Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

 When I immersed myself in Elden Ring for several weeks back in January / February I invested in strength and tried to build a melee focussed character. Last week on a whim I reinstalled the game and started over as magic using glintstone sorcerer prioritising intelligence. Now I find I am progressing through the game far more quickly and enjoying the experience more. A lot of this is due to my familiarity with the game born from experience but I am enjoying the playstyle more as well.  Before I go much further I must address the elephant in the room. There is a section of the Elden Ring community who look down on magic as easy mode. They consider it an inferior playstyle to the carefully timed parrys, dodges and counters that are a hallmark of Souls games. I would like to think I am above being influenced by this kind of snobbery but that isn't entirely true. I am pretty sure that my decision to initially play as a melee character was influenced by a niggling feeling that tha...

 Back in 2012 the brooding world of Dark Souls consumed me for several weeks . I bounced off several other FromSoft games but Elden Ring's more accessible approach  has sucked me back into the Souls world once again. I now have now spent over 200 hours in the game and it has become a compulsion. At this stage I am strongly considering taking a break.  Elden ring has taught me something about myself and about the way I approach games. I play very very slowly. How Long to Beat  suggests that the main storyline takes about 55 hours and that 100% completion takes around 130. After 200 hours my level 65 character is less than half way through the game (currently in Redmayne Castle preparing to take down Starscourge Radahn). When I realised how slowly I was progressing compared to others I initially blamed it on my lack of skill however on reflection I think it has more to do with the way I prefer to play. To give an example from yesterday: I spent four hours overcoming a ...

 Steam says I have played Elden Ring for 77 hours since installing the game 23 days ago. Some of that is undoubtedly idle time but I have probably clocked at least 50 hours of actual playtime and I am still very much a beginner.  Elden Ring is the 2022 mega hit game from From Software, creator of the hugely influential Demon souls / Dark Souls series. These games are notoriously hard core and make a virtue out of not hand holding players. Elden Ring remains true to the souls formula but in a bigger bolder and more accessible format. Elden Ring has been rewarded with huge sales and multiple critical accolades including several "Game of the Year" titles.  More accessible is a relative term. Unlike previous souls games Elden Ring does have a tutorial (if you can find it by jumping off a cliff) but it only teaches the very basics of melee combat. Most of the games many many complex systems are left for the player to figure out by themselves including things as fundamental as ...

 I was only a couple of hours into Assassin's Creed Odyssey when a young street urchin friend came and asked for my help. Her family it seemed lived in another town which was in the grips of a terrible disease called "The Blood Fever". I'm not sure what she thought my warrior character could do but the girl looked up to me so I set off. Perhaps I would find the source of the mysterious illness,  a polluted well or some such.  I was surprised on arriving at the town to find that it had been burned to the ground and the last few survivors including my friends family were being held captive by a priest and his guards. When I talked to the priest he explained that he had to kill everyone in the village because it was the only way to stop this terrible plague from spreading to the whole island. The remaining villagers begged for their lives and pleaded that they weren't even very sick but just wanted to leave the cursed town.  This left me with a surprisingly distressi...

 I would like to share two moments from my recent playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn: Moment 1: I was only a few hours into the game but I had already sampled enough to realise that this was a very good game with a stunningly beautiful game world, interesting gameplay and combat, rich and  interesting lore, and great characters and story.  However a couple of hours in as I was beginning to get to grips with the game mechanics another realisation hit me and my heart sank.  It was the bags that did it The game has about half a dozen bags for items that you have to level up by collecting stuff. It also has all the other hallmarks of an open world Ubisoft game. A beautiful open world map populated by  creatures and sites of interest for you to explore and get distracted. Towers to climb to open up new sections of the map (in this case the towers are giant robotic giraffes which is a nice touch but still the principle remains). It has tonnes of make-work errands and si...

 I am currently playing and enjoying Remnant from the Ashes a Soulslike game that has  a few twists of its own.  In common with other Soulslike games Remnant is a third person adventure where saving at a checkpoint re-spawns all non boss enemies. Even regular enemies are dangerous and death is a frequent occurrence as you progress through the world.  Perhaps Remnant's most significant difference is that it relies far more on ranged combat than melee combat. There is a wide range of guns and gun powerups available but the melee combat is quite simplistic in comparison to a typical soulslike game. There are no blocks or parries and a very limited number of melee moves. I find myself using melee only as a fallback when I am out of ammo or an enemy gets in too close.  Another feature of Remnant is that is uses procedurally generated maps and levels within an overarching plot framework. Even the boss fights you encounter on any given play through are randomised...

I do love finishing games even when they are relatively casual indie games like Broforce. I highly recommend the game by the way. It is an action platformer with a couple of twists. Twist 1 is that you play as a random selection of "Bros" (translate: thinly disguised action heroes from 80's movies), You never know which character you will get next and they all have very different weapons and skills. The second twist is that the terrain is completely destructible. Altogether this adds quite a bit of strategy to the usual shooty carnage. A major bonus is that the game is very co-op friendly and it is a complete blast in co-op. Now what game will I try next? Another indie game will be quick to pick up but I have a few AAA titles in my queue that I also want to try. Deus Ex Mankind Divided is tempting.

Dawn of War 2 expansion on campaigns: Chaos Rising and Retribution. I loved Dawn of War 2 and I love these expansions. DoW 3 has small squad RTS combat which is a particular favourite of mine. Chaos Rising is a whole new campaign with similar gameplay and a novel "morality" feature which impacts on the skills of your heroes, the gear they can equip and also has some story impacts. Retribution has a fairly short new campaign but you can play as any one of multiple races which gives a lot of replay. Retribution also changes the gameplay somewhat introducing resource gathering and troop recruitment as a supplement to your heroes. You can even choose to swap out heroes for squads of lesser troops which allows some variety in tactics. Ryse Son of Rome: I got this from Humble Bundle in a sale because I love Roman History and it is supposed to be one of the prettiest games on PC. Sadly the game play has been widely criticised as boring and repetitive. I can certainly vouch for the...

Undoubtedly the biggest breakthrough for me in learning how to play Alien Isolation was to stop panicking and simply listen to my surroundings. The positional audio in the game is absolutely superb. All of the enemies make characteristic sounds and you can pinpoint their position by sound alone. Not only can you tell where they are you can usually also tell where they are going. The Alien itself is particularly noisy as it stomps about the place and many times I managed to evade an alien with very limited cover simply by moving myself about in response to sound prompts ensuring that I never fell into its line of sight. I cannot recall positional sound every having been as important to me in a game. Please note you don't need surround sound speakers to experience the positional audio I played with stereo headphones and stereo speakers. The headphones are better but the stereo speakers work just fine. Learning to use sound was so important to my enjoyment and mastery of the game th...

A deeply flawed masterpiece in my opinion but a masterpiece none the lest. The best stealth horror in any game I have seen. I actually got a neck cramp from the tension of playing the game. The flaws? Well the game is too long and far too repetitive.

I still suck badly at Alien Isolation. But I am making a bit more progress. One lesson I have learned is that my natural inclination to get as far away from the alien as possible just doesn't work. The creature, it seems is attached to the player by an invisible rubber band. If you do try and sneak away to the far side of the map the Alien will pop  out of a nearby vent  and surprise you. The safest place in the game bizarre though it seems is to creep around behind the alien. If you can see the creature then it cannot surprise you. I am also convinced that the conveniently placed lockers and boxes that appear all over the game with big "hide here" pop ups are death traps. In the first instance the make an almighty racket getting in and out. They also restrict your vision and restrict the motion tracker. The alien can and will attack you in there and you have no escape route. If you must hide then sneaking under a take is a much better bet especially one you can exit fr...

I have slotted Alien Isolation into my gaming rotation and I am not enjoying it as much as I expected. This survival horror game has won tonnes of accolade and it is both true to the movies and also genuinely scary. The trouble is I suck at the game. I keep getting eaten by the Alien which is not a pleasant experience. In my defence I offer that part of my frustration stems from the fact that while the game is very atmospheric the developers (Creative Assembly) have prioritised game play over atmosphere in a number of areas. The stealth parts of the game are genuinely tricky in addition to being scary. Further more the monster is obviously scripted to always be "some where near you" so you cannot really hide from it. For me this means that instead of sneaking through an area and being scared I try to sneak through an area, get eaten and then try again. After a few more deaths deaths I slowly  learn the pattern of the monster and instead of a scary game it becomes a Simon Says...

I am in a unusual position (for me) at the moment that I am actively juggling several games and not getting frustrated by it. I am playing a long campaign of Rome 2 Total War (Iceni start) which is true Total War fashion is sometimes very engrossing and sometimes tedious. It makes sense to intersperse my Total War sessions with a it more action so I have also been playing "Call of Duty Ghosts" single player. If you want a militaristic on rails interactive shooter movie then Call of Duty is probably still the best in the business and I do enjoy short bouts of shooty entertainment. However I do tire of the bizarre morality of modern shooters so when Call of Duty tires me I switch to "Blades of Time". This is a fantasy third person action adventure in which a scantily clad young heroine slaughters hundreds of assorted chaos monster who have taken over a mythical land of treasures. Blades got mediocre reviews but I am enjoying it a lot. It is very linear but the combat ...

They say you feel hungy again an hour after finishing a Chinese take away and that is sort of how I feel about Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor. I really enjoyed the game but now that I have just finished it I am not sure if it will leave any lasting memories. The game play, the setting and the whole presentation are absolutely terrific but overall it is a collection of fun gaming activities rather than a massive integrated work. The story itself (of the game not of Lord of the Rings) is fairly forgettable which doesn't help but I actually think the enormous freedom the game give you also contributes to this lack of overall purpose. Come to think of it I felt very similarly about finishing Far Cry 3. Perhaps this is a feature of what are being described as Ubisoft style open world games. Another gripe is that the game forgoes a final epic boss fight in lieu of a sequence of quick time events (press X to not die sort of thing). This is a let down in my opinion and is somewhat su...

Nvidia are giving away free  Ubisoft games with their GTX970/980 video cards and I chose Assassin's Creed Unity. Eighteenth century Paris was too tempting a prize to turn down. There is a lot of forum discontent about the game because the initial release was apparently badly optimised and buggy in places. The  minimum system specs are huge but Nvidia cards seem to fare better than AMD in this game so I reckoned that AC Unity was a good a way to test my recent upgrades . I have only played for about an hour so far but I am delighted to say that the game is running very smoothly so far. I am playing in Very High quality, 1680x1050, 60fps with Vsync on. I am a little surprised at it running so well because my ageing cpu is below minimum spec. No evidence of glitches or stuttering yet. Fingers crossed. I am even more delighted to say that the rendition of 18th century Paris is absolutely stunning.   The clothes, the architecture and the furniture are completely gorgeous a...

Over the last few weeks I have found myself getting  sucked in to Shadow of Mordor. I don't normally indulge in recently released AAA games but the combination of Tolkien and Arkham was enough to convince me this one time.  The game ambience owes more perhaps to Petr Jackson than to Tolkien and it is unusually violent (albeit the spouting blood is all Orcish black). Nevertheless I am enjoying it greatly.  I have seen this style of game called "Ubisoft like Open World"  similar to the recent Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games. You have a beautiful open world to explore with many optional side-quests and mini games in addition to a main quest line.  I have also seen criticism of the repetitiveness of it all.  Shadow of Mordor does have many repetitive elements and yet it offers a large range of different game play opportunities. When you are first thrust into the world the  vast array of things to do is quite over-whelming. You gradually learn...

The optional Deposed King is one of the hardest bosses in Darksiders II. I stumbled across him first at level 13 and was soundly defeated and I didn't eventually overcome him until level 17.  He is not a very complex boss. Most of his attacks are slow and easily avoided but he hits very hard and one particular hammer attack leaves you frozen for about 10 seconds while your health drains away at an alarming rate. Even one of these can be enough to kill you so there is absolutely no room for error as you whittle away his large pool of health. This is the source of the difficulty and frustration with this encounter. You spend a long time getting his health down only to die because of one mistake. Anyway the simple hint I have is to stack resistance gear. Gear in Darksiders II has two mitigation factors:  defence, which protects against most normal attacks and resistance, which protects against elemental attacks. Defense is more generally useful so you have probably maximised tha...

We have had a Wii under our living room telly for many years and it has always been my intention some day to explore what it could do beyond family friendly titles like Mario Kart and Just Dance. Monster Hunter Tri in particular was a title that I intended to try out someday having heard good things about it from many sources and given that it isn't available on any other platform. Somehow that "someday" kept getting pushed back and today I was a bit miffed to read that the servers are shutting down this very day . I don't think this affects the single player game but it is disappointing to realise that I will probably never have the full experience. Apparently Capcom are shutting down the Wii servers in the hopes of encouraging folk to migrate to their newer game on the WiiU platform. This strikes me as a pretty dodgy business strategy. There are almost a hundred million Wiis out there. There are no where near as many WiiUs and I strongly suspect there never will...

I am all for challenge in gaming but sometimes it is fun to get a weapon so overpowered that you can wallow in the visceral joy of annihilating hordes of enemies, particularly if you were previously struggling against those same foes. Darksider II has just such a weapon. It comes at a part of the game where you are facing swarms of weak but deadly mobs backed up by tougher mini bosses. The weapons at your disposal up to this point are barely adequate to deal with the onslaught and then you pick up the Gorehammer . It's a rocket launcher I guess firing exploding projectiles but two factors combine to make it the most overpowered rocket launcher I have every come across in a game. The first is that it constantly replenishes ammo at a rate of about one rocket per second. You never have to worry about running out of ammo and a generous magazine means you can let loose a rapid volley of rockets whenever required. The second factor is the doozy: there is no friendly fire. You cannot ...

Fallout  3 I recently spent over 60 hours playing the main campaign of  Fallout 3. I am hugely impressed and highly recommend it. What a huge world to explore full of adventures and stories. I forgot they made games like this. A minor gripe is that character progression is perhaps too generous with generous increases on power up and lots of skill ups scattered about the place. I never really felt the need to compromise one role in order to progress another and by the end of the game I was 100% proficient in several major skills. I have yet to install the add ons which I believe increase the level cap and will allow even more skills to be maxed out. Darksiders 2. I loved Darksiders 1 and I was hugely disappointed that the sequel didn't pull in enough revenue to save poor THQ. At least there is a fabulous game still to be played. Terrific artwork, fun puzzles and combat make this demonic fantasy action game a delight to play. For old codgers like me who normally struggle w...