Red Faction, Guerilla: putting the fun back in martyrdom

You know how in Sandbox games, no matter how much chaos you cause and people you kill, the cops lose interest once a mission is completed?

Red Faction Guerilla is no different when it comes to missions, but not during the aimless property destruction required to unlock those missions.

This leads the Mars occupiers to employ ruthless asymmetry against window smashers, and go to lunch while their barracks burn, but more importantly, committing acts of petty sedition produces the most accurate simulation of an insurgency campaign ever played:

You don't go into these attacks expecting to come out alive and seldom do. All that matters is hurting the target, and there is no shortage of (strangely similar looking) people who'll die to do it. Morale does not improve as control wanes, and after the army is forced to withdraw from an area it becomes overrun by truckloads of gibbering savages who'd been hiding out in the mountains.

Ooh, I wonder if he'll vote for the moderate party!

Demon's Souls: tough but fair

GOAT!

I'd hoped that Demon's Souls would be a goldmine for this blog, rife with metaphor about frustration, imbalance, and loss, and I suppose it could have been if I'd just never played it.

It turns out we've become so accustomed to the coddling of games designed to smoothly progress from point A to point B to point Buy the Sequel that a little bit of learning curve seems daunting.
The problem isn't Demon's Souls...It's us. If you still haven't played it, you really should.

Below are my responses to some common reasons people cite when in angst or awe of this game's supposed outrageous difficulty:


If you die, you lose all your souls (spent on leveling and as money)

Retrace your steps to the bloodstain which appears about 5 seconds from where you were standing and you can have them back.

Also, you don't lose any items including the "canned souls" strewn about the game.


Lots of guys can kill you with one or two hits

Good thing you've got infinite continues! Lesson learned? See above.


At any time, other people can come into your game and kill you

Only other people at comparable levels, only one at a time, only in certain areas, and only while you are "alive" and they are "in soul form," meaning their hit points are halved. And if they don't succeed, they'll go down a level.

Oh and that whole "alive" thing...yeah it doesn't happen too often.


But I don't want to be in soul form! I've only got half my health!

Cling ring.

Or volunteer to help someone else kill a boss. Or go kill a boss yourself. Just keep stuffing watercress in your mouth and you'll be fine. Or use one of those magic rocks! Rare and valuable resource, you say? Pah, I've got 30 in my Thomas!

But seriously. Cling ring.

You can't pause!

"oh honey, I would love to look at those baby pictures with you, but you know this crazy game I'm playing won't let me pause! I told you about that right? Isn't it crazy?!?"



I think that just about covers it. True, there are some dick moves the game will pull, like making you struggle to earn magic swords you're not strong enough to wield, or letting Yurt the Silent Chief kill all your Nexus pals, but he likely won't take out anyone that important, and would anyone really miss this prick?

harumph!

And on the flip side, how many games give you experience points when bad guys fall off a cliff?

Happiness is a warm spittled gun

Holiday shopping for Doomeru Jr. today, I came across the gift no infant should go without this season:


And it's organic!

Here's the link. Better get yours fast, it was a recent Etsy favorite!

Me, I'm going with the Super Mushroom teether. Double baby's size or your money back...if mushroom turns purple remove from child's mouth immediately and proceed to nearest hospital.

Red Dead Redemption: Rawhide

giddy up...please, god, just giddy up...

There are two reasons why smart young African American men like CJ Johnson become carjacking criminals, and they have nothing to do with 400 years of historical oppression or an inherently biased socioeconomic system: It’s because most jobs are not feasible via mass transit, and all other means of transportation available require constant mashing of the accelerator button.

Do we see illegal aliens straining their fingers this way? No sir. Yet now, when it comes to putting honest American family men like John Marston back to work, we require them to rely on this same method, even after it’s proven to cause repetitive-stress injuries and the commission of felonies? For so called “Realism?” I can see a rather European type of “ism” but it isn’t the one that begins with “real!” Holding down the button was good enough to simulate equine gait stimulation in GUN, and the approach is just as strong today.

Are there no depths of depravity to which you won’t sink, Rockstar? Not if I have anything to say about it! God bless my loyal listeners, and God bless America.

Red Dead Redemption, Undead Nightmare: Occam's Gayzor

I’d really love to know what inspired Rockstar to make the jump from Western to Zombies in this DLC. It was ingenious how well it fit, and so complementary of their signature satirical humor.

Even though the amount of repetitiveness between missions was more than usual, I had to play through if only to learn what caused the dead to walk amongst us in a tableau of irrevocable pain, misery and fear. I know, I know, Rockstar isn’t generally known for their gripping storylines and it’s really not supposed to matter why…Zombie Apocalypse is an inevitable given; The important questions lie with how the living choose to live, morality, humanity, practicality, and such…But hell with all that, the reason I couldn’t put this game down was because I needed to know how it would end.

The simplest, most logical explanation always gives good odds though, and in hindsight I really could have guessed. It was those damned Mexicans again!