Monthly Archives: August 2019

Blog: You Can’t Go Home Again – 08/28/19

It would be generous to say that I have any experience with World of Warcraft considering I’ve only played it for about a week almost a decade ago. But while the fervor around the 15 year-old game has waned in popularity from time to time, it hasn’t stopped people from losing their minds over the release of World of Warcraft Classic.

From the time when WoW Classic was announced to its recent release, I’ve gone through varying degrees of confusion about the desire people have to jump back into a game from 2004, with all of its quirks and hiccups intact. But now, days after it’s dropped, I think I get it.

Like I said, I have basically no experience with WoW Classic nor any desire to get in there and see what all the fuss is about. I just figure that considering most of my friends have fallen prey to its wiles, I should at least pay some attention to the arc of this whole experience and try to get some insight into people’s excitement.

I asked some of my friends if they were genuinely excited to play WoW Classic as a game, or if they were actually just trying to chase those feelings and memories associated with it. Most of them agreed that the latter was the primary driving force for them, which is evidenced by the fact that suddenly, people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade started popping up and coming together to plan out their game nights. It’s kind of incredible when you think about it. It’s really the only game I can think of that has the cultural cache to become the equivalent of a high school reunion.

I was in high school when World of Warcraft burst onto the scene, taking the world by storm. At the time, the only MMO I was playing was Star Wars Galaxies, and that was purely motivated by my love of the movies along with a dash of peer pressure. I enjoyed playing it with those people at that moment in time, but if it was suddenly announced that Star Wars Galaxies was getting a faithful re-release that encapsulated everything about the game at that time, I don’t think I would care that much.

I know that’s just me though, as evidenced by the mass of players bombarding the WoW Classic servers. I’m not writing this with the intention of raining on the parade of anybody who is having a great time with the game. Chase your bliss. But for me, the way I felt when I played games with other people back then, are relegated to pleasant memories now. Sure I miss the carefree days where I could play games online with my friends till 3 in the morning, but those days are gone, and that’s okay. I did that when I had the time to do it, and I don’t regret it.

If you’re playing WoW Classic, I hope you’re enjoying it. It has to be this time capsule of a game that evokes so many memories, and that’s wonderful. A similar situation is soon to crop up with me and the Halo games when they start getting released on PC sometime this year. Yeah, it’s going to be fun to dive back into those games and play them again, but I know I’m not going to stick with them the way I did when they initially released. I must have over a thousand hours in Halo 2 alone, but when it drops on PC, I know I’m never going to come close to even a tenth of that.

My point is that these games are like looking through a photo album or something. You get that burst of positivity and warmth while the memories flood back in, and then you turn the page and keep going. I’m glad that Blizzard released WoW Classic, allowing so many people to come and visit Azeroth in just the way they remember it, but it’s never going to feel the same as the first time you had to kill 100 boars in hopes of getting 10 tusks.

Blog: Actual Human Physics – 08/21/19

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On numerous occasions I’ve mentioned my particular fondness for physics-based wackiness, but looking through the history of this site I don’t think I’ve actually talked about one of my favorite examples of that. If you haven’t heard of it, allow me to put Human Fall Flat on your radar, because it’s damn good fun.

Human Fall Flat isn’t a new game. It was released a little over 3 years ago on PC, but eventually made its way to just about every platform out there. In Human Fall Flat, you play as a little blob person who must traverse through various levels filled with puzzles and platforming challenges. At face value it doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s the wild physics that you’ll be battling that makes things interesting.

Puzzles usually require you figuring out how to hit a switch, breaking through a wall, piloting a vehicle or just maneuvering through tricky terrain. All of this is made more exciting as you’re trying to reign in the wily physics or preferably, exploiting them to break the level and circumvent the obstacle entirely.

It’s a goofy experience that only gets better when you get your friends in on the chaos. The game supports 2 players locally (on PC at least) and up to 8 players via online play. I’ve played through this game both single player and with another person, and I cannot fathom what kind of shit show it turns into with 8 people.

And “shit show” might actually be the most accurate descriptor of Human Fall Flat because of just how bonkers things can get. You might find yourself flying through the air, or flipping a vehicle with your bare hands or something because the physics went bonkers. But that’s what I love about the game. I can solve the puzzles and traverse the obstacles as intended in a pretty quick fashion, but it’s when you decide to go off the beaten path that Human Fall Flat really shines. It really is a case of, “if you think you can do it, you probably can.”

The problem is that there’s only a handful of official levels in the game at the moment that offer limited replay value. Creating a level filled with puzzles and branching paths can’t be easy, so this isn’t me complaining as much as it is me yearning for more stuff to fool around with. Luckily there’s Steam Workshop support which has enabled people to create their own nightmarish levels for me to bang my head against. I think I’ve downloaded about 20 levels at this point, and have only been able to conquer about half of them, which is fine because it’s more game for to play and I wont grouse about that. But here’s a tip for you custom level makers out there: put some fucking checkpoints in your levels.

The unfortunate truth is that Human Fall Flat is one of those games that when you see it, it’ll either click with you or not. While writing this, it was announced that a new level was coming to the game come August 27th, so that’s something to look forward to. I can’t properly express my love for this game without showing it off to people or letting them get their hands on it, but if you get the opportunity to try it, please do.

Blog: Everyone Needs to Calm Down – 08/14/19

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Late last year the Epic Games Launcher was released to much cynicism and side eyeing from the gaming audience, myself included. I won’t lie, I was very skeptical of the product and in some regards I still am, but I’m ultimately glad to see that there’s some real competition in the PC games marketplace for once. My issues with the Epic Games Launcher are mostly directed towards the very limited feature set which to be fair, they’re working on, but most of the anger and vitriol amidst the discourse revolves around how “aggressive” Epic appears when lining up exclusives.

A few months ago, Metro Exodus was gearing up for its PC release on Steam. It had been available for pre-order on Steam for quite a while and people were eager to play it. Weeks before it launched however, it was announced that the game would be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. The Steam pre-orders would be honored and activated on release day, but people were not happy with the abrupt jump to this new platform. I’m guessing that was the start of everyone getting angry with the platform in general. Even I thought it was a questionable move, but I also had no intention to play Metro Exodus, so I moved on.

Since then, Epic has been courting developers of all sizes, encouraging them to release on their platform and enjoy a healthier cut of profits from sales. There should be no question that developers should get paid for the work they put into making these games, and if there’s a platform out there that better facilitates that, then it’s an easy decision to make.

But the internet is still a nightmare emporium where people will take any reason to raise their pitchforks and try to ruin the lives of others. That’s where Ooblets comes in. Ooblets is a game that appears to be mixing the elements of Animal Crossing and Pokemon together into one colorfully charming experience. Unfortunately, this post isn’t about how excited I am to check the game out (which I am), instead it’s about how on July 31st the studio behind the game announced that they were signing a deal with the Epic Games Store for a few reasons, income being the primary motivator. Let’s be clear, an indie studio doing what they have to in order to get paid more for there work is not something we should be grousing about. Developers need money to survive, and if the Epic Games Store is offering them a bigger cut alongside of a signing bonus, they should take that opportunity.

I bet you can guess what happened next. See, the team behind Ooblets put out a pretty hilarious and snarky blog post outlining the decision, while also making fun of how much people on the internet lose their minds when they hear about Epic grabbing another exclusive. I thought it was pretty hilarious but the internet did not. The internet found it so unfunny in fact, that they responded in some pretty shitty ways including racial slurs and death threats. You know, completely rational responses to a video game going to another store.

WARNING: If you want to see some of the garbage people have said, it’s here, but there’s some really horrific stuff in there, so click at your own risk.

So here we are in the aftermath of all of this, left with yet another tragic example of targeted hate campaigns over the stupidest and most inconsequential shit. The amount of hatred and anger over this move should seem unbelievable, but unfortunately the internet continues to remain a smoldering crater full of mutants with keyboards. I don’t have the solution to this problem, I can only encourage people to spare a thought for the people behind the product. It isn’t worth getting so wound up over a game that you verbally assault someone or threaten them. Nothing should prompt you to be that kind of person, especially not a video game.

It’s a shame that the developers and their insanely charming game have to be associated with this nonsense and I hope the developers are able to rise above the noise and push on. I’ve been interested in Ooblets for quite a while now and fully intended on playing it, regardless of what storefront it eventually wound up on.

Maybe it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around how to install a new launcher. Maybe they don’t like having two whole icons on their desktop for game related things. Those excuses are bullshit. None of it is worth threatening people. Get the fuck over yourselves.

Building a New Splinter Cell

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A YouTube channel named NoClip, recently released a documentary series about the rebooted Hitman games of the past few years. It highlighted developer IO Interactive and their separation from Square Enix, the way they designed their levels and AI patterns, as well as some other very interesting tidbits about their struggles and accomplishments. You should check it out. But it got me thinking about another stealth-action franchise that could use the same rebooting treatment that Hitman received. Of course I’m speaking of Splinter Cell.

Just like the Hitman franchise, Splinter Cell has had some really good entries in the series, and some not so great ones. Hitman eventually pivoted off of a divisive release in the form of Hitman Absolution, into the phenomenal Hitman 2016. Absolution was a fairly linear game that tried to follow in the steps of popular action games of the time, ultimately betraying the core conceit of what those games were traditionally like. Hitman 2016 threw linearity out the window and placed you into clockwork, systems driven levels that had dozens of way to approach them, with multiple objectives for you to complete, a bevy of disguises and weapons at your disposal, and plenty of over-the-top methods for you to dispatch your targets.

But it isn’t the only tried and true stealth-action franchise that made drastic changes to the formula. In a similar fashion, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain did something of a soft reboot in terms of its mechanics and play style, favoring an open world and systemic driven design as opposed to a more curated one. It wasn’t without it’s issues, but most people can agree that it was the best playing Metal Gear, despite having a middling story at best.

So I got to thinking, if Hitman and Metal Gear could reboot themselves so successfully, Splinter Cell should be able to as well. While it’s easy to say that Splinter Cell should just do the same thing those games did, it can’t. There are fundamental differences in the way those games play that just don’t translate perfectly. But if we were to cherry pick elements from either of those games to slot into a new Splinter Cell, I bet you’d come back with something pretty good.

In Hitman 2016, you’re infiltrating these massive and mostly public spaces, adopting the persona and disguise of whomever you need to be in order to gain access to some of the more guarded targets. You’re usually trying to get rid of some sleazy rich guy who’s throwing a party or staying at a hotel or something. There are more “public” spaces for you to occupy and plan around, making it feel more like a puzzle game than anything else.

In Metal Gear Solid V, you’re infiltrating various military installments spread throughout this massive open world, returning to your home base every so often to cash in your missions or progress the story. There isn’t a ton of variety in the way you actually approach these missions, but you’ve got a pretty impressive tool kit at your disposal, from a rocket powered arm that you can shoot into the faces of your enemies, to a dog that wields a knife in its mouth and will cut fools up at your behest.

Splinter Cell is different kind of game in those regards, striving to be a more grounded depiction of military efficacy than the other stealth-action franchises. That established ideology about what those games do makes it difficult to open up the floodgates and allow for more of the weird shenanigans that Metal Gear and Hitman allow for, and Sam Fisher as a protagonist isn’t exactly the “dressing up like a clown and sneaking into a birthday party” type of secret agent.

But despite all of that, here are some elements from both Metal Gear and Hitman that a new Splinter Cell should implement in a new entry.

LEVEL DESIGN

The star of the modern Hitman games is most certainly the levels that you play in. What Hitman 2016 doubled-down on were these clockwork levels that were massive sandboxes for you to explore, where NPCs had routines and goals for you to intercept and take advantage of. Almost every corner of the level provided you with some new opportunity, tool or costume for you to use to dispatch your targets. Along with that, the way the AI was scripted was such that no matter what you did or who you removed from the world, the game was able to pick it back up and make sure everything didn’t grind to a halt because you killed a particular NPC or were caught doing something.

I think that same philosophy can be applied to Splinter Cell in an extremely effective way. In Hitman, the levels all provide Agent 47 with opportunities to hide in plain sight, playing to his strengths while also providing you with a ton of variety in terms of settings and weaponry. Because Agent 47 is more focused on infiltration, the levels can be anything from an active movie studio, to the suburbs, or to a fashion show. That’s the beauty behind the core concept of Hitman.

Whereas Sam Fisher is more of a traditional spy, running military ops, sticking to the shadows and using his environment to help shield him from detection. Instead of the normal, shoot out the lights and sneak up behind a guy routine, a bigger and more complex level could afford you new opportunities to take when stalking your prey.

The problem is that Sam Fisher as a character has a pretty one-note arsenal. He’s a super effective spy who knows how to sneak around, shoot guns and climb obstacles, but he can never dress up like a hipster and pretends to be the drummer in a band so he can kill the lead singer. It’s what makes creating these more intricate levels so difficult, because nobody ever cares how Sam Fisher gets into an enemy base and kills everyone, because he’s on a mission to a dangerous place where there are rarely any civilians to worry about.

CHALLENGES

There are so many things that make Hitman levels so infinitely re-playable, but the challenges and missions have to be up there. Hitman encourages you to replay levels and approach them differently by rewarding you with experience for throwing a pair of scissors at your target’s head while dressed like a clown, or by pushing a loud speaker off the awning above them and crushing them. By completing these challenges, you’re rewarded with new outfits, starting points, and weapons you can use to flex your creativity. It’s a brilliant loop that consistently proves to be the voice in your head that says, “yeah that was cool, but how about this?”

In Splinter Cell though, you have maybe 3 or 4 ways to actually deal with your targets, and in reality you’re only going to either shoot them or strangle them. That’s kind of another big problem Splinter Cell runs into if it tries to adopt a more Hitman-like approach. How do you encourage your players to play differently, and what does that even look like? Sam Fisher doesn’t dress up in goofy outfits and he rarely hides in plain sight, so how do you make new challenges and missions within this limited tool set as well as what the audience expects from a Splinter Cell game? Without completely redefining what kind of character Sam Fisher is you get kind of locked into a box.

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing an all new Sam Fisher who gets tasked with taking down targets that aren’t purely enemy combatants, but I think people would lose their minds if he suddenly started dressing up as a waiter or something.

WEAPONRY

Some of the deadliest and most effective weapons in Hitman are often the most innocuous ones. I’ve killed more people with pasta cans, letter openers, and cheeseburgers than actual guns, because in Hitman, everything you can pick up becomes a deadly weapon. I’m willing to bet Sam Fisher is just as effective as Agent 47 when it comes to improvised weaponry, but I can’t really recall him ever exhibiting that beyond throwing a brick or a rock.

This issue seems far more surmountable than the previous ones considering that you can put plenty of flotsam and jetsam in the levels that Sam could throw at the heads of his enemies. Cinder-blocks, bottles and so on and so forth all would narratively fit in the self-serious tone of Splinter Cell. But that tone can be a little limiting in terms of what you can cram into a new Splinter Cell.

I want to see Sam Fisher try to play guitar poorly in an attempt to fool his target. Then, when he realizes that the target isn’t buying it, smashes it over their head. He might then say something like, “everyone’s a critic” and move to leave the level. But I sincerely doubt I’d ever see that.

TONE

Speaking of the self-seriousness of the franchise, we arrive at my last point. The tone of Splinter Cell, hell, the tone of all the Tom Clancy games are just so painfully self serious. That isn’t to say that striking a serious tone is a bad thing, but it is limiting if you’re trying to build out levels, opportunities and basically everything I’ve mentioned up until this point.

Even when you look at something like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a game that also provided players a systems driven sandbox to skulk around in, that game still had levity built into it. By Metal Gear standards it was pretty serious, but you could still do some wild stuff in that game like making your horse poop on command that would lighten the mood.

I can’t really recall anything like that happening in the Splinter Cell franchise. Sam Fisher will make the occasional quip, but he’s never drowning his targets in the toilet they’re vomiting into like you can in Hitman or confusing enemy guards with 20 inflatable dummies of himself like you do in Metal Gear.

The Tom Clancy approach to things is to make bad military humor that is funny to maybe a handful of people out there. Like, there had to be one person out there who cracked up every time a character shouted the phrase, “shitballs!” in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, right?

Despite my personal preference for a lighter toned game, I just think that from a design perspective it has to be easier to create fun opportunities than just the standard military fare ones. I’d rather watch the ejector seat on a jet launch a man into the sun than see a guy just shoot a guy with a sniper rifle. It’s why I appreciate the Hitman games so much. Maybe Splinter Cell just isn’t the franchise for me anymore, but if I had my way, it would be a much different game in tone.

I desperately want a new Splinter Cell game, but as time goes on I get a little more cautious about what that game looks like. Between the need to change and the desire to stay true to the existing formulas, I’d have to imagine that part of why a new Splinter Cell hasn’t been announced is because the well of ideas that exists within those confines might be running dry. I just hope that if there ever is a new Splinter Cell game, whatever it turns out to be, it manages to keep me playing for as long as the Hitman reboots have.

Blog: A Hike I Like – 08/07/19

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Last week, a delightful little game was released on Steam called A Short Hike. It’s about your character, an anthropomorphic bird lady, who decided to get away from it all and head out to the mountains with her aunt. Your goal is simple: make your way to the top of the tallest mountain so you can get cellphone reception. At first blush it seems pretty absurd, but very quickly you find that you’re expecting an extremely important phone call from a family member.

So you head off through the woods to find a way up to the peak of the mountain. Naturally, it wouldn’t be as simple as just going there. You lack the physical capabilities to properly scale said mountain when you start out. Soon after that realization, you encounter a mechanic that quite simply put, is a stamina meter. You need to collect these golden feathers that expand your capacity for physical activity. Whether it be climbing, running or flying, the feathers are the key to your success.

In total, you’ll need about 7 or 8 feathers to make the journey up. The way you get more of them is through completing side quests through the quirky side characters that pop up along the way, buying them, or just straight up finding them in the wild. It’s all pretty straightforward in terms of gameplay mechanics.

The characters are written well enough, with some genuinely chuckle-worthy moments sprinkled throughout their dialogue, but there isn’t any real characterization going on here. By the time I got to the climax of the game, I didn’t find myself too attached to the main character and her quest to really feel the weight of it.

While the story is a little bit of a bummer, A Short Hike has a style to it that I personally really enjoyed, but I could imagine some people would hate. Everything is overly pixelated, almost to the point of being completely overtaken by a mosaic effect. It’s like someone took a GameBoy Advance game and blew it up to a modern resolution. While that may sound odd, when it’s paired with the wonderful art direction and color palette the game boasts, it comes together pretty well.

A Short Hike isn’t just a clever name though. It’s a very short game, taking me only about an hour to beat. I did a few side quests and explored a bunch before I decided to make my way to the peak of the mountain to see where the story went. Once I got the scene up there and made my way back to the starting area, I accidentally triggered an event that resulted in the game ending and credits rolling. The game didn’t make it terribly clear that this was going to happen, but it is what it is.

I enjoyed A Short Hike for what it was, even if there wasn’t much there. It’s a calming and pleasant game that’s decent way to kill an hour or two. It’s out on Steam now for $7.99.

The Master Of Disaster: Illiterate & Rich – 04

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I don’t have a great deal of experience with Dungeons & Dragons outside of playing a few one-shots, playing in a short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and of course DM-ing the campaign my friends and I are currently going through. But I’d like to focus in on that short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and talk about the time one of our players decided to take up the mantle of expert accountant at the cost of his literacy.

We had a particularly greedy dwarf barbarian in our party who was always quick to gather as much loot as he could possibly carry on his mostly naked body. It was a funny bit that worked well with the rest of us because our goals were a bit more altruistic and personal in nature. But not for our enterprising dwarf. No, he was motivated purely by shiny things.

I imagine this is what our dwarf looked like

It’s when we came across a chest of gold pieces that Gravy-Train (his name was a play on the Pokemon, Graveler, but I refused to call him that) found and decided that here in this enemy infested cave was the best place to count it all. Worried that we would all be caught off guard while Gravy was counting his pennies, he flippantly posited that his character was a money-whiz, and could count a vast amount of coins in mere seconds. I think our DM was willing to concede that point, but Gravy followed it up by saying that he didn’t know how to read, but could count really well.

Me being the scamp I was demanded that this was canon and he had to commit to it. I experienced no push back from anyone, and from there on, Gravy was illiterate but could count really well.

We ended up in a library packed with books that our now illiterate dwarf could not read. While I had hoped for some sort of Twilight Zone styled Sisyphean curse where he’d lament at the vast amounts of knowledge he could no longer consume, but Gravy-Train was unphased and went ahead and told us how many books were on the shelves as if that was some great piece of intelligence he had just dumped on us.

That run down mound of garbage on the far right? That’s Gravy-Train’s Bar

Later in the campaign, Gravy-Train began to split from the party in an effort to make some deals with the town banker or something. He wanted to buy the entirety of the town if memory serves, and started by buying out the old and run down tavern on the hill. The guy couldn’t read, but had already set his plan of owning an entire city into motion. It was an amazing moment when he finally revealed that to us.

It’s the little bits of character building that I’ve come to appreciate in my time with D&D. This story may seem fairly benign in the grand scheme of things, but it made his character more tangible and real, despite being hilarious. It’s because of this that I think I’ve been so taken with D&D. I want to have more of those moments in the game, both the funny and serious alike. After destroying their world, I was presented with the unique opportunity of putting my players into a setting where they can re-contextualize everything about themselves, and maybe put them in more situations that can bring out these character moments. That’s my hope at least.

But I do wonder if we would’ve ever taught him to read again though. I’m guessing we wouldn’t. It’s funnier if he never could read again.