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Medal of Honor is hell of mediocre.

I mean, I don’t even know what to say about it, really. It was mostly a game of shootdudes or guyshoot, but was very, very vaguely based on reality. You play as these “tier one operatives” who have unlocked beards or something, and you play levels that seem very disconnected, very same-y, and are fairly uninteresting. Then the game kind of ends.

I have one rememberable moment in the game. There is a sequence where the game tells you lay down covering fire on a turmulent, and for the first time in game history, actually means it. You can’t just kill people. You actually have to cause a distraction for your teammates. That was pretty neat. Otherwise, I can’t really remember any moment in the game. Seriously.

Any variety in the game is kind of killed by the way the ammo system works. You can constantly ask your teammates for ammo, as long as you keep the guns you start with. This gives you 0 incentive to ever switch guns, which I found really frustrating, especially when the game gave me an LMG. I’m not an LMG sort. This system was pretty stupid. Sometimes they won’t give you ammo, and sometimes they will. It’s only if they perceive you need ammo. It’s dumb, and it keeps you from enjoying any sort of weapon variety, or from using the weapons you like most.

The game also likes to be really stupid with its objective markers. There was one time where I had an objective of “destroy an anti-air emplacement.” There’s the little symbol telling me where the objective is. Cool. It’s super far away, I can’t see, so I shoot at the objective marker, thinking the game would be sane. No, actually the emplacement is like, down and to the left a significant amount. I eventually squinted it out and found it after dying like 4 times. Way to be game! Way to be.

I mean, I guess I shot some dudes? I didn’t try the multiplayer because of the online pass bullshit, but the single player is really forgettable. If you really want to play through a shooter, play through something like Singularity first. Or CODBLOPS, since I’m sure that’s probably at least a bit more memorable. I don’t know. I can’t recommend Medal of Honor.

Yet I played all the way through it. I am so weird like that.

Have you played One Chance yet? Go ahead and give it a go, then we’ll talk about it. I’ll wait.

You played it?

Good.

On the Jick and Skully show, Jick said that he thought the way that the developer actively doesn’t want you to play the game a second time is “really cool.” Or something to that effect. That’s certainly what sets this game apart, I suppose, from other games of its ilk. You can’t go back and play it again. Feel free to try, but without actually working at it, there’s no way to restart.

I suppose that does say something, I guess, about how your own actions can’t be rewound like a video game. At the same time, there are only a few very binary decisions in the game, so it really kind of lessens the impact to some extent. I chose to work hard every day but the last, where I gave up and spent time with my daughter. It really seemed to be the only way to go for me. I suppose other things might have been fine options for other people to do, and I saw that there were options, but I didn’t really feel like I could make them. Maybe you made different decisions.

Still, I guess I’m just not struck by something like this, because when I play a game with multiple outcomes, my initial reaction is to not WANT to play it a second time, because it belittles the experience by letting me see the systems. For example, watching my brother play through Mass Effect after I had beaten it kind of cheapened the experience for me, as it let me see how tricksy the game had to be to give you the illusion of choice. I certainly don’t want to replay Mass Effect 2 for that reason. I understand that some people would, but I’m not that person. So the fact that this is a game that doesn’t let you restart doesn’t really affect me. Hell, I wouldn’t even had noticed if I hadn’t heard discussion about it after I played it.

So… yeah. I guess it didn’t affect me as much as other people. I felt my interaction to be so limited that many of the things happening didn’t affect me as much as some other sorts of art games. If you’re someone who wants to see every possible outcome, maybe this would affect you more? Who knows. It’s an interesting little tidbit, anyway.

Do you remember Yaris? Man, what an abysmal game. How about Doritos Dash of Destruction? Passable, but not great. These tie-in free XBLA games have not had a good track record.

However, I’m here to tell you that Doritos Crash Course is actually fairly fantastic, and totally worth a download and quick playthrough. It’ll only take you maybe an hour to enjoy all the content, but it’ll be a good hour! It’s a lot of fun.

The premise of the game is a game show along the lines of a Takahashi’s Castle or that new show I’ve heard of called Wipeout. Your avatar is a contestant on an obstacle course, and you have to run and jump your way through to the end and try to get the best time you can.
What this amounts to is a fairly well designed bit of speed platforming. You have to dodge timed traps and use conveyor belts to your advantage to get past obstacles, all the while trying to go as fast as possible. There are tons of checkpoints, so it never really gets frustrating, even though some of the later challenges can get a bit hard. There are three locations with five levels each, and they’re all pretty fun.

This is a great use of Avatars, mostly because they actually took the time to animate them well. They don’t seem plastered in in this game. They seem like they were actually made for this game, which is huge. I hadn’t seen that before. It was cool to see my avatar, rocking her Grant City PD shirt as she died over and over because I suck at platforming. It works!

Other than that, though, this is nothing you haven’t seen before, and there are plenty of better platforming challenges out there. For example, Splosion Man, which I’ve been slowly working through. But for the price of free, the game is totally worth letting yourself get distracted with it. The Doritos branding is only in the title, and not really anywhere else, so that’s not obnoxious. It’s even smart enough to have integrated friend leaderboards to maybe help you eek out a few extra minutes of free fun. The content runs out before it gets boring (unlike Dash of Destruction) and I had a good time all the way through. It has some sort of multiplayer too, though I haven’t tried it, but hey, that also might be fun.

It’s a fantastic little game that actually might be worth a buck. But it’s not. It’s free. So just download it already. At least you’ll have fun mining for free achievements.

Thanks to the super-cool dudes at On The Stick, I played Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Now that I’ve talked about the gameplay, I get to talk about the plot. So, I suppose, this is spoiler territory if you care. Consider yourself warned.

—OMG SPOILARZ—

Poor Patrick Stewart.

There is so much bad monologue in this game. Every level opens up with some, and Patrick Stewart reads all of it, and it’s all terrible. I mean, my good buddy Patrick Stewart (yes, I have to write his whole name out every time) does his best, but man. Man. It was painful to listen to, because I know he can do better. I want him to make good money, of course, because he deserves it, but man. Man.

Basically, one Gabriel Belmont has had his wife killed. He’s a member of “The Brotherhood,” an organization that seems to exist mainly to have it’s knights die in places all over the world so that there’s always a corpse with a power up or background info around any adventuring location. He gets told that the world kind of sucks because of the Lords of Shadow by some dude named Zobek, who is Patrick Stewart, and that if he fufills some prophecy, and kills them all, then hey, maybe things will get better. This involves a mask for some reason I was never clear on. Oh, and Gabriel is also told he can revive his wife this way.

It’s not very deep, and there are no real twists and turns. Okay, there’s a twist, but it’s not a REAL one by any means. Basically, Zobek is the third Lord of Shadow in disguise. Or something along those lines. That’s just kind of lame. Also, I guess he used mind control to make you kill your wife, and that makes you unable to go to heaven? Something like that. In any case, no real surprises. Side characters appear, and are gone next level, and you don’t really give a shit about them, even when they die heroically. Even when you kill Pan, the person you probably interacted with the most, it doesn’t really mean much, because half the time he’s just a plot contrivance to get you to a new-looking location. One of which is the land of the dead. I think? I got a bit confused as to why I was where in the end, I admit. It just wasn’t interesting enough to keep my attention.

In the end, Patrick Stewart, now a guy in a dumb mask with horribly stupid-looking animation, talks for awhile, and then suddenly Satan appears for some reason. Satan is the last boss. He is by far easier than many other bosses in the game. Satan is kind of a pushover. You kill him, and he’s kind of gone, and there’s no reason for any of it. Somehow, though, this brings the plot to a close.

There are credits.

Then there’s a scene where, in modern day, Zobek goes to see Gabriel, who is still alive, and tells Zobek to call him Dracula. He then falls out a window.

What the fuck.

This event makes no sense at all. Zobek was killed by Satan, so why is he there? Why is Gabriel suddenly a vampire? Especially considering he doesn’t look anything like all the vampires I killed in the game. Is this supposed to set up a sequel? How could it? Does this relate to actual Castlevania canon in any way? I know enough to be perplexed at the very notion that it might. It was a pretty scene, I guess, but it’s disconnected from literally everything else in the game, and that’s the last thing they leave you with.

Yeah. the story in the game is kind of a clusterfuck. It sucks that games just can’t hack it often in that regard. Luckily, you can mostly ignore it, but especially with the production values on the game, it would have been so much better if there was something to care about. Oh well.

I entered a contest, and then I won a contest, thanks to the fantastic people over at On the Stick. I had entered both because I had a good idea and because I wanted to support them. They’re making a fantastic podcast over there, I think. Not just a “for Talking Time” production, but a podcast any gamer can enjoy. I’m certainly enjoying it.

In any case, I won a copy of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Now, I wasn’t really planning on playing this one, but since I won a free copy, I made sure I blazed through the whole thing. On easy, of course. I suck at action games. Now that I’ve beat it, though, I wanted to comment on it a bit. We’ll do mechanics today, and story and other such things tomorrow. I have many things to say about it!

It’s a really weird game. I am just really unsure what they were thinking when they were developing this game.

Just to get the obvious question out of the way, it doesn’t feel like Castlevania or anything. They try to invoke a little of that with powers that unlock things in earlier levels, but I felt no need to ever go back to an earlier level just to be able to hold more subweapons I rarely used, so I didn’t do backtracking. I don’t think this is a problem, but I suppose it could be a problem for some people.
What it is, instead, is like… God of War mixed with all the parts of Uncharted where you’re shimmying along things? I don’t know. There’s so much traversal, and it’s mostly just inoffensive. It’s never any fun, but it’s never really frustrating, as they always make things magically light up to show you were to go. Then you get there, and you might solve a weird puzzle, or fight some monsters.

I personally really enjoyed the combat. I think it’s because I haven’t really played a brawler/spectacle fighter/whatever the fuck this genre is called game in a long time. I played the original God of War, and I played two hybrids of the genre in Brutal Legend and Darksiders, but never really any pure ones since. As such, it was kind of fresh, getting into thinking about combos again. I mean, I’m horrible at it, and there’s nothing particularly whip-like about how you use the whip in the game, but it was pretty forgiving on easy after I got the hang of it, so it was never that much of a problem. I’m sure something like Bayonetta is more palletable for people who really like this genre, but as someone who doesn’t normally go in for it, it was pretty fun.
The best thing about it, I think, were the Light and Dark magic meters and the Focus bar. Basically, you had two magical auras you could throw up at any time. The Light one had a health drain effect, and this is where most of your healing comes from. The Dark one just flat-out ups your damage. There are special combos with each, but I never really used them. However, managing these meters was actually pretty fun. Do I want to end the fight quickly, or be more survivable? I could absorb Magic Orbs into either bar, so I had to constantly be making the decision of which one I needed more. On top of that, the Focus meter meant that if I could get many consecutive hits without being hit myself, I’d get a ton of magic orbs, which was actually enough incentive to make me actually do some blocking and dodging in a game. It made me get more involved in the combat, which was fantastic, as I worried I’d end up just mashing buttons.
I never did find much use for the subweapons, though. Every so often I’d get tired of them telling me I was full up on them, and use them, but they seemed so… separate from the normal flow of combat it didn’t really occur to me. Near the end I started using the Holy Water more to clear out minions, but that was about it.

Granted, there are annoying parts too. I found the Shadow of the Colossus-style bosses to be obscenely annoying. It would always seem to punish me for wailing on the magical seals, since they took about 5 hits more than they should have to break. The sections where a Chupacabra steals your powers and you have to hunt him down while he CONSTANTLY SAYS STUPID SHIT was also annoying. It’s such thinly veiled game padding that it just makes a player sad.

But mechanically, I had a good time. A better time than I thought I’d have, actually. I was kind of prepared for the worst, but the combat was enjoyable, and the rest was fine, and wasn’t going to make me give up. That’s good!

Next time, we’ll weep for Patrick Stewart, but yeah, the game part of the game is pretty fun.

Since why not, the night before the wedding I saw A Warrior’s Way.
Man, what a mis-represented movie.
You see stuff for this film, and it’s like, “Ninjas! Cowboys! Fighting! Special Effects!”
And then you get in and watch the film and it’s like, “Surreal visuals! Strange voice-overs! Rarely any fighting!”

Seriously, you come to a movie like that for badass swordplay, don’t you? But there isn’t one person in the entire film that Mr. Main Character doesn’t kill with one strike. None. Even the most important characters are dead immediately. The longest fight scene is between love interest and bad guy 1, and that’s kind of… a desperate fight, as opposed to cool badassery. It’s a bunch of people flailing around as opposed to a badass, choreographed scene.

Most of the movie was Mr. Main Character getting used to being a laundry man. He doesn’t smile, and people in this town take to him, and teach him how to have fun, and he takes care of a baby. It was so weird. There’s this cast of carnival characters and I guess we’re supposed to get to like them. Nobody was really very well developed, though. They were all stereotypes, living together. They didn’t really feel well developed. Granted, the Cowboy Villian, Bad Guy #1, was wonderfully creepy, so they did that right at least. But still, not really a full character.

The visuals, too… well, Essner described them as “Like Amilie” which is kind of accurate? Nothing was real at all. Every shot was really constructed and had a lot of CG in it. It certainly gave the film an interesting look, but without the rest of the stuff to back it up, it doesn’t seem completely worth it.

I don’t know. It was such a weird film, I’m unsure what to think of it. It wasn’t an offensive movie, but it was really strange, and nothing like it seemed like it was going to be. I can’t really recommend seeing it in theaters, but it was an experience, to be sure.

Have I mentioned I like Telltale Games? I like Telltale Games. They make funny stuff, and I always find games of theirs that I play genuinely enjoyable. Still, I was on the fence when I heard the announcement of Poker Night at the Inventory. I don’t know anything about Poker. Okay, that’s not true, but it’s not a card game I really enjoy. The concept of betting actual money just doesn’t appeal to me, so I never really got into it. Still, when I saw it was only going to be $5, I went ahead and jumped in. I liked the characters, and I trusted Telltale. The TF2 unlocks that showed up later also made me feel sure I made the right decision.

The game itself is kind of what you’d expect. You play Texas Hold’em Poker, and these characters you recognize say funny things. The dialog in the game is genuinely hilarious. I’ve laughed quite a bit while playing through it. Each character is true to their nature, and they have nice discussions back and forth that are meta and appropriate. For example, Tycho understands the Heavy is a character in a video game who gets drops from kills, but also discusses his background as if he were not. Similarly, Strong Bad and Tycho go back and forth on the relative popularity of their respective websites, for example. It works, and it’s really well-written and voiced.
There’s only so much voice work and funny jokes, though. It does run out. I had the game set to “idle chit-chat,” meaning the characters rarely talked, and I heard most of the jokes after a few hours or play. Sometimes another one I haven’t heard slips through, but if you had it turned up to more verbose settings, I’m sure you’d blow through the dialog in a much shorter period of time.

However, the game itself is just Poker. It’s sweetened with the TF2 unlocks, but it is Texas Hold’em. Rock Paper Shotgun seems to think that the Poker AI is not very good at all. This very well might be true! I don’t notice it, but I admit I only know the very basics of actual deep poker strategy. It does seem designed around people who aren’t particularly Poker players, which seems a weird decision when you’re making a Poker game. However, I have to say that, as a person who isn’t into Poker, I do find the gameplay pretty fun. I probably won’t keep playing it after I get all the TF2 unlocks (I’m only missing the Iron Curtain at this point) but I am enjoying myself. I have no problem with it.

Just know you’re getting a budget game, and that it isn’t anything more than Poker, and you’ll know whether or not this is a game to pick up. If you like Telltale and play TF2, this is really a no-brainer, though I hope you preordered and got the badass Poker Visor. If you just like Telltale, think about it. It is very entertaining while the dialog lasts, and you may discover that Poker isn’t as boring a game as you once thought.

I guess I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, huh? Yeah, I kind of did. It’s the perfect sort of film for people looking for something like this!

It was also adequate.

That’s sort of the only feeling I got from the film. I had had pretty high hopes about the movie after the Half-Blood Prince film. It was really fantastic because the people who put the movies together took liberties and had the freedom to create an entertaining film, instead of being locked firmly to what the book did. Therefore, I was really looking forward to what they did with the seventh book, since I love to hate on it so much. Could they turn Tent Angst Time into an entertaining film? COULD THEY DO IT?

Eh, sort of.

They, rightfully, barely spend any time in the tent. Little scenes are expanded in order to fill the time, and are normally expanded with exciting fight scenes, which certainly make Harry Potter and Friends seem a lot more badass. For example, what I remember as being about a two second encounter in the diner turns into a dramatic firefight ending with the entire diner destroyed. It’s entertaining to watch.
Especially of interest is Dobby who, somehow, they manage to make seem kind of badass and cool. He keeps showing up, kicking ass, and spouting dramatic one-liners. When he, spoilarz, kicks the bucket, it did feel like an emotional scene. I was kind of affected. But then I remembered it was Dobby. Still, impressive to even get that far. I’m sure fans who care about the character more than I would have been really touched. Shauna, for example, seemed to be strongly affected. So that’s good on them.

Overall, though, they really stuck much more firmly to the plot of the book in this movie, which disappointed me. Harry and friends really are just kind of doing things at random and getting super lucky all throughout the plot of the book, and this isn’t explained more here. Decisions aren’t given much more weight. Sure, we get to see a ghostly Harry and Hermoine having hot naked makings-out, but is that something someone actually wanted to see? It was good to show that these characters are basically adults now, but still, it almost came off as silly, since the ghost people looked like they were made of plastic. After that sixth movie, I thought for sure they could jump in there and make the whole thing make a little more sense. It didn’t happen.

The movie is fine. If you like the books, you’ll love it. If you have a weird sort of love/hate relationship with Harry Potter, you’ll enjoy seeing it, but probably won’t be all impressed. By all means, give it a view. In the end, though, it’s still a movie that’s half of Harry Potter book 7, so… you know what you’re getting into.

Today I’m going to talk about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.

No, not the movie. The video game.

First off, I guess I need to justify why I have even played such an amazingly awful game. Well, the answer to that is fairly simple. Basically, I thought the idea would create a mediocre but playable experience. I have always been of the opinion that, if you’re going to make a tie-in movie game on a low budget, you might as well steal mechanics directly from other good games, so that the game will at least play decently well. Death Hollow One seemed to be doing this: it was being called Gears of Potter, and was supposed to be a third-person, cover-based shooter. That’s pretty easy to get into a passable state. I had confidence it might happen.
The other main reason is that, even though I certainly bitch about it and point out its flaws an awful lot, I really do enjoy Harry Potter. It’s kind of stupid in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of writing problems, but it’s also pretty fun, if you just go along for the ride. I’d enjoy running around shooting Death Eaters, right? Maybe?

Anyway, so I randomly put it on the top of my Gamefly, and Gamefly sent it out to me. I played it for an evening and put it down, because oh man, is it awful.

Let me explain to you the situation where I stopped. I was sneaking into the Ministry of Magic. I had to do a horrible stealth section, where I then picked up some information. Then, immediately after that, I got swarmed by death eaters and about 3 dementors. I could not defeat these guys, even on easy, because there was nowhere to take cover. I though, for a second, that maybe I was supposed to sneak past them, but every time I picked up the information, I got kicked out of my invisibility cloak and everyone was alerted to me, and every time I died, I had to redo the stealth part.

Everything that’s not shooting dudes in the game is really awful. The sneaking under the “power draining for no reason” invisibility cloak is boring at worst and frustrating at best. The “walk around and talk to people to solve puzzles” would be cool, except there aren’t puzzles, and you’re walking around in tiny hallways with only one way to go. It’s pointless and time consuming.

The shooting is, unfortunately, not much better. Wands don’t have any kickback, which makes all the spells feel really weak. Plus, they all are. Stupefy is really your only combat option. You get other spells, but they do what Stupefy does, but with more cooldown, or less accuracy. It’s really pointless to use any other offensive spell. In addition, it’s impossible to hit anything unless you “aim,” which actually just locks on to targets. However, if those targets are moving, at all, Harry can’t hit them, even when locked on. It’s ridiculous, and not the Bogart-related spell.

On top of all this, the graphics are nightmare-inducing. The characters are drowning in the uncanny valley. They’re too realistic while being too stiff. They creep the fuck out, and not in a good way. The enemies, which you might want to be creepy, are always so far away that they aren’t. It’s always Harry, Ron, and Hermione who are creeping me the fuck out.

Yeah, this game is horrible, and this experiment with licensed games is over. It was silly of me to think it would be a passable weekend distraction, I suppose. Now I know, though. Maybe Part 2 will iron out the problems, because the core idea is still fine. Shootdude in Harry Potter Land is an idea I can get behind. However, I doubt it will come together into something vaguely playable, and I probably won’t check it out to see.

I don’t want to brag, but I am now a bartender, apparently. I even have the .jpeg to prove it, as you can see. How did I earn such obviously official training? Why, by playing Nimble Strong: Bartender in Training, of course.

Nimble Strong is a fascinating game, since it is in a fairly small group. Here’s a game that’s actually entertaining that teaches you a potentially useful set of stuff, much like, say, the majesty of Typing of the Dead. While you aren’t mixing the drinks for real on your iPhone, of course, you are having to memorize the names and recipes of many drinks in order to succeed in mixing them in the time-crunch scenarios the game puts you in. You can always look at your little book to read the ingredients while playing, of course, but you have to look at the book in real time, and eventually taking too long to review will cause you to not have enough time to mix the drinks properly. It really does start to make you learn the various drink types, and once you finish with the story, a “survival” mode lets you quiz yourself by constantly throwing drink orders at you, outside of the story, and without being able to look at your book of ingredients.
The only thing, gameplay-wise, that bothers me is the Recipe book you have outside the game. There’s a menu option to just let you look at the book, to help mix your own drinks. However, you have to unlock them with the tip money you get from playing the game. This seems needlessly game-y. It would be much more useful, if I was going to actually attempt to mix drinks, to simply have that reference always available for IRL situations.

The story elements of the game are acceptable, although not particularly amazing. The website promises an “epic storyline,” which it really isn’t. At the same time, it does a decent job. It’s obvious from the title and character design that the game is trying to steal some style from Phoenix Wright, and it does that to an extent. The characters are interesting enough to keep you from being completely bored in the story segments, though aren’t spectacular, perse.

Still, if you’re the sort who’d like to learn how to make these drinks, this game seems like a fantastic purchase. I had fun just with the game aspects of it, though perhaps it was a bit pricey, considering I’m probably not learning anything that will ever be of use to me. However, if you were to drink, I think this is a great way to learn the basics. Wrapping it up in a game just makes sense, and it is fun. It’s worth a look, anyway.