I found myself with a ton of free time this past weekend which enabled me to take a shallow dive into my ever expanding backlog. There were plenty of games from me to pick from, but I decided to make good on a goof I made over a year ago. I’m of course referring to the smash-hit, mega viral video sensation that took the world by storm; my video about the time I rented Uncharted: The Lost Legacy from a Redbox, and it didn’t work.
While I think the video was worth the $3 rental fee I paid, I actually did want to play the game. Now we’re here in 2019, over a year from that hilarious video, and almost 2 years from the release of the game itself, and I finally found some time to blast through it.
I really enjoy the Uncharted games, not because they’re such a joy to control or anything, but because they’re just fun blockbuster movies I get to play through. The over-the-top action, pseudo-historical, Indiana Jones-esque series has always been a consistently fun experience, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is no exception. In fact, it might just be the best in the series.
I could go into detail about what makes this entry so good, but that isn’t what this post is about. What I really want to talk about is how I put the Uncharted games into the same category I would a Marvel movie. They’re these high-intensity, big and expensive adventures that get me psyched out of my mind. Sometimes they leave a longer impact, (Endgame, never forget) but most of the time it’s just this exciting thing I get to be a part of for a few hours.
I won’t remember the details about Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in a few months, but I will remember how much fun I had with it. So it got me thinking about some other “junk food” games I turn to when I want to turn my mind off. In all fairness I think I’ve covered that pretty well on this site, turning to various “simulator” games, the NBA 2K series, and Cities Skylines, to name a few, but I’m always looking for a game that allows me to just turn my brain off for a while and just go for a cool ride.
Sometimes you want a game you can lose yourself in for 20 to 30 hours, fully immersing yourself in the world and what you’re doing. Then sometimes you just want to play a game where you’re firing rockets up at attacking helicopters while you’re riding on the roof of a train. Turns out, I’m looking for more of the latter these days.
Since a few days ago when I posted my piece on the first few hours with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, I can’t say that I’ve played much else. That isn’t because I’m so head over heels for the game, rather, I just haven’t played anything that’s really revved my engine as of late.
I feel like I write something like this every few months, where I can’t find something to hook me in and keep me occupied. Ultimate Alliance 3 has been more or less, my go to game as of late, but even with that game I can feel myself losing a little steam with. It isn’t a bad thing though. In fact, it’s given me a lot more time to focus on some of my other hobbies.
I’ve been really diving headfirst into writing, specifically working on making my Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’ve been running for a while, really fleshed out and fully formed. From designing quests, to fully realizing the NPCs and settings, all the way to making maps, I’ve been very creatively fulfilled by this in a way I haven’t been in a long time.
This is basically what I’ve been up to
Outside of that, I’m playing music again. Not in any real serious capacity, but I’ve started composing some tracks and recording them with the little equipment I have. I’ve been listening to some D&D podcasts where they create music to help heighten the tension or portray the right mood, and while I’m not looking to integrate my music into my campaign, I think it’s a fun challenge to give myself a tone and try to make a song that represents that.
But yeah, not really doing much in the way of gaming lately. It feels like I’m in this summer lull where most of the games coming out just aren’t resonating with me in any meaningful way. I’m still working through Ultimate Alliance 3 and occasionally plucking away at Super Mario Maker 2, but that’s about it for the time being.
In lieu of an introduction that recounts the entirety of the Marvel renaissance over the past decade and how this title properly capitalizes on that zeitgeist, I’m just going to go ahead and say that I’m really enjoying Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order and what it brings to the table. It’s an imperfect game that doesn’t fully deliver on the power fantasy of playing as your favorite superheroes, but it sure is fun.
For those who don’t know, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is a 1 to 4 player cooperative brawler with a lot of RPG elements. You get to slip into the tights of several iconic heroes and take on just about every big time villain you can think of, in an effort to collect all of the Infinity Stones. The story is largely forgettable, mostly serving as very loose connecting threads between the different supervillain themed levels, but it has enough fan service to make the cut-scenes worth watching.
But that’s not why I came to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. I wanted to punch, kick, and magic blast my way through every enemy I could see. In this arena, Ultimate Alliance 3 excels. Each hero has their own unique light and heavy attacks along with 4 special abilities that can be upgraded to be more effective. The combat is repetitive yet fun, and adds enough variety by forcing you to block and dodge more than you’d expect from a brawler.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order encourages you to really consider your team build by offering buffs based on who and what kind of characters your active 4 is comprised of. Teams like The Guardians of The Galaxy, the 2012 movie Avengers, 4 of the Spider-Man characters and so on and so forth, get special bonuses when you use them together. But even when you split the team up and get less married to team composition, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order still rewards you with a portion of whatever active bonus you might be building towards.
For instance, having The Hulk and Thor on a team grants you half of the movie Avengers team bonuses, as well as a bonus for putting heavy-hitting characters together. All of the team compositions can be viewed in the menu which is extremely helpful considering you unlock new characters pretty quickly, and there’s something like 30 different team bonuses you can achieve.
The downside to all of this is that Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order only half explains most of its mechanics. Learning about proper team composition is fairly obvious, but finding out what category of moves your characters have access to and how those play together is kind of a mystery at first glance. There are just so many icons that each portray different abilities, or unity bonuses, or stat categories, that it’s genuinely overwhelming at first.
In addition to that, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order kind of forces you to try out your newly recruited superheroes by making them significantly higher level than the heroes you’re currently playing as. Normally I’d say that’s a good thing to encourage people to step out of their comfort zone, but in my experience it’s only led to me ignoring team bonuses in favor of who has the highest level. So now I have the iconic team of Thor, Deadpool, Dr. Strange and Ghost Rider all hovering around level 28, while Captain America, Spider-Gwen and so many others are so under powered that using them would be me handicapping myself.
This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the difficulty spikes are fairly brutal, and require you to have a fairly robust knowledge of these 30+ characters and their strengths in battle. Sometimes you need a lot of area-of-effect and crowd control characters. Sometimes you need a balance of bruisers and ranged characters. The problem is that unless you know how these characters play or figured out the myriad of icons and tokens that denote a specific hero’s style, you’re basically brute forcing your way through situations and experimenting via extensive trial and error..
I don’t want to paint the picture that I don’t like this game, because I genuinely am enjoying it despite the issues I’ve run into. The action is fun and simple without feeling overly repetitive which is a tight rope to walk when making a brawler. There’s a stun meter that acts like enemy armor, that once depleted will stagger an enemy and allow you to attack their health directly. It adds a simple extra layer of depth to the combat that manages to keep things interesting long enough for you to get to a boss battle. And that simple loop is made better by the wide variety of characters and moves you have at your disposal.
I did wish that my attacks felt a little more powerful though. It felt a little weird to watch The Avengers struggle against a bunch of convicts in a prison and then proceed to go fight Ultron or something. But it’s a video game, and you have to be able to deal with weird logic loopholes if you want to have fun sometimes.
Minor grievances aside, the biggest problems with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order are mostly of the technical variety. The camera is hilariously bad at times, getting locked up on some geometry, going in walls, or just zooming in and out in odd intervals in an attempt to be helpful. While the frame-rate has a tough time holding up when the action and particle effects start to kick up. The loading times are abysmally long and managed to actively keep me from completing more challenge missions considering the load to get into them was just about as long as the mission itself.
Even the AI and how the logic of the game treats them is strange. Most of the heroes at your disposal will require you to pick up red and blue orbs that represent health and energy respectively. Reasonably, the game only allows player controlled characters to pick these things up, but even if you’re filled up on health and pick up an orb, it doesn’t heal any of your teammates. It sounds like a silly thing to complain about, but it ultimately led to me favoring one character and praying that my team AI wouldn’t get themselves killed because I didn’t want to micromanage their health pickups.
I know it sounds like I’m really down on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, but honestly, I’m having a really good time with it. There are plenty of other things I could pick apart, but despite all of them I just want to keep playing it more. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is the perfect example of a game that does one thing so right, that all of the issues surrounding it don’t seem as bad.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch.
We’re over halfway through the year and I’ll be honest, there haven’t been any releases this year that have really blown me away. That’s why we’re going to look forward into the infinite void that is the remainder of 2019, and see what games are in store for us.
MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 3: THE BLACK ORDER – JULY 19, 2019
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’m a big fan of those ladies and gentlemen that parade around in the colorful tights. I believe they’re called superheroes in some circles. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Ultimate Alliance games, mostly because of the very repetitive, brawler combat it boasted. It’s been a long time since I’ve played an Ultimate Alliance game, so maybe this time around I can find something to really sink my teeth into.
ANCESTORS: THE HUMANKIND ODYSSEY – AUGUST 27, 2019
On top of being one of the only games I can think of that have ever dealt so directly with the concept of evolution, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey just looks so delightfully weird that I can’t help but want to play it. I have no clue if there’s going to be any depth to it, or if it even will be fun, but I need to know how it shakes out. In my mind, there’s a version of this game that is 99% the same, but has the creature creator from Spore so I can make nightmarish visions in a game that isn’t absolute trash.
Nothing like a bit of telekinesis, guns, and psychedelic shifting environments to really get the blood pumping. Or at least, that’s what they say. Control looks like a game that could easily become a sleeper hit this year. With people coming away from demos of it celebrating not only the aesthetic and gameplay, but some more surprising aspects regarding the story and the agency you have, my excitement for Control has gone from none to some, fairly quickly.
NBA 2K20 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
Look, this isn’t something I expect most of my readers to give a shit about, but I do. The NBA 2K series has proven to not only be the games I play when I don’t want to play anything else, but the spark that got me back into following the league in earnest. There will be nothing monumentally different about this game, but I’ll take a slightly shiner version of the game I already own for sure. Besides, I’ve gotten way more than my moneys worth out of last years entry.
BORDERLANDS 3 – SEPTEMBER 13, 2019
Look, I’ve already said my piece about Borderlands 3 and how Randy Pitchford is doing his best to tank the game before it comes out, but it seems like the best candidate for a game that my friends and I can play together. I am a little disappointed by some of the changes, or more accurately, the lack thereof, but Borderlands games are mindless fun, and if this one can nail that, then we’re golden.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: LINK’S AWAKENING – SEPTEMBER 20, 2019
The Zelda series has always been a weird dark spot in my gaming history. I’ve played the original along with A Link to The Past, but outside of those, I never really gelled with the traditional top-down Zelda games the way I did with the 3D ones. But once again, I’ve been somewhat taken with an adorable graphic style despite my spotty history with these kinds of games. I will buy The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening when it is released, the only question is if I’ll regret it or not.
CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE – OCTOBER 25, 2019
I’m so curious to see what a reboot of Call of Duty 4 looks like. I can’t imagine that they’ll manage to recreate the magic of the initial 2007 release, but I’d love to see them try. I think what I’m most interested in seeing is how this release is received both critically and commercially, and how the next Call of Duty game shapes up because of it. Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare casts such a big shadow over the franchise itself for being such a monumental step forward in terms of online shooters, it’s easy to see why you’d want to go back to this particular well once more. We’ll see how it all goes down when it comes out.
THE OUTER WORLDS – OCTOBER 25, 2019
So let’s get this out in the open: I don’t like Bethesda styled RPGs. There are a myriad of reasons why, but let’s just truncate this thing by saying the word “bugs” and leave it at that. So imagine my confusion when I saw the trailer for The Outer Worlds and was actually into it. Maybe it was the setting that piqued my interest, or the possibility that this game engine might actually be able to sustain the weight of the game, but I can’t be sure. All I know is that I’m cautiously optimistic about The Outer Worlds and hope it isn’t too broken.
LUIGI’S MANSION 3 – OCTOBER 31, 2019
I only really got to play the first Luigi’s Mansion in short bursts thanks to me never actually owning a Gamecube, but it was easily the game I was most curious about playing on that console. Now that I own a Nintendo Switch and the third game in series is finally coming out on it, I can make up for that lost time. I don’t actually know what to expect from Luigi’s Mansion 3 aside from busting some ghosts with what I think is literally a vacuum cleaner, but hell, I’m up for it.
POKEMON: SWORD & SHIELD- NOVEMBER 15, 2019
I remember being a kid and playing Pokemon Red when it came out. After that I got Pokemon Yellow and was just as into it as the first one. Fast forward to 2018 when I played Let’s Go Pikachu, and we’ve just covered my entire history with Pokemon games. My experience and love for the Pokemon games are very low, but after enjoying the Let’s Go games as much as I did, I’m at least curious to see what all the fuss is about. I enjoyed the more streamlined version of Pokemon I played last year, and I know that this isn’t going to follow suit, but I’m still interested enough in it to possibly try it out. But man, when I hear things like “Dynamaxing” and “EV-Training,” my eyes start to glaze over, and my interest suddenly runs dry.
STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER – NOVEMBER 15, 2019
It’s a Star Wars game. I like Star Wars. I like lifting fools with my magic powers and slicing my way through everything with my laser sword. I’ve heard that this game will allow me to do both, and then some. It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a real Star Wars game, now only time will tell if this one is good or not. I’m a big fan of everything I’ve seen in the footage they’ve revealed, but I’m curious to see more of the game. This might be one of the few games this year that I’m actually excited about.
UNTITLED GOOSE GAME – 2019
There’s no need for me to explain myself here, just watch the trailer.
We’re only halfway through the year, and this isn’t a comprehensive list of any kind, but I’m still hoping that something between now and the end of the year manages to really blow me away.
If ever there was a game that was able to justify the existence of the Wii U, it was Super Mario Maker, without question. The combination of this bizarre hardware, the level building concept, and the various Super Mario mechanics that have been drilled into my head for the past few decades helped to make it one of the only level creation based games I’ve ever enjoyed. Also, the references to Mario Paint that were included were just some delicious icing on the cake.
Now there’s a sequel on the far more successful Nintendo Switch, which is great. The problem lies in the fact that while Super Mario Maker 2 does a pretty good job replicating and adapting that experience for the Switch, it never manages to feel as intuitive or easy to handle as its predecessor.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Super Mario Maker 2, but I feel like creating things without a stylus is more cumbersome and difficult than I’d like. To be fair, in handheld mode you can just touch everything on the screen and get things done that way, but I don’t want to smudge up the screen on this thing. So in place of using my fingers to make levels, I can use the built in radial menu system to pick and choose objects. It works well enough, but it’s nowhere near as intuitive as just using a stylus.
So that’s where I was with Super Mario Maker 2. I wanted to create levels, but the in game tools left me wanting. So what am I to do? I suppose I could just adjust and learn to live with this new system, adapting to the changes that they’ve made in order to get my level creation on. But this is America, and if there’s one thing I know about being an American, I can just kick and scream and throw money at the problem until I can do things the way I like them.
This is all a very long winded way of saying that I bought a stylus for my Nintendo Switch so I can play Mario Maker the way I want to. Quick correction, I actually bought a pack of ten of them on Amazon because I need more bullshit to clutter up my apartment.
But honestly, I can’t seem to even approach making levels in earnest without a stylus. I’ve mostly kept to playing the “story mode” and various online courses. I’ve dabbled I’m level building with the built in controls, but when my glut of styluses arrive, then shit gets real.
Every month I step in here to tell you a little anecdote about my D&D adventures and the various mishaps that inevitably took place. Last time I told you all about a fairly simple puzzle the absolutely flummoxed my players. This time I’d like to tell you about when I destroyed the world. But before I can tell you that, I need to tell you about the circumstances that led up to the eventual destruction of everything they came to know and love.
I’ve been running a campaign for a few months now with my players, and since I embarked on this journey, I’ve kind of found a groove in how I like to run a game. I’m very fast and loose with the rules, I actively try to encourage my players to think outside the box, and above all, I want them to feel like they have full agency over the world they’re in. Simple enough, right?
When I started, I bought a module through Roll20, the app in which we use to play our wonderful fantasy adventure. I purchased, Waterdeep: The Dragon Heist, a module which looks like it could be a lot of fun in the hands of an experienced DM who has an understanding about the lore of the world. I am not that person. So when this module didn’t have answers to the questions my players were asking that were lore based, I decided instead of do research, I’d just write my own campaign.
What followed was a continued effort to carve out my own narrative and characters in the map of Waterdeep that was included with my purchase. This map ultimately came to represent the thing keeping my players from feeling agency. Most of my players never felt any attachment to the city itself, because there really weren’t many opportunities to explore it or uncover cool stuff in it. This undoubtedly falls on my shoulders for not properly getting them hooked on the city, but I had already mentally moved past Waterdeep, leading all of us to treat the map more like a screensaver until I moved them somewhere actually interesting.
So after months of planning and writing, I pulled the trigger. They were sucked through a portal and transported to a land of my own creation. A place that they thought was just a pocket dimension, but turned out to be their first stop on the upcoming grand journey they’d have.
I built the simple island with three goals in mind. First, I wanted them to be in an unfamiliar place, with its own lore and history. Second, I wanted to craft a place with its own politics, factions and problems. And lastly, I wanted them to feel invested in this world and approach it as an opportunity for a fresh start. The first two I think I managed pretty well. That third one though, didn’t play out how I had hoped.
See, the entire time they were there, I was juggling two story lines I wanted to pursue. Either this would be a pocket dimension they’d return from, or they were trapped here. I played coy and didn’t give them much insight into what the truth was, but since they were convinced this was just a vacation till they eventually returned home, they weren’t as invested as I would’ve liked.
Finally I made a decision on their fate after receiving a few compliments along with grievances from a few of my players. They liked the concept of this new world, but felt that there was nothing to do in it aside from leave. A fair point, I did kind of only write this section as a single path with three branching paths that eventually led to the same place. But it was one particular comment that pushed me over the edge. I was told that Waterdeep, the actual map of it, was imposing and kept them at a distance. They never felt compelled to pursue their own character motivated quests because they had no idea where to start.
That’s when I decided. Fuck Waterdeep, you’re done. I tantalized them with an orb that would surely bring them home, only for it to be just a crystal ball that shows you stuff. Guess what I showed them? I blew up that map in front of them, killed off every person they knew, and hurdled them 1000 years into the future. I basically wrote a short story that equates to, “And everything exploded.”
The reaction I got was kind of… not what I expected. In game, nobody said anything. It was just silence. After sitting there for what was the longest minute ever, I just kind of pressed forward with the session, not giving them much time to comprehend what just happened. That was my bad.
I gave them a boat, and sent them to the northeast to this massive new world I made for them. I’d put that picture in here, but as I’m writing this, I don’t know if we’ve made it there yet.
Which leads me to where we stand now. What awaits my players is a massive open world that has several settlements of varying sizes, with creature politics and behaviors that differ from what D&D lore might normally decree. These places have their individual quests ranging in severity and importance. Quests will take them from city to city. They’ll have tough choices to make, and they’ll have city faction reputations to deal with. They have bespoke story lines and quests I’ve generated for their specific characters, along with a main quest that might shed some light on why Waterdeep went kaput (aside from what I’ve just told you), and what happens now.
Outside of all of this, what I’ve actually done is give myself a massive amount of anxiety and intense deadlines to write quests that have longevity and are interesting along with make maps. Also I run this website, work, and have other hobbies. So what I’m saying is, don’t do what I’ve done and make your first time being a DM something worthy of an intervention.
Some of my favorite kinds of games fall under the very specific category of, “wacky physics based activities.” Some of the hits from that genre in recent history have been games like Human Fall Flat and Gang Beasts. So imagine my surprise when I came across the open beta for a game on Steam called, Totally Reliable Delivery Service.
Honk honk, I’m the delivery boy
In Totally Reliable Delivery Service, you can either play solo or cooperatively as a team of four to complete wacky physics based delivery missions that are scattered around the open world the game is set in. Using the combination of over the top physics and a fleet of vehicles, you’re literally trying to tack things from one place to another as fast and safely as possible.
The pitch itself is neat, but in practice, it doesn’t work too well. This is going to sound ridiculous and I totally understand, but the controls in this game are terrible. And that’s a damming thing to say about a game that’s supposed to control all crazy like. I hate to draw comparisons, but in both Gang Beasts and Human Fall Flat, the wacky controls worked while also allowing for ridiculous bullshit by streamlining the controls to make them just imprecise enough to be fun. Whereas Totally Reliable Delivery Service is just unwieldy and random in places.
This is gonna go great
A fine example would be some of the early missions that task you with moving things that have some exploding capabilities. I’d grab the object by holding the triggers down that correspond to each arm, but then to lift them you have to hold both bumpers down because they also correspond to each hand. You get this weird claw maneuver going on which is uncomfortable and doesn’t actually work.
If you happen to manage to get a product into a car without blowing it and yourself up, then you need to drive a car to the destination to complete the delivery. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line of development, somebody thought it would be a cool idea to take camera control away from you, should you dare to use your characters right hand. You see, traditionally, the right analog stick is for camera stuff and not for steering a vehicle. A common mistake, but an important one to rectify.
It didn’t go great
I know harping on the controls of Totally Reliable Delivery Service is kind of a cheap shot considering the type of game it is, but I can’t imagine I’m the only one who finds this game a little too unwieldy and unresponsive, right? I want to like this game, and maybe I just need to put more time into it or play with friends, but as it is, I just can’t get behind it. All Totally Reliable Delivery Service managed to do was make me play Human Fall Flat and appreciate it’s wonky control scheme.
The Bonus World 