“I’ll krump with ya’, foul tarnished!”

Me wandering into some random ruin and seeing a Stake Of Marika:

Bread’s Game Journal 03/05/22: Oh No I’m Playing Elden Ring.

You know, I really shouldn’t have bought Elden Ring before I finished Horizon Forbidden West. It’s not like I’m about to drop Horizon or anything, but I do know that, as of right now, I have too much on my plate. But does that really matter, because frankly, both of these games rule.

I’ve only played Elden Ring for a little over four hours at this point but damn if I’m not enthralled! I haven’t felt this way about a big open world like this since Breath of the Wild, which of course this game shares a lot of it’s DNA with. I mean I’m not even really out of the starting zone and I already have some wild stories to tell. A dragon keeps trying to kill me, a treasure chest tricked me and teleported me into some terrible mine somewhere far away, I fought a big group of goblins in a pitch black cave!

The game, thus far anyway, is both easier and more difficult than any Souls game before it. Easier in the larger variety of options and places to see and explore if you just don’t want to fight any big bosses or anything. Harder, that when you do stop to go fight those big bosses….they’re bigger than ever. Some of the enemies in this game are absolutely brutal, too. In just four hours I can no longer count on only two hands the amount of time some horrible creature has just annihilated me before I could get a good handle on how I need to deal with them!

I’m sure I gonna have a lot more fun the further I get into the game, meanwhile playing both Horizon Forbidden West and my old Standby, WoW, so that I don’t completely lose my mind of course. And hey, if I could beat Sifu, I can beat this….I think.

Bread’s Game Journal 03/01/22: What Garners An Emotional Response In Horizon Forbidden West, Stays In Vegas.

*Mid Game Spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West*

Horizon Zero Dawn is a game I had a complicated path to enjoyment in. Mostly just in that, for whatever reason, it took me like four separate tries to get into the game, with each start and stop increasingly more random in ways that never really made sense. Happily, I haven’t had that problem with Horizon Forbidden West. Something about this game has clicked fairly quickly, and I’m finding a ton to appreciate every time I play it.

I wanted to write, tonight, about one part of the game in particular, the ruins of Las Vegas, and the surprising emotional payoff it brought with it. Horizon is good at mining meaning and pathos out of things that, we as the players, understand mean little or nothing. Most locations in the game world aren’t even ever referred to by their actual past names, even if it’s clear to the player what those names are, but interestingly, Vegas is spelled out to the player from the start.

The basic plot of the section is simple, Aloy needs the Poseidon Program, which has entrenched itself in some kind of dome underneath the ruins of Las Vegas, and there’s a team of salvagers already there when you arrive, this is of course, where things get interesting. The salvagers aren’t rough and tumble types looking for riches, they’re looking for “Embers”. It isn’t immediately clear what an ember is, but the first real thing you learn is that the leader of this group has a deep emotional attachment to them, and you fully buy into his need to get them out of the watery grave they find themselves in.

In the kind of ironic twist these types of stories love, it turns out “Embers” are little more than cheap holograms used to advertise casinos. Importantly though, that doesn’t change anything. There’s no reveal that crushes the salvagers spirt, he’s fascinated by these things in an incredibly genuine way. He speaks of seeing a hologram of a buxom woman directing him towards a buffet as a child, and describes it as high art that changed his life without even a drip of ironic humor. The best part is that the voice over performance is so well done, and so well directed, that you really do believe everything he says.

And it’s not just the salvagers either, throughout the quest you find brief but enlightening data points filling in a little bit of the backstory of this zone in fantastic ways. The story makes it clear that, long before the world died, Vegas was abandoned. Unable to sustain itself in the middle of a climate change ravaged desert, everyone left, which devastated one man who truly loved the city. Without getting too much into the details of the story, the important thing is, that when Vegas was truly lost, that man made the decision to simply leave Vegas “On”, so to speak.

Even knowing that it was all hacky lights and tricks, he believed in Las Vegas. In simply leaving all the machinery on in standby mode, he hoped that someday it would mean something to someone else again. He was right, of course, as I said before, Morlund, the salvager thinks of Las Vegas a paradise of wonder on this earth, and he’s keeping the dream of this long ago mogul alive.

All of this is really a long way of saying: Horizon Forbidden west specializes in finding pathos and genuine emotion in areas that could otherwise be filled with cheap jokes and other played out tropes. It can spend an entire main story quest set in the now underwater ruins of Las Vegas hammering home how important this shackle of ruins is to two people in this world, and it never feels out of place. Those two characters have such a genuine love, that you might find yourself like me in the big payoff at the end. Tearing up a bit because someone, somewhere, just made the choice to leave the lights on, and influenced more than they could have possibly known.

Bread’s Game Journal 02/22/22: In Sifu, Mercy is The Coolest Feeling In The World.

*Spoilers for Sifu*

There’s something truly unique about the way Sifu handles the idea of a New Game Plus that leads to a secret ending. Unlike a lot of other games that go with this setup, it doesn’t take all that long. Nor is achieving the proverbial “True” ending actually all that difficult. A statement that sounds bizarre when you consider how difficult the game itself has been up to this point, but then, that’s just the thing.

As a reminder, the only way to get the true ending in Sifu is to understand that vengeance won’t solve anything, and exploit the hidden mercy mechanic in each of the boss fights. Essentially via letting all the bosses know that you can easily kill them, but are choosing not to, by breaking their structure meter twice in one fight. Doing so sounds like it’s going to be a hassle, some of these bosses are a huge pain to beat at all, let alone beating in a specific way that requires you to be actively careful not to kill them.

The thing is though, it isn’t. By the point in the game that you’re going back to fight all these bosses again, if you’re anything like me, they don’t stand a chance. Fajar becomes utterly predictable and can be beaten flawlessly before he even really has a chance to gain the upper hand. Shaun, a total nightmare when you first fight him, has become a big predictable lug who will fall victim to your kidney punch stuns over and over until the battle is over. Even Kuriko, who’s extreme speed and difficult to predict patterns can’t stand up to you after you’ve fought her a dozen times trying to get your age down for the next run during your first playthrough.

This new lack of difficulty from a previously brutally difficult game makes you, the player, feel just as you should in these mercy giving situations. In the story of the game, the lead character wants these kung-fu masters to know that he’s easily beaten them, and that they have to live with that knowledge. A feeling that translates perfectly to the player when you just trounced a boss that used to kick your ass up and down the room.

I’ll be real, there’s a not insignificant chance that Sifu is my game of the year. Still too early to completely tell, but I doubt I’m going to feel the same things I felt playing this game again. I urge anyone who likes action games to give it a try.

Bread’s Game Journal 02/12/22: The Key To Winning In Sifu Is Disrespect.

Sifu is a difficult game, for a number of reasons. It’s difficult to pinpoint why I love it so much, when normally I bounce off these ultra hard action games. It’s difficult to get a grip on what the game actually expects of you a lot of the time. Hell, even the aging mechanic is difficult to wrap your mind around at the first, with the game actually telling you very little about it or how it works.

One thing that hasn’t been all that hard to figure out though, is how to get ahead, and that’s disrespect. I refer to it this way because a lot of this game expects you to treat it with some level of respect, but it’s all a ruse to make you perform worse. An enemy wants an honorable duel? Throw a bottle in their face while they’re talking and get a few free hits in to shift the battle your way. Go directly for any weak link you see. Use dirty tricks and crotch shots to throw your enemies off guard. In a lot of other games, the things you need to do in this game to get ahead would probably be considered cheesing.

But all of that is what makes this such an interesting game to play. The combat system is damn near flawlessly designed. Certainly the best hand to hand system since the Batman games, it flows better than anyone could have imagined. The levels are so well designed that replaying them over and over doesn’t get old. Even the boss fights, as frustrating as they can get, all present a very interesting challenge.

I’m not even close to done with Sifu, but I know I have to keep with it. It’s just a joy to play. Just, you know, once again, don’t treat any of your opponents very well.

Me, on the internet for the past month.

Bread’s Game Journal: 01/23/2022: Roiland Voices The Universe

You know, I’m not actually too big a fan of the most well known Justin Roiland thing. Even so, the guy has a hell of a voice for comedy, and can really mine some good jokes out some breathless long takes. I’ve not played a ton of Trover Saves The Universe yet, so this post is light on a lot of info, but from what I have played I can gather one thing. This game is pretty much just endless Roiland improvisation that was worked into some kind of bizarre sci-fi VR game, and it works so far.

In what felt like ten minutes I found out I’m a chair dwelling alien known as a “Chairopian”, some kind of giant beaked monster stole my dogs and called me a dick, and a purple man gave me one of his eye babies so I could control his actions because he was tired. This isn’t even getting into the racist old man who I maybe sort of beat up? Or the inter universe teleportation pod I found myself stuck in on a quest to get Trover his space cash.

Basically, in thirty minutes of playing this game, a LOT has happened. I’m looking forward to seeing what else it throws at me….I think? I’m expecting some wild stuff to go down, more or less. Also expecting to laugh.

Bread’s Game Journal 01/21/22: VResident VRevil VRfour.

I finished Resident Evil 4 VR today, and overall, it was a fantastic time. I wrote about this last week already so this post will be brief, but I really have to reiterate how fantastic of a job Capcom and Armature did with this new port of such a classic game. Parts of the game that I was sure would be worked around or presented in some kind of strange third person fashion were routinely fully re-worked to be VR experiences through and through.

Resident Evil 4 drags a little bit near the end, this is something we all know, but I have to say, the VR element really revitalizes a lot of the parts of the final third of the game that grind on re-play. The fight with Krauser, for example, is a bit of an annoying cat and mouse game in the original version, but here, simply by the way you’re seeing the world, it becomes far more thrilling. The Regenaradors were always creepy, but never really that much of a threat once you figured out how to deal with them. Now though? Try turning a corner and seeing one of the Iron Maiden’s directly in your face, complete with that ragged breathing filling your ears with 3D audio, it’s intense!

Even that big Jet Ski escape has more work put into it than you’d ever expect! Hell, I would have forgiven them for skipping over that one, I can’t imagine any game dev would want to design a full VR seadoo section for the twenty seconds it’s active, but they did it! They went above and beyond with this version of the game, and now when I go back to play RE4 as I tend to do once a year, this version is going to be in hot contention with the original as the preferred experience, that’s for sure!

Oh, but they did remove the part where Ashley awkwardly comes onto Leon at the end, only for him to brutally reject her , so maybe actually this is the worst version of the game?

Bread’s Game Journal 01/18/21: Microsoft Is Buying Activision-Blizzard And I Am Very Happy.

To come out in front of this, let me just say, yes Monopolies are bad for any creative industry in which they’re present. That said, I not only have no qualms with Microsoft buying Activision-Blizzard for near 70 billion dollars, I am in fact completely ecstatic that it’s happened. Let’s not beat around the bush here, Activision-Blizzard has had a rough year, or so, in the news. Widespread abuse revelations, constant delays, Booby Kotick in general, it was pretty much one long downhill slope. Now though? Now I have some hope, and let me explain why.

Activision in general holds, arguably, about 80% of the IP’s that are important to me as someone who loves video games. A few years ago they actually started doing something with some of the bigger ones they held. Crash and Spyro got fantastic remakes, Crash got a new game, even Tony Hawk came back for a brief, but fantastic remake of the first two games. Then none of those games made a billion dollars, and Activision threw them all in the hottest pile of trash you’ve ever seen without a second thought.

Activision is one of the most brutally stupid companies to ever exist. They’re so obsessed with sure thing bets, that they’ve taken almost every studio they own, all of whom have shown great talent in the past, and place them all on one franchise, instead of growing any kind of diversity of output. But now, we might actually be free. You know what company of late has shown a fantastic willingness to use their IP to explore new and different genres? Microsoft. You know what company wants and needs smaller budget content that doesn’t necessarily need to make a trillion dollars? Microsoft. And they’re the ones who bought Activision! You see where I’m going with this?!

None of this is even to mention the possibilities laid now in front of existing games. Could you imagine some kind of World of Warcraft subscription being added to PC Gamepass? It wouldn’t just save some of us a lot of money, but could cause a large new base of people to discover the game! Overwatch could see an influx of players. Even just adding the back catalog of games from the Activision-Blizzard lineup could drive Game Pass numbers for a long time. Imagine a day when Call of Duty games, which are notorious for stubbornly keeping their full price even years after they’re irrelevant, are all added to Game Pass for players to easily access whenever they wanted.

Again, I know it’s isn’t super thrilling to see the makings of a monopoly form, but you know what? Right now I truly don’t care. For me, this is indisputable good news. I truly cannot wait for this deal to go all the way through, and to finally feel excited about the future of these IP again. Because boy, do I gotta say, I’m sick as hell of just sort of shrugging and thinking “Well, at lest WoW still makes enough money for them to keep making more of it.”.

Me logging into Fortnite today.

*Hyperventilating*

Bread’s Game Journal 01/17/22: Oh My God They Actually Shut Off Halo 3.

I’m not being even a little facetious when I say what I’m about to say: It just hit me that they turned off the Halo 3 servers, and it’s going to take awhile to get over it. I know this happened days ago, I know you can still play Halo 3 multiplayer looking better than ever on the Master Chief Collection, and I know local multiplayer will always work…..but they shut the servers off. I spent so much time on those servers and now they’re just gone.

At the peak of it’s popularity I must have spent hours on Halo 3 every single day after school. I was a high school freshman and pretty much all me or my friends would talk about was this game. We’d compare screenshots we took, brag about games we did great in, mess around in Forge. Even before the game released we all obsessed over Halo 3 in a way I don’t think I’ve even come close to doing again with any other game, and probably never will. Now all of that is just….lost.

Again, I know I could go back and play the game in it’s updated form, but all my original playtime, stats, armor sets, it’s all gone. All the pride I had finally managing to get the Overkill achievement (A borderline preposterous task that required you to kill every other player in a ranked Free For All Match at essentially the same time) has evaporated when they flipped off that switch. This is far from the first time a game I liked to play has had it’s servers flipped off for good, but this time, sitting in bed at nearly 11 at night….this time it feels really bad.

Online gaming was still pretty new back then, and frankly it’s absurd the servers were on as long as they were, but it still feels bizarre knowing it’s gone. I’ll always have the memories at least. Big Team Battle on Valhalla, good times.

Bread’s Game Journal 01/16/22: When Assassin’s Creed Was Small.

I picked up the “Assassin’s Creed: Ezio Collection” the other day on impulse from the local game store, and I gotta say, a couple hours in, it’s extremely refreshing. I really like the Assassin’s Creed games, and I often defend them from a lot of accusations that I think are mostly unfounded, or come from places of too high expectations for the type of games they are. Something I simply can’t effectively excuse though, is the bloated size of the most recent entries in the franchise.

We all knew Assassin’s Creed was going to come back different when it took that year break after AC: Syndicate, but I’m not sure many of us expected it to be quite as expansive as it was. Suddenly they were massive open world games filled with hundreds of quests and open worlds that went from accurately re-creating cities, to broadly recreating entire countries, empires, or regions of the world. With this absurd size fresh in my mind, I wasn’t sure what I would feel going all the way back to Assassin’s Creed 2.

Well, I can tell you so far I only have positive vibes. Everything is scaled down in a way that not only makes it a lot quicker to get around the world, but makes the grandeur and size of the buildings impressive again in a way they haven’t been in awhile. This doesn’t just apply to the world itself, but also a lot of the systems. There’s ways to get stronger weapons and new outfits sure, but they aren’t covered in stats. The new sword just does more damage, the new robe is just a teal dye of the old robe.

Sure, there were RPG systems and upgrades back in these days, you can’t deny that, but they were so much more straightforward. If I held AC2 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla right next to each other, I could see one game that has a literal web of skill upgrades to work towards over 100 levels of progression, and one where the upgrades basically all boil down to “More Health” or “More Damage”.

To be fair, Assassin’s Creed isn’t going to just suddenly scale down and return to this. The new games are their own beasts, ones that I enjoy even, but I can tell I’m going to have a very good time dipping my toes back into this classic era of such a long running franchise. Also, remember how much these games used to be obsessed with Historical Tourism? I totally forgot you meet Leonardo Da Vinci like maybe twenty minutes into Assassin’s Creed 2!

Bread’s Game Journal 01/14/22: Until You Fall’s Perfect Gameplay Is The Equally Perfect Realization Of An Old Star Wars Game.

Until You Fall is a roguelike VR sword fighting game that I have now happily bought twice, but it’s also inexorably linked in my mind to something wholly unrelated: an old Star Wars game. If you were like me and you spent any portion of your 90’s youth in that brief time arcades had their wonderful resurgence, you probably remember Star Wars Trilogy Arcade. Most of the time that game was something resembling a flight sim, or an on rails shooter, but a few times you’d get to play a pretty simple lightsaber mini game where you basically just block attacks to a simple rhythm until you get the chance to strike. At the time, it felt like you were really into a duel with Darth Vader, now, it shows it’s age.

Also show’s it’s age in that the only screenshot of the level I’m talking about is an off screen cam rip.

That’s where Until You Fall comes into play. Sure, it may not be Star Wars, or even really thematically related at all, but it understands the idea of the perfectly faked sword fight just the same as that old arcade game did. I often hear people speak of other VR games like Blade And Sorcery in reverent tones, often due to the physics based swordplay systems that lean as far into realism as they can. Here’s the thing though, looking real and looking cool, are two very different things. Much like Star Wars trilogy did, Until You Fall focuses on making you feel like you’re pulling off clutch moves, not awkwardly swinging your blade at a ragdoll.

As a result, you could level the accusation at Until You Fall that it’s largely staged, but I would counter that it is staged, in the sense that you’re taking part in a performance. You’re often just following visual cues, but it’s those same cues that make you feel powerful, and skilled at the art of sword fighting magic knights as the game presents it. Again, it’s not all that dissimilar from the way Star Wars Trilogy made you feel like you just defeated Darth Vader in a duel, even though all you really did was follow along with some on screen cues.

VR is extremely good at combining the moment to moment action of a video game, with the choregraphed moves of a performance or set piece moments of something of a theme park experience. That’s probably why I like it so much, frankly. It combines the theatre kid that was always waiting below the surface, with the grown ass adult who thinks Disneyland is unironically the happiest place on earth.

Bread’s Game Journal 01/13/22: VR Himbo Simulator, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Resident Evil 4 VR

I thought of opening up this post with “Why does Resident Evil 4 Work As Well As It Does?”, but that’s a bad question, because why wouldn’t it? When RE4 VR was announced it was certainly bizarre, a high profile VR port of one of the best games to ever exist? And it’s exclusive to the Facebook VR headset? For a game that gets ported to pretty much everything, why go exclusive on one VR headset now? So naturally, a lot of people assumed the worst about the quality of the actual port.

Those people were wrong, as were any of us who doubted that Capcom could pull this off. Resident Evil 4 VR is an actual triumph of porting an old game into an entirely new medium. Far from awkwardly jamming an old game into a totally new format and letting modders pick up the slack *cough*SkyrimVR*cough*, RE4VR went through a head to toe makeover to fit into VR. That said, it’s still entirely identifiable as RE4, in spite of what I just said. The spirit of the game remains exactly the same, even if the way you’re engaging with it has fundamentally changed the playing field.

The Ganado’s still act exactly the same as you know them too, but now you can react to them differently with the wider range of movement at your command. You have two hands and can dual wield weapons if you like, but that of course trades out your ability to effectively reload. All your weapons are dynamically located in the places you’d expect them to be, and reaching for them based on feel alone becomes second nature.

Instead of the hasty port that we feared, RE4VR has far more in common with Half Life Alyx, which in my eyes, is no small feat. It’s a full game, not a fleeting experience that some people often classify VR as as. It has a sense of immersion and scale that, despite the obviously aged textures and environments, makes the whole experience feel new again. And that’s really saying a lot for a game that’s been ported to almost every console released in the last 17 years.

I know it’s not the most easily accessible game in the world, but if you do have an Oculus/Meta Quest 2, and for some reason you haven’t already bought RE4 VR, you really owe this one to yourself.

There are few things funnier than the humongous motorcycle and tiny little Chauffeur after you get turned into an Ogre on Exiles Reach.

Bread’s Game Journal 01/11/22: Alan Wake Me Up Inside (Can’t Alan Wake Up)

Ignoring my legendarily bad title joke, I’ve been getting back into Alan Wake. My best friend bought me the PS5 remastered edition for my birthday a month or so ago, and let me tell you, this game is still wild. Remedy is obviously well known for a lot of things, but I think my favorite, and something that shines through a lot in Alan Wake, is their absurd sense of theatricality.

Alan Wake, famously, is structured like a TV show. Proceeding in “Episodes” that all end with cut’s to “credits”, complete with music playing over them. As far as TV shows go, though, this is a dense one. From the start of this game Remedy is pushing the old “Developer Foresight” trop to it’s maximum limits. The amount of foreshadowing to later parts of the story is matched only by the amount of cheeky voice lines where Matthew Poretta essentially says “nice try” directly to the player.

This theatrical motif even extends into the gameplay. There’s something I’ve never been quite able to articulate about Alan Wake’s actual flow, but I can try. Everything in this game has this sort of awkward weight, stiff movement, or obsession with looking cool that I think is brilliant. I think that primarily because this is a game about a New York City writer in a tweed jacket with leather elbow pads, picking up a gun and fighting monsters. If Alan Flowed like Jesse Faden in Control, for example, it wouldn’t feel right. It’s much better that he just sort of lightly jogs through the woods, just as out of shape as I am, losing his breath after every stiff jump or ten second job.

There’s way more to talk about Alan Wake, but given that I’ve only played the first chapter tonight, I’m gonna hold off on trying to fit all that into one post. Plus, I should really start looking for Alice, you seen her? Well, let me know if you hear anything, I’d hate it if she was, say, kidnapped.

Bread’s Game Journal 01/10/22: Gardeners Of The Galaxy

I’m not new or revolutionary in posting about how much I’m enjoying the 2021 Guardians of the Galaxy game, but try and stop me! I get the sense I wasn’t alone in my worry of how this game would come out, right? The Avengers game out of Square and Crystal Dynamics was, favorably, a massively flawed attempt and, unfavorably, bad. Guardians didn’t exactly show off well during it’s E3 related appearances, nor did it bode well that it seemed to have gone completely unknown for as long as it did prior to announcement.

But then, all of that was crap, because it’s a fantastic video game. the issues I had watching the combat system in video form vanished when I realized how it actually felt to play. My worry that only playing as Star Lord would grow stale, fell apart as soon as I realized the game has an extremely high degree of control over your team and the ways in which you all work together to fight enemies. Hell, even my worries about the games lackluster looking performance were dismissed when it became clear this game runs rock solid on aging PC hardware.

It’s also just astounding to take in the sheer amount of writing this game has in it. I’m not sure I’ve played one section of the game where one of the characters isn’t talking. Whether it be just to fill time while you explore an environment. Point something out, or even as a part of the games surprisingly robust Mass Effect style conversation option system. The team is always talking to each other, and I’d say about 70% of the time the writing is fantastic. I don’t meant to sound like a backhanded compliment either, for the amount of writing in this, the fact 70% of it is as good as it is, is an astounding ratio.

Again, I am not the first person to write this. Hell, just about every review of this game is a far better articulated version of this post. I wanted to talk about it anyway, and nobody is going to stop me but me. Or a depressive funk, but thankfully, despite the internet’s best attempts, that’s not the case right now!

Bread’s Game Journal 01/09/22: It’s Weird That I Like VR This Much Right?

Over the last year or so I’ve become a very avid fan of VR gaming. As a medium it has a sense of immersion and a sort of theatricality that traditionally video games just can’t replicate, no matter how hard they tried. Thinking about it though, it’s pretty funny that it’s a medium I’m as into as I am.

Tearing apart VR into the individual base concepts that make it work seems to create a bunch of disparate things that I never really liked. I never thought 3D movies were worth the headache they would invariably give me, and I’ve been a pretty staunch “motion controls usually just make games worse” kind of guy, but both of those things are core to why VR works at all. Maybe the two needed to be combined, maybe it’s because I get to explore the 3D space of my own volition, maybe it’s because motion controls in VR involve the entire body, who knows. All I know is that I love it, and think it might be the actual future of video games in the end.

I received an Oculus Quest 2 for Christmas, and I’ve been going pretty hard on a handful of games for it. Pistol Whip, Until You Fall and Resident Evil 4 VR all fill niches that, a little over a year ago, I never really knew I desperately needed. I can dodge bullets to the beat in Pistol Whip, sword fight monsters in Until You Fall, and finally live out my fantasies of being the world most successful himbo in Resident Evil 4 VR.

VR is something that I’m really not sure it makes sense for me to like this much, but I’m glad I do. I’m glad that all these disparate things could come together in a way that clicks in my brain. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to continue to juggling my guns in RE4 VR, like you just know canonically Leon does constantly.