Lack of games, time, and creativity

So, yet another week has passed without me getting enough time in on a game to write a review this week, so you all get some editorial type stuff. Hopefully I’ll be back next week with a review of Splinter Cell: Blacklist, assuming the powers that be allow me enough time to finish it.

So what I want to talk about this week is gaming culture and the toxicity that seems to pervade it. It’s a subject that’s been seeing no small amount of discussion over the last few months, ranging from the work Riot Games is doing to combat it with their tribunal system, as well as public bans of well known figures from the community who act out of line with their code of conduct called the Summoners Code, to a bit Extra Credits did a few weeks simply titled Toxicity, even Microsoft is taking a stand with the new prisoner island style system on Xbox Live.

Toxicity runs rampant the gaming community, almost to the point that it’s all some people know about gamers. The integration of the internet into gaming culture has done much to exacerbate this, the most often cited reason being anonymity. Some have even gone so far as to give this problem a name. There’s a lot of heated discussion over this, possibly more heated by the aforementioned anonymity issue, with no small portion of our community saying that trash talking is intrinsic to the nature of competitive gaming, but there’s a very very very fine line between competitive banter and hate speech, and anyone who tries to blanket everything that crosses that line as “part of the game” or “part of the culture” is quite frankly a coward too afraid to hold a healthy discussion about the problem, or quite often are part of the problem themselves.

Fortunately for all of us there are multiple organizations out there, large and small, dedicated to stomping out toxic behavior. Good Guy Gaming is an e-sports organization founded on the idea of self improvement and positive community. The Penny Arcade Alliance was a group of guilds in World of Warcraft founded by the creators of Penny Arcade with the idea that each player, both in and out of the organization, was a person on the other side of that keyboard and should always be treated with the respect that you would give any person you interacted with in non-digital means. There are also the aforementioned efforts of both Microsoft and Riot Games, and the irrefutable words of Wil Wheaton “don’t be a dick.”

I personally can’t tell you what the correct solution is to this problem that runs rampant through gaming culture. It could be punishment of those who are the problem, or positive rewarding of those who actively fight it. It’s probably at least some of each, but I do know one thing, there must be consequences for actions and the reintroduction of consequences into the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory does much to combat toxicity.  We also need to not be afraid to discuss this problem, and treat it like the problem it is. Fear of the issue will allow it to continue unchecked and leave those of us who are not toxic ashamed to call ourselves gamers.

Crime Time

It was supposed to be a simple job, steal some meth, and trade it for information on the Mendozas.  Kill the Mendozas, take their loot, and walk away.  Hector is happy, and we all come away richer for our trouble.  Thing is, when Hector gives us a job, it’s never easy.  The cooks were dead when we got to the lab, if we wanted meth we’d have to make it ourselves, and the cops were already pulling up.  Looks like it’s gonna be a long night.

Such a scenario is delightfully common in the sequel to Overkill’s smash indie hit, ‘Payday: The Heist.’  Payday 2, which launched today on Steam, is a cooperative first-person heist, robbery, and general chicanery simulator.  The game puts the player in the role of one of four members of an infamous team of bank robbers, whose sole thrill in life appears to be the accumulation of massive sums of wealth via unscrupulous means.

Game play in the game consists of the player and up to three friends picking from lists of available heists and fending off waves of enemy law enforcement as they attempt to complete a variety of objectives.  Comparisons to Left 4 Dead are inevitable, with both games featuring 4-player FPS co-op, hordes of enemies, and a very similar method of reviving downed comrades. (In the first game in the series there was actually a level added later on feating Mercy Hospital before the infection broke out)  While the first game had a fairly limited number of missions, each one proceeding in roughly the same fashion, the sequel attempts to alleviate the tedium of repeating the same missions over and over somewhat, by way of making each mission a bit more randomized than in the first game, as well as offering 30 different heists to choose from.

The core mechanics are still present from the first game, players will complete heists to gain experience, granting them skill points that they can apply in the 4 upgrade trees available to players.  These skill trees allow for players to have vastly different skill sets to bring to any given mission.  A player high in the Mastermind tree can, for example, use their smooth talking abilities to get hostages to perform favors for them, such as reviving downed comrades, or even taking up arms against law enforcement.  A player deep in the Enforcer tree is an unstoppable combat juggernaut, barely taking damage from enemy fire, dealing absurd damage with their own weapons, and gaining access to a portable saw which allows quick and easy access to locked doors and safes.  The Ghost and Technician trees on the other hand allow for a more hands-off approach, granting the player access to tools, explosives, and jamming devices.  Having certain skills available to your group greatly enhances your team’s options, allowing them to proceed through heists in vastly different ways.  Players are not locked into their choices, being allowed to respect their skills in-between missions for some of the money they’ve earned.

This leads me to one of the other improvements that Payday 2 has over its predecessor; namely, the enhanced ability for players to choose HOW they want to complete a mission.  In the first game stealth options were very limited to the players and often an impossibility for certain missions.  Not so in Payday 2, aside from certain missions which are billed as action missions from the very beginning, it is possible to complete every mission in the game without ever attracting the attention of the police, so long as certain precautions are taken and perfectly executed by the players.   This can lead to many tense and exhilarating moments where every player in the team is performing their assigned duty, hoping and praying that no one has screwed anything up, missed a vital detail.  If all goes to plan, you’re in and out in a hurry, richer for your trouble.  More often than not however, that telltale alarm will sound, and now everyone is in for a fight.  Not as much of a problem on lower difficulty missions, but on the hardest difficulties, Very Hard and OVERKILL, where the real money lies, you may well be in for a trip to the Game-Over screen.

In addition to being able to customize and respec their skills, players are also able to find, purchase, and customize various weapons, equipment, and this time around, masks.  Yes indeed, probably taking notes from their friends over at Valve, Overkill has allowed players to engage in the time-honored tradition of collecting virtual headgear for their characters.   There is now a drop-system implemented in the game giving players a random item after each mission, from a list that includes: mask parts, weapon modifications, extra money, and ultra-rare “Joker” cards that give players very powerful weapon parts.  Due to the nature of this system, certain items are extremely hard to come by, which may hint at the future possibility of steam trading becoming available for the game.

From what I’ve seen of the beta, Overkill has done a fantastic job of improving on their first title.  Everything in this game feels better, more polished.  Guns feel more accurate, have the proper weight and sound, little details, like the camera lean when your character is carrying a heavy object add to the atmosphere and immersion.  The randomized missions and post-mission drop system add hours of replayability that the last game was lacking.  This game is doing everything right, fans of the first game have no reason to deny themselves this sequel, and people new to the series have plenty of reasons to check it out.

Crime does pay.

Payday 2 is available now on Steam for $29.99 or, if you’ve got friends to go in with you, the much more affordable 4-pack for $89.99.

Adorably Crazy – Genericguy Reviews Mugen Souls

Mugen Souls is an RPG for the Playstation 3 developed by Compile Heart and published in the US by NIS America. The publisher in this case was what attracted me to the game, as I am frequently not disappointed with their showings here in the states. Mugen Souls is a little older at this point, having released in Japan in March 2012 and here in the states in October of the same year. If you’ve ever played a game released by NIS America you probably have some idea of what to expect, since everything they seem to pick up follows the same pattern. Completely over the top protagonist, zany backup characters who are often just being strung along for the ride, a turn based combat system of some sort, and some kind of fiddly difficult to master system to be used in that combat. This title hits all these points with flying colors, multiple times in some cases.

The opening video is the main character, Chou-Chou, and her Sidekick, Altis, preforming a completely ridiculous pop concert for all of her loving minions declaring her intent to conquer the seven worlds of the universe. It is so hyper charged and sugary that I think it gave me diabetes. Almost immediately after this intro you are launched into a series of combat tutorials that go about explaining basic things such as your move radius, the attack command, your skills menu and other RPG basics. Then comes the core of the game’s mechanic, the moe kill. For those of you who aren’t super huge into Japanese game and animation culture it’s pronounced mo-e and it is a slang term typically used to mean adorable or cute as applied to fictional characters. It also has a few other double meanings based on the origin of the slang, but I’ll let you look that up on your own time. The moe kill is what is used to turn enemies into your minions, and is honestly the core of this game, right up to and inclusive of, a great many of the jokes that are made. The moe kill is preformed by you looking at your enemy’s personality, be it masochist, sadist, bipolar, or any one of the eight personality traits, you then check their current mood, which has another seven possible outcomes, THEN either by trial and error or by looking up a chart online you decide which of the phrase options you are given will be best for turning the enemy into a minion. Simple, right? Well, it would be if those were the only factors you needed to consider. Later on in the game it is revealed that you can also change your own personality type in order to better facilitate the enslaving of the beasts wandering the fields.

The fact that the moe kill system seems to have no way of learning it without trial and error, as well as having so many variables can make some of the battles a little frustrating and make it extremely tempting to just beat the crap out of every enemy you find and the minions be dammed. However that leaves your ship sorely underpowered for the upcoming airship battles. Oh, did I not mention there’s an airship battle mini game? Yeah, and your ships power depends entirely on how many and of what type of minion you have. There’s also a, I guess you would call it mini game, to subject entire contents to your charms and make them your minions as well. The last components of the game will be recognizable if you’ve played any of the games NIS America has released, there’s an infinite dungeon and a master/subordinate system that parallels the item world and reincarnation systems respectively. There’s also weapon forging, character customization (quite extensive I might add), and plethora of other systems and mechanics to remember.

Overall Mugen Souls is a manic, turn based RPG with a lot of depth but maybe a bit too much complexity. It definitely sits in the “not for everyone” category, but my biggest fear may be that it’s so far into it that it may have hit “not for anyone.” You may be able to find it at your local retailers, probably not any big box companies, or Amazon is usually pretty reliable for digging up stuff like this.

Cyberpunk’d – GenericGuy Reviews Shadowrun Returns

So last week I hinted at this review, and yes I will be talking about Shadowrun Returns this week. For those that don’t know what Shadowrun is, it is a cyberpunk tabletop role playing game that very recently released it’s 5th edition. If you’re not familiar with the cyberpunk setting go watch Blade Runner or Hackers.

Shadowrun Returns was released a little over a week ago, as of the time of writing, on Steam for $19.99. The game is a reboot, or maybe a re-imagining, of the video game adaptation from the 16-bit era. The gameplay looks and feels very much like an update on the classic Shadowrun video game, and even much of the music is a recreation of tracks from the original game. While much of this sounds like it was done “in service to the brand” it all still feels very genuine and does not detract from the game overall.

The story offered with the initial game is enjoyable, if somewhat predictable for the cyberpunk genre. An old criminal partner contacts you with a request from beyond the grave through the use of a dead man’s trigger, asking you to track down his killer. The story behind the act is inevitably bigger than what you could have foreseen and takes you though a winding path of side quests and other distractions. The characters encountered frequently feel like stereotypes from the criminal underground, but with a little extra interaction often reveal themselves to have some pretty great personality written in. Sadly, or maybe thankfully, the lines are not voiced which could have been a great boon to immersion or if done poorly could have destroyed the characters they made.

On a gameplay side the turn based combat, spending all of your team’s action points and then waiting for the enemy to do the same, leaves something to be desired. Coming from a system that uses initiative based combat, some other more fluid adaptation probably would have served better, but overall it gets the job done. The characters are highly customizeable, by which I mean after you pick your Archetype you are free to spend your Karma (Shadowrun’s version of skill points) on whatever the hell you want. Do you want to be a Decker a rock hard body that can reflect bullets? Go for it. How about a spirit communing Shaman who can also put a rifle round between a target’s eyes from three city blocks away? Yup, that’s available as well. My only complaint about the leveling system is the fact that you are forced to choose an Archetype at the outset. All this effectively does is spend your first handful of Karma for you so that your character begins focused on something that you want to do anyways, but as someone who loved the classless system of the Shadowrun tabletop this rubbed at me a bit. Also conspicuously missing are glitches which is probably something that got offered up to your random number generator being controlled by a computer instead of a fistful of d6’s, but it’s still not quite as fun to succeed in a challenge without the potential of something going awry anyways.

Overall, Shadowrun Returns does a great job of recapturing the experience of the 16-bit video game and a decent job of simulating playing Shadowrun the tabletop game. The level design and music are immersive and the characters aren’t quite as two-dimensional as they initially appear. With the inclusion of the Shadowrun Editor I’m hoping we can see some pretty great user created content popping up in the future, and with a recreation of the original 16-bit campaign showing up on the community forums on day one I think that hope is a real possibility.