Monthly Archives: June 2020

Gut Check: Umurangi Generation

Umurangi Generation is a stylistic and serene game about being a photographer in some weird dystopian, vaguely cyberpunk world where somebody is paying top dollar for your random pictures of birds. It’s actually a really neat concept that fumbles the execution in certain spots, but still retains a certain meditative quality that I appreciate.

When I jumped into the first level of Umurangi Generation, I honestly felt a little overwhelmed by what I was supposed to do. You’re given a list of photo objectives, most of which just want something specific in it like a mountain or a flag, but some will have an additional piece of criteria that asks you to use a specific lens or be at a particular distance from the subject. As I played more however, I started to feel more comfortable with the suite of tools I had and when to use them.

What doesn’t get easier however, is the unnecessary vagueness of some of these objectives. Often times the objectives are straightforward, asking you to get a certain amount of an object in one shot or asking you to recreate a postcard. Then there are objectives that are so purposefully vague that you’ll end up spending several minutes trying to even comprehend what you’re actually supposed to be looking for.

For instance, an early objective was to find a sarcastic version of the phrase, “Property of the United Nations.” This level looked like some military outpost, so literally everything had the phrase, “Property of the United Nations” on it somewhere. But not knowing what I was exactly looking for caused me more frustration than satisfaction when I eventually discovered that one of the soldiers was wearing a helmet that said something cheeky on it. Like, it was a decent joke I suppose, but the punchline didn’t land because I had already wasted twenty minutes trying to find the damn thing.

That nebulous goal was only made more infuriating by the slow and imprecise movement of your character. My main issues are the speed at which you move and how often I found myself getting tangled up on level geometry. I’d get caught on corners and ledges for the most part, which were less than ideal when you have ten minutes to complete all the objectives in a level.

Technically you can go over that time limit, but you’ll take a penalty for it. In Umurangi Generation, you pay for every roll of film you use in your camera, and get paid for the content and accuracy of your shots. I never really felt the financial impact of wasting time or film in the early parts of the game, but I imagine that could change in later levels. You’re also dinged for having any “blue bottles” or man o’ wars in your shots, something I feel I should mention because they’re literally everywhere. It’s this extra obstacle that makes you find more creative ways to get the perfect shot.

Once you take a picture, you get the opportunity to edit it. It starts simple at first, only allowing you to change the exposure and color tint, but by the third level I had unlocked a saturation slider as well. Umurangi Generation has a decent progression system in it too, where you unlock a new tool as you move from level to level. The first unlock I got was a telephoto lens, followed by the aforementioned saturation slider. I don’t know if Umurangi Generation will keep up the pace of unlocks as I progress, but I sure hope it does.

Umurangi Generation is an extremely cool concept for a game that does a really good job with the photography mechanics, but has some rough edges on almost every other aspect of it. That being said, I really like Umurangi Generation. When the weight of the timer or the nebulous goals isn’t pushing down on me, it truly feels like the meditative experience I want from a game.

Blog: Black Lives Matter – 06/03/20

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I know everyone has their opinion about what’s going on in the world right now, and I also know that my voice is not the best suited to speak on these heated issues, but being silent is akin to not caring at all. I’m sure you’ve seen and read a lot of media about this very topic, so my apologies for just adding another thing on the pile. Oh, and this shouldn’t be surprising, but this one isn’t about video games.

I 100% am in support the protestors and the Black Lives Matter movement. This country has needed systemic reform since its inception, and its citizens have cried out for it countless times in our history. George Floyd was murdered by the police, and those officers, along with every officer needs to be held accountable for their actions, as they’ve been literally getting away with murder for decades.

I know I’m far from the right person to speak eloquently and informatively about this topic, so I won’t belabor the point. It’s been long past the time for action in this country, and I applaud the protestors for continually standing up to oppression despite having a president who both encourages and celebrates violence towards them.

There are plenty of ways to provide support and aid to the movement, all of which are listed here, and I strongly suggest you look into if you are able to. And if you are participating in the protests, stay safe. Not only do you have to contend with the police, but there’s still a deadly virus hanging around that you still need to be cautious about. Above all, if you want to see real and tangible change, vote in November. Vote this pompous, malevolent and quite frankly, evil man out of office later this year. You can check your voter registration at vote.org.

Stay safe everyone. This is only going to get harder.

Gut Check: Maneater

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Maneater is a genuinely fun game with an extremely unique concept that ultimately gets bogged down in repetition and monotony far sooner than you’d expect or want. One would think that a game about being a shark that’s hell-bent on consuming and destroying any and everything in its path would be more exciting to play, and while the moment to moment gameplay achieves that desired level of excitement, the objectives and grinding required of you become very tedious, very quickly.

When you begin Maneater, you’re thrust into the far more capable fins of an adult shark that’s fairly hearty and ferocious. You learn the basic controls of locomotion and eating, and shortly afterwards find yourself devouring placid beach-goers just trying to soak up the sun. After a few snacks of the human variety, a shark hunting party is deployed to your location where you summarily dispatch them through a combination of ramming their boats, hurling divers at their boats, leaping atop their boats, or just chomping away at them until there’s nothing left.

In classic “abilitease” fashion, your shark is captured by some big time shark hunter that’s being filmed for the reality TV show, unsurprisingly titled “Maneater.” This jerk kills the shark you were playing as, cuts a baby out of your stomach, and throws it back into the water, but only after this baby shark chomps off this dude’s arm. Thus you start your murder-shark career in earnest as this orphaned shark-child that’s definitely not out for revenge.

It’s during this first level of Maneater where I cultivated my “Gut Check” opinions, so I’m well aware that things can change as I progress further. The first level is your standard bayou that’s chock full of catfish, cattails, murky brown water and of course, gators. You spend most of this time trying to navigate towards your objective marker while chowing down on turtles and other tiny fish on your way. In this way Maneater feels a lot like a Feeding Frenzy type of game, where you eat enough smaller fish to level up and grow into a bigger shark that’s capable of taking on bigger foes. Except, even at higher levels and larger sizes I was still getting attacked by level one fish who no longer posed any sort of threat to me.

See, in Maneater you don’t just swim over a fish and eat it, you literally have to mash on the right trigger to chew your food. You’ll also need to wiggle the right analog stick if something caught in your maw tries to escape your grasp. If you’re feeling especially froggy, you can even grab some prey in your massive chompers, and then hurl them off into the distance at another target. Maneater clearly is taking its subject matter about as seriously as Sharknado did, and I love it for that. It’s one of the few games in recent memory that have made me laugh, not through a joke or a cut-scene, but through the sheer absurdity of what I was controlling.

Unfortunately, Maneater gets a little repetitive, even so early in the game. I progressed through a few objectives pretty quickly, but ultimately was greeted by a progress gate that required me to be level 4 before I could take on any additional missions. That meant I was just going to swim around and eat more turtles and groupers until I became a bit heartier. This took a while. Now this could just be an isolated incident, but the word on the street is that this repetitive structure only gets worse as you progress.

That’s a damn shame too because I genuinely think that Maneater is such a strong concept for a game. Unfortunately it shows its cards a little too early in the game, revealing that while the core gameplay loop is fun, it isn’t fun enough to outweigh Maneater‘s repetitious nature. That isn’t to say that repetition is the only issue that Maneater has, but it is the most predominant one, with a close second place going to the unwieldy camera.

Maneater does its best in trying to make a game about swimming actually feel good to play, and for the most part it succeeds. But the way the camera works, particularly when you’re in combat with something is infuriating. Combat usually devolves into you and your opponent circling one another, waiting for and then dodging their attack, and then retaliating with your own powerful chomps until they finally die. This would all be fine if the camera actually played along and locked-on to your enemy. Instead, you can click the right stick in to whip the camera around to face your enemy, but it doesn’t lock-on to them. It’s bewildering at best, and I sure hope that there’s either a setting in the menus I missed, or even some woefully misguided later upgrade I can unlock, because as it is fighting anything is a messy endeavor.

Maneater does have its highs though, primarily in how it presents the story to you. The show, “Maneater,” is portrayed to you in the style of a Discovery Channel show about wildlife, interspersed with reality TV show moments that follow the folks trying to hunt you. It’s all narrated by Chris Parnell as well, which is honestly a great choice because he does a fantastic job with the script he’s given, even if all of the jokes don’t land.

I’ve only played a small piece of Maneater, but I’m already starting to feel a little worn down by it. I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet, but I kind of already know that there’s a very little chance I end up seeing this thing through to the end. I’m just not a big fan of having to grind or complete repeated objectives in games, and it sounds like there’s a lot of that in Maneater.

I Wanted to Play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, But Apparently That Was Too Much to Ask For

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Recently the Epic Games Store ran their “Epic Mega Sale,” in which not only were games on sale, but they issued ten dollar coupons to everyone to entice people to buy more. Needless to say, this offer worked and I picked up Assassin’s Creed Odyssey for only a couple of bucks, thus starting a several day journey of actually getting to play the damn thing.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey clocked in around 81 gigabytes for its initial install time. I wasn’t surprised by how massive it was considering I knew how big of a game it was. Sure having to wait a few hours for something to install sucks, but it’s an unavoidable part of playing just about any game these days. This was something I anticipated and was prepared for.

What I wasn’t ready for was the disconnect between the Epic Games Store and Uplay, a factor that took me alarmingly long to realize and fix. See, when you launch a Ubisoft title outside of Uplay itself, Uplay still has to launch and authorize that you actually own the game. What I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that I hadn’t actually launched Uplay for a long time, so it needed to update itself as well, but since I was running a shell of UPlay the actual program itself was unable to update.

I was met with a blue dialogue box in Ubisoft colors that said something to the effect of “looking for updates.” This box never went away. It was looking for updates but couldn’t find any. After some time of waiting, I decided to just launch Uplay by itself to see if an update would automatically initialize. Luckily, that did the trick.

So now I was ready to go, right? Of course not. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey had a 30 gigabyte update ready and waiting for me. You would think that in buying the game I would have received the most updated version of the dang thing, but no. For some reason, far beyond my comprehension, I still had an update that was nearly half the size of the game to install before I could have my fun stabbing adventures.

Finally, the update was applied and I was ready to go, right? Nope! Because suddenly Uplay was asking me for a CD key for the game I just bought, and I couldn’t find that information in my cursory searching through the Epic Games Store. So I restarted the Epic store to see if that might refresh some entitlements or something, and it kind of worked out. I had to link my Epic account to Uplay, something I could’ve sworn I already did when I bought The Division 2 when it initially released. So I did that and finally I could play the game, right?

If that was the end of the saga, I might not have written this article at all, but unfortunately for me a new problem appeared just in time to properly piss me off. The game launches, I do the intro mission and start to progress. Not five minutes into actually playing the game as the protagonist, it crashes.

The first mission in the game has you face off against two hooligans who come and harass you on behalf of some gang leader named “The Cyclops.” After roughing them up, you get to make your first choice in the game of whether to kill them or let them live. I chose the latter. A cut-scene happens and you have to make your way a short distance to the next objective. On that journey, I was ambushed by the hooligans I had spared and had to properly dispatch them this time. Upon killing the final enemy in the group, the game crashed.

It did this every single time. I have played this 3 minute portion of the mission a total of 5 times already in the hopes that something different would happen, and I could finally enjoy the fucking game I paid for. I don’t even want to play the game that badly anymore thanks to the multi-day calamity that I’ve been through with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but part of me doesn’t want to let the game get away with this bullshit.

This whole article has been pretty directly pointed at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but this is the kind of shit that can happen in the world of PC gaming and digital distribution. Now, I love playing games on my computer and consider it my go-to place for gaming, but this kind of nonsense is the exact kind of thing that makes me think I’d be better off just playing it on my PS4. But this isn’t unique to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey considering that just last year I went through this exact same thing with Red Dead Redemption II, also through an Epic Games Store purchase.

I know that all of this sounds like I’d end this article bashing Epic or Ubisoft, but I kind of get why it’s such a mess. Publishers want to make as much money as they possibly can, which is why almost all of them have their own PC launcher and storefront. But they also want to put their games where people will actually see them like Steam, Epic or GOG, and still be able to verify purchases and track their players habits in game. That’s why whenever you buy a Ubisoft game on Steam, it launches an extra layer of DRM in the form of Uplay. It’s cumbersome and annoying, but I get it. The problem is that while these problems don’t always crop up, when they do it’s usually because the solutions aren’t as seamless or elegant as you’d hope. I don’t know what the solution to all of this is, but I do know that I’m going to fucking play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey even if I have to reinstall the god damned thing.

UPDATE #1: I have verified the files of the game and unfortunately was greeted with the same crash in the same place, every time.

UPDATE #2: I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to have to reinstall this game, and have already begun that process. It’s been two hours and I’m around two-thirds of the way through the download.

UPDATE #3: The installation process is complete and I have officially completed that mission without any additional hiccups. The frame rate is a little wonky though.

UPDATE #4: I haven’t played the game in days. This was a really good use of my time.