call in a few attacks of his own. We see the Commander call in an artillery strike on a group of tanks that were about to knock down a skyscraper the demoing squad was on. We didn't get a full multiplayer match, as the demo ended as the building collapsed, but this was still quite a beautiful look at what to expect from Battlefield 4.

Before EA left for the day, they closed the conference with a trailer to a new Mirror's Edge. I've never played the first one, though, and I think I heard it wasn't all that good, so I really don't have much to say about this new trailer, other than... it's pretty?

Microsoft E3 Press Conference: An Interesting Lineup of Exclusives, But Still No Words on the Console Itself?

This post is actually not going to be as in depth as my other posts, because I actually watched this press conference while I was at a friend's house. Therefore, I did not take notes and I might have forgotten some of the games that they showcased, but with all honesty this is how I can describe Microsoft's conference in comparison to the others. That's right, Microsoft's E3 press conference was pretty forgettable, offering some interesting new IP's but little else. The other conferences show off some indie games, and I think this one did as well; however, relative to those other conferences, there were few games shown that weren't from either a big third-party developer or from Microsoft Studios. No doubt, this is probably attributed to Microsoft's bizarre choice to restrict indie developers from self-publishing. Most notable, however, was Microsoft's refusal to address anything about the Xbox One as a gaming console in itself.

The conference began with a look at Metal Gear Solid Five, beginning with a really long cutscene that MGS4 was notorious for. I don't know a whole lot about the Metal Gear series, and I thought this game took place before MGS4 because Snake looks younger. Snake also has this demon horn growing out of his head, and near the end they start talking about demons and such. I wasn't too sure of what was going on, but the gameplay itself looks true to what I've experienced from the little I've played of MGS4. Snake is seen hiding from enemies while horseback, by using a Native American technique of hiding behind the horse's side that faces away from the enemy. Snake is seen sneaking through towns in the desert... that's all I really got. Also, they said that Metal Gear Solid 5 is now an "open world."

Also, what's with the name? "The Phantom Pain." That has to be one of the most retarded titles I've ever heard, I mean, is Snake an amputee now?

Before getting into the Xbox One, Microsoft wanted to show that they still "supported" the Xbox 360. Those who own Gold Membership will, for next couple to few months, receive two free games available for download. This sounds exciting at first, but then they reveal their first two downloadable titles: Halo 3 and Assassin's Creed 2. Does Microsoft think they're Nintendo now? While these relatively old games might be considered classics to several in the future (I know Halo 3 will be one for me), these re-releases are pointless. These aren't games to get excited for, especially if you are one of the many people who already own it for that console. What made Nintendo's ambassador programs so successful was not that they re-released titles that already existed for their Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, it was because they re-released classics from the NES, GameBoy Advance, and so on. Microsoft also said they were "re-releasing" a slew of other games, like Final Fantasy XIII, but I am not sure if this is part of the monthly two-game freebies. If this is something else entirely, this is also another failure of a decision. How are you going to re-release games that are still widely available in the market? Now, if they were to re-release classics from the original Xbox console, then maybe this would be something to be excited for.

With the Xbox 360 out of the way (as they probably would've put it), Microsoft jumped right into the Xbox One, with the promise that this conference was "all about the games." What Microsoft fails to realize with this stupid phrase is that E3 is already supposed to be all about the games. So anyway, they go ahead and proceed to discuss the games that they plan to release for the Xbox One, along with several exclusive titles. One such title announced as a game called Ryse, where you play as a Roman general(?) and lead a group soldiers to battle. In the demo, the game looked like a "300 meets Gears of War," as one of my friends put it. It looked alright until the cringeworthy quicktime events, where the player had all the time in the world to execute an, well, execution with the press of a button and enter a cinematic killing move, in which the player has no control beyond that single press of a button.

Things get a little worse from here. Next on the Microsoft press conference was the showcase of Forza 5: Yet Another Racing Game. The spokesman comes up with a car from the game and everything, and even talks about the car a bit. What does this have to do with the game? Well, after that, we get down into some gameplay videos. The spokesman mainly discusses graphics (go figure, what else is there to talk about), and also one slightly interesting mechanic about the game. Forza 5 will use Microsoft's Cloud service to analyze how players drive their vehicles in the game, and then that will be used as AI for non-player vehicles. Then they talk about the graphics and how great they are, but nobody should really care about the graphics unless it is integral to the game's art design. In the case of Forza 5, do you really think art design is a big part of the game? What's also stupid is they show what are essentially meaningless technical demos, showing stills of a car and explaining how "state of the art" the graphics are when the truth is that in the actual gameplay, the framerate reduces the visuals, so it all depends on how the game runs. If graphics have to be a selling point for a game, then that game is a failure. Graphics these days is just another standard that shouldn't be worth mentioning unless there is something actually notable about them.

Aside from these things, the press conference continues and seems pretty okay for a while. They show off several games that look interesting, one of which caught my eye was that stylized Sunset something game. They showed off Dead Rising 3 and Killer Instinct as Xbox One exclusives, which pissed my friends and I off, but in truth it is a good thing for Microsoft because they need all the good exclusives they can get. As they showed off Killer Instinct, they decided to show the console's ability to screen record and livestream your gameplay. They also said they were doing away with Microsoft points for real money, further blurring the line between console and PC. While the Microsoft point thing might be good, you can't give a console all the features of an actual computer. PC's are always going to be better than consoles, so when selling a console you have to ask, what will the gamer have (or even not have) on a console that he won't on a PC? You also have to take into account what exclusives are being made for your console. This is where Sony and Nintendo are seriously dominating Microsoft on, but I'll return to that in future posts concerning them.

A whole slew of other games were shown, most of which I remember thinking nicely of, but honestly I cannot remember much of them. I remember one game they showed called Project Spark, which really integrates the Smartglass to design worlds, towns, objects, and so on. What I didn't understand about the game was that you were supposed to design enemy wave battles against towns you build. How does that make any sense, what is the point in creating monsters to attack your own town? The game looks nice, though, but I had to laugh at the pathetic framerate issues that gave rise during the goblin waves.

Following Project Spark were the notables. First, they gave a taste of Battlefield 4 by showing the single-player campaign. However, when they tried to start the game, the game froze, or something, and so for a good five to ten minutes, we were looking at the title of the game. Finally they got it working, but what was there to really see? If you've played one of the Call of Duty single player campaigns, you've played them all, and this can apply to Battlefield 4, especially since it seems that Battlefield 4 is just a souped up version of Battlefield 3. That's all these games are, really, unless you actually switch things up and set them in Vietnam or in the future.

The next thing I remember seeing was the trailer for Halo 5. What, Halo 5 already? I thought Halo 4 just came out last year! We see a robed man traversing a desert, pretty much for most of the trailer. Then, something rises out of the sand, which turns out to be this giant robot. The robed man looks up and... it's Master Chief! He's holding some dog tags I had no idea what they were. I have yet to play through Halo 4's campaign, so clearly I am probably missing a lot of information here. Sadly, my experience with the Halo storyline will end with Halo 4 sine I am not planning on buying an Xbox One, so that'll be something I'll have to live with.

That's pretty much the whole Microsoft press conference. They had one last "surprise" game to close with, which was really just a new IP that I doubt anybody new of before or really cared that much for. It's a game called Titanfall, which seemed nice to me, it's like a mix of Halo and Battlefield....

Actually, I realize I just described Planetside 2. Though really, I'd consider Planetside 2 more of a Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefield. Titanfall has the whole body armor suit thing, plus the core elements of a Battlefield first person shooter, but the twist here is A) you can control giant mecha soldiers, and B) the game's story mode is also the competitive multiplayer mode. That sounded really interesting to me, but then they said it was an Xbox One exclusive. However, as we will see in the upcoming EA press conference post, it is actually not an Xbox One exclusive (though it still is exclusive to Microsoft).

So overall, I had no real opinion of the Microsoft press conference because I simply couldn't care that much for the titles that were announced, even including the exclusives. What I wanted to see was Microsoft striking back at the air of mystery around the console's ability to play another person's game, around the company's policy on used games, around the console's claim of always requiring to be online. However, Microsoft failed to seize this opportunity to discuss how the Xbox One is a gaming console at its core. And as a result, Sony swept in and tore Microsoft apart in their press conference, but more on that later.

I am truly sorry for Xbox fans. While I disliked the Xbox 360, I cannot fail to acknowledge how it revolutionized online console gaming, with Xbox Live and the slew of features it came with. Now, Microsoft has taken that and used it as an effort to just grab all of your money. While I and many gamers can treat this as Christmas in advance, I cannot help but feel awful for the Xbox fans who were massively screwed over by Microsoft.

Also, the Xbox One will be $499. Ain't nobody got cash for that!

Update: It turns out, there was even some dialogue during the Killer Instinct demo that offended many people, whom interpreted the dialogue as sexist rape jokes. I'm not sure what to make of it, mainly because the dialogue between people playing these demos is always nonsense, but here's some of the conversation that transpired between the two.

"I can't even block correctly, and you're too fast," she says.

"Here we go. Just let it happen. It'll be over soon," he says.

"You have a fight stick," she says.

"Wow, you like those," he says.

"No, I don't like this," she says.

A Brief Recap of My Metroid II Speed-Run

First off, I want to explain that my computer is currently being operated on and could possibly be dead. A few weeks ago I spilt soda all over it, and it took a couple of weeks for my dad to finally give me the help I needed to clean up the motherboard. But then, as I was trying to take out the motherboard (you see, I have a MacBook, so taking it out was the most needlessly difficult procedure of my life), I broke the connectors for the fans, which I obviously need if I plan to play any game on my computer. However, now it's been a couple more weeks since that's always how it is with my dad. Today should be the day my dad and his friend fix the fan connectors, but I have some doubt seeing how the weather outside has been pretty bad.

So to ease my boredom (I'm on my Summer break), I've played a few Nintendo games to pass the time. I've been closely watching the news on E3 and Super Smash Bros. 4, which is driving me crazy and man can I not wait for that!

But also, I've returned to what I consider to be my first fandom: my fanwankery over the Metroid series. I'm not as fanwank as I was when I first fell in love with the series, but I still play the Metroid games every so often and my memories of my first experiences with each game hold fond places in my heart. So I decided to revisit some of the games to see if I can pull off all the speed runs and perfections (thank god there's no need to speed run the prime series). Of course, since it's been months since I last played these games, I try to use a guide for what I can't remember, which is annoying as hell having to pause the game every two seconds. I started with Prime 3, but for some reason I stopped at the Pirate Homeworld and haven't found the motivation to continue. I beat Prime Hunters completely, but there's really nothing you get for doing that. So then I wanted to play some classic style 2D Metroid, but I dared not touch Metroid II because, in my opinion, that is the most difficult Metroid game in the series. So I tried to speed run Metroid Fusion, only to fail by going over forty minutes.

So I was bored today, and I honestly don't want to play Super Metroid at all, even though it is a perfect game. I would've played Zero Mission if I still had the game (I have it on my computer though). So I looked at Metroid II, which I literally only played once, and decided I'd give it another go and try to speed run it. Beating the game in three hours is really not that hard, but when you have no idea what you're doing in that game, it is basically impossible.

So of course I used a guide to refresh my memory on how to advance through the game, because otherwise every room looks nearly the same and there are a few "dud" locations which I seriously believe were placed to waste your time. There were also a couple of shortcuts I didn't know of.

I worried about the metroid bosses, because what I remembered of them was simply frustration, but they surprisingly weren't a real problem this time around. Each encounter with a Zeta metroid however did feel like my game was going to end, and then when I faced Omega metroids, I started getting close to dying. Actually, on one Omega, I had little health left because it seemed the programmers either forgot to leave an energy recharge or sadistically did it to see how many Omega metroid fights you could take before breaking the game. I managed to get some energy back, fearing all the time that costed me, and defeat that Omega though. It was a pain because the damn thing would air juggle me and kill me. What? Air juggling in a Metroid game?! Yep, that was exactly what happened. Six times.

Still, I managed to get through it all. I was low on health again at the Queen, since all the normal metroids seemed impossible to avoid, so I had to get another energy recharge. Again, I feared I cost myself a ton of time, but I managed to take down the Queen easily (relative to the damn Zeta/Omega metroids). It was fun blowing her up from the inside with the morph ball, something I didn't think of doing on my first playthrough when I was twelve. The guide of course said to do it, but even without one I would've figured that out thanks to Other M. And this might sound weird, but the baby metroid was so cute! Even already knowing that it exists and that it follows Samus around like if she was her mother, I still found it a sweet touch to a game that has you freaking out every time you see those metroid shells.

I doubted I managed to speed run it successfully, even with the generously-given three hour time frame (as opposed to two in later games, [one in Metroid] plus having to collect every item in them), but as we can see in the picture above, I did it! ^^ Another successfully completed Metroid to add to the list.

Hopefully I'll get my computer back soon. I really want to give my take on E3. I'm already disappointed I can't write all about the ridiculous rumors I've been reading. I mean, I could, but this post alone was already a pain for me to write on my phone.

BioShock Infinite

This is what the game is all about.
Just kidding.

Continuing the praise that this game has endlessly been receiving, here's my BioShock Infinite... not just a review, but experience. Then again, maybe that would be better applied to the let's play videos I'm trying to make, but nonetheless, overall this was a pretty great game. I don't usually enjoy shooters, but I came close to loving this game as much as I fell in love with the Half-Life series.

While BioShock Infinite exists within the BioShock universe, the game's story has little to nothing to do with the first two games. The gameplay is even somewhat different, as BioShock drew on horror elements while Infinite draws on elements of adventure and perhaps fantasy, to an extent. Both are science fiction, but Infinite has more aspects of a fantasy to it, with a city floating in the sky and rifts, referred to ingame as "tears," to alternate dimensions and stuff. It's explained by science, but none of it feels like the full grounding of science in the original BioShock games. Then again, I haven't played the second and I played the first game years ago when it was released, so I probably have little clue as to what I am talking about.

The city itself is starkly different from Rapture. Of course, you can easily see the difference in how Columbia is a city in the sky while Rapture is a city under the sea. There is also a difference in society, as well as what the game draws attention to.

An evolved form of the Ku Klux Klan?

The city of Columbia is established around the mind of Father Comstock, the founder of this city and the "prophet" everyone seems to turn to for guidance, along with a vision he had:

"The seed of the Prophet shall sit the throne and drown in flame the mountains of man."

As you explore Columbia, you find this society based on "Christian fundamentalism and worship of America itself," thanks to Blue Highwind for being able to put this into words for me where I would spend hours repeating myself and not saying quite what I mean to say. This city takes the American racial hierarchy and blows it so out of proportion, you can't help but feel uncomfortable as you come across an African American, dressed in stripes and speaking nervously, offering you a soda. Or at the very beginning of the game, when you are given the choice of throwing a baseball at either the interracial couple or at the host of the fair celebrating Columbia's history.

The racism isn't limited to African Americans; it applies to basically every race that isn't White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so the game doesn't fail to acknowledge the racism against the Irish that existed in this country as well. History is blown out of proportion, targeting Native and Chinese Americans at one point and picturing them as evil hordes of monsters, with a robotic George Washington prefacing each exhibit with a rhyming soliloquy.

Even with the terrors of the city's foundation, the environment is still very inviting and lovely with the detail. Straw hats, women with large feathered or flowered hats, men sitting in shoe shining booths, kids smoking cigarettes, red/white/blue colored banners and balloons, and double chaingun toting George Washington killing machines galore in the lively level design of Columbia.

I could go on about the wonderful design and art concept this game boasts, but I want to move on to the gameplay before my readers get bored. Now I know I said the game feels very different from the original BioShock games, but it still retains several elements. Plasmids are now vigors, "magical" abilities that allow you to shoot lightning or summon a literal murder of crows to attack your foes. While each spell has some uniqueness to them, there are several which more or less do the same thing. A lot of these spells stun your foes, leaving them open to a blast from the shotgun. Whenever I found myself in a closed space, I'd throw down a vigor and rush each enemy with a shotgun, blasting them out of my path. I found myself doing this quite often, and I was playing on the Hard difficulty. Of course, this technique didn't carry me through every battle. Every now and then, the game will throw a "hard-hitting" or special enemy at you to switch things up a bit, like a "fireman" clad in iron with a furnace on his back who throws bursts of flame at you, or the featured "handyman," an ape-like half-man half-machine abomination that hits hard and moves fast.

Honestly, the gameplay doesn't go far beyond what it really is: a first person shooter. Shoot and take cover, and you will surpass most of the obstacles in the game. Combine these with vigors and you are well set on taking on nearly every encounter. The challenge is reduced through the game's interesting death system, where you are immediately brought back to life and kept in the same battle. Enemies regain health and you lose some money, but there is no other consequence beyond that than just the annoyance of being in the same fight. There is a gameplay difficulty, "1999 Mode," where if you die with less than a hundred dollars, you are taken to the main menu and you'll have to start from the last checkpoint. However, the difficulty curve skyrockets there, as that game mode isn't meant to provide simple extra challenges.

That said, many gunfights get pretty exciting, especially when the environment utilizes the skyrails. Blue Highwind said that the AI isn't smart enough to use them, and while I cannot say that I experienced many fights on the skyrails myself, there were quite enough for me to believe that the AI can use them properly. Once I got Undertow, a vigor that bends water to either splash enemies back or unleash a tendril that pulls them to you, I encountered an awesome battle against a patriot, two firemen, and many soldiers where I was able to use Elizabeth, the girl that you're with throughout the game, to summon a Tesla Coil from another dimension and use Undertow to bring my enemies to the coil and get fried.

Ah, and this brings me to Elizabeth's powers: she is essentially a human TARDIS. For those unfamiliar with Doctor Who, Elizabeth can basically open tears to other dimensions and other times. This allows her to pull money, ammo, salts (used to fuel your vigors), and health out of thin air, much against what she says at some point in the game. Also, as for the summoning, throughout several battlefields there are tears that reveal objects from alternate dimensions that you can use to your advantage, from machine guns to cover to even a George Washington killing machine. This spices up some firefights and adds a level of fun that would've left me wanting even more out of this game by the end if this feature wasn't included.

Still, as I said, from a gameplay standpoint this is a simple shooter. I said I loved it about as much as I loved the Half-Life series, but the gameplay is nowhere close to being as innovative. So this is where the story comes in and completes the game, giving me the full experience.

I already covered some of the premise here by describing Columbia. The deal is Father Comstock, the "Prophet," is raising his daughter Elizabeth, referred to countless times as "The Lamb," to take his position of power and lead Columbia to destroy the "mountains of man." Without spoiling the game, I'll let you readers get an idea of what that means. Booker, the character you play as, is known as the "False Prophet," who according to Comstock is coming to take Elizabeth and "lead her astray," or keep her from fulfilling the destiny he set for her. Throughout the game, your adventure with Elizabeth reveals to her all the horrors kept hushed in Columbia, which of course reinforces her own desires that conflict with Comstock's. Through this story, Elizabeth develops so wonderfully as a character that it makes me wish to replay the game to see her go from being trapped in a tower without real experience of the world to... um, well to the decisions she makes at the end of the game, which I cannot say without spoiling the whole game.

There's not much to say about Booker. He's come to "find the girl and wash away the debt," to get Elizabeth and deliver her to somebody in New York to whom he owes some "debt." Other characters come in as well, such as the game's mascot, the Songbird, who was created to watch over Elizabeth and ensure she never escapes her tower. You never fight this massive robot bird, but at the end of the game you do share a moment with it during the gameplay that was pretty satisfying if a little anti-climactic. Elizabeth's relationship with the bird isn't too developed in detail, though.

Throughout the game, two snarky British twins, the Letuce Twins, pop up and aid Booker and Elizabeth. The game doesn't give all the details about them, but you can pick up audio logs from them that explain several things about them. They are the ones responsible for the technology that allows Columbia to float in the sky. Honestly, I simply liked them for their quirkiness and such. They finish each other's sentences, they speak in riddles sometimes, and, at one point if you attempt to shoot or hit them, they'll ridicule you for "missing." The bullets actually go right through them, for weird timey-wimey reasons I cannot fully explain without spoiling things.

We also have a Mr. Fink, who created the Songbird and several other machines in the game, most notably many of the enemies that you fight. He's mostly some background comic relief, with his overblown capitalist corporate monopolist persona and such... I cannot get into much detail because he is quite a flat character as well, even with an entire series of levels dedicated to him. But as I said, he's mostly just background comic relief and another antagonist to pose problems for you.

The story is pretty straightforward, you come to find Elizabeth and escape from Columbia and the hands of Comstock. However, an entire section dedicated to a rebellion of sub-ordinate groups draws out the story in the game's middle portion. I didn't really think of this as filler for the story to be longer, though; here we see the rise of an organization that I referred to as the Black Panthers, even though they don't just consist of African Americans. After a few weird trips to alternate dimensions, they become antagonists for seemingly no real reason, so after that point I just became annoyed with them and found myself wondering why I had to deal with them. At the end of the game, the fight comes to Comstock, and once you reach his "house," the story goes off the walls insane: very intense, very confusing, and very memorable. There are discussions all across the Internet trying to decipher what went on in the game's last moments. Just before the climax of the game, the game makes a small return to its roots of horror, and that was a lot of fun, it certainly kept me on the edge of my seat. And somewhere in the game's last moments, where the game goes insane, there's a little something many BioShock fans will appreciate.

At first, I had a hard time making sense of the game's ending, but after some thought and reading several discussions, I came to really appreciate the ending. The story as a whole is great, just some flawed moments every now and then. Elizabeth is the game's centerpiece, drawing much interest to how she develops as a character. Little moments like trying to skip rocks across water to failing at picking up a medicine ball to singing one of the game's recurring songs to a child further brings out the amount of attention the developers gave to her.

So while I was left wanting a little more out of this game at the end of the day, I still enjoyed it throughout and I will probably fondly remember it in the future. Hell, I am already playing the game over again for an achievement/easter egg/screenshot run! Also, on my YouTube channel, I plan to upload a playthrough of this game! So stay tuned for that.

Gameplay: 8

Design: 10 

Story: 9

Sound: 10

Replay: 8

Overall: 9.25

Edit: Added a replay value. Forgot to add that when I initially wrote this.

In Which I Moan About Wanting to Play BioShock

I swear I am going to be the last person on Earth to play BioShock Infinite. I'm trying to do a video playthrough of the game, in my antics to put my YouTube channel out there. Unfortunately, I live in a suite with four people, and the walls are as thin as the walls of a gingerbread house, and the only time I get to play video games is later on at night. I cannot record videos in the common room because everyone is there talking it up and talking about things entirely irrelevant to what is going on, and I just simply cannot have that.

Tonight I was just about to play it; I got a few seconds into the game when my roommate comes in and ruins the night for me. All day, he's been pissing me off so much that I think I'm just going to preach about it on my personal blog, but anyway, because he's here, I can't record a video of me playing the game. I could just play the game, make a video, and do a voice-over later, but I hate thinking of doing that because I want viewers to get exactly what's going through my mind as I play the game. By the time I get a video done, every other major YouTube channel is probably going to be done with it, though, so I don't know why I even bother.

I really feel like writing about my roommate now, so I'm gonna switch on over to my private blog to do so. Before I go, I want to assure you Readers that I really do have things in the works here, including:

• A let's play/review of BioShock Infinite
• A let's play (condensed) of The Longest Journey
• Some snippets of stuff for another Minecraft Country episode
• A match in Garry's Mod where my cousin's friends and I grief people up an RP server's invisible walls. (hopefully)
• A playthrough of Just Cause 2

Things just have been tough, because my main group of friends pretty much have subpar computers that won't allow for them to play anything with me. So trust me, there will be stuff here; I just need to get the opportunities to do them. The circumstances I gave plus school work plus other personal matters are constantly demanding my attention, but hopefully over the Summer, I'll have mostly everything straightened out.

Epic Fail on Elegon

My friend, Latinoxbest, is not a bad gamer when it comes to the thick of things. He's just... off sometimes. Like every time we'd run Elegon, no matter what you do to add to the warnings, he will fall through the floor when Elegon removes it. So we ran it, this being my second time going through Mogu'shan Vaults.

As you see in the video, which I took to record his failure, I screw up as well. However, I kept this video because the chat window was golden.

I've mostly played this game between now and the last post I wrote. I would have more videos and such if my friends would play more Steam games with me. I also guess I've been neglecting news and such, thing is I get tired of that after a while. Also school's been a drag, and even more so than that, I've been engrossed in a personal problem that's kept me from attending to this blog. But I'll try to keep things up this time. When Summer comes along, I can assure you that there will be more activity here.