One man's struggle against his gaming backlog – a quest for closure
It finally happened. I was sure it would never happen to me. I told myself I was in control. I thought this only happened to other people. I was not going to fall into the trap. I was wrong. Last month I forgot to pause my Humble Monthly subscription and now I own a bunch of games I didn’t ask for. That of course is a problem you often encounter when buying bundles. It’s how you get a mountain instead of a pile.
‘Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’ is an insane open-world stealth game and much more. It’s also incredible that despite its flaws it’s still such a great game. A weird combination of 80s action movie, bad writing and utter madness, enhanced by something that is either a great sense of humor or me being ignorant of Japanese culture. It’s also a very impractical game if you want to write a blog about video games because even by concentrating solely on the story missions it took me about 35 hours to finish it.
In ‘Metal Gear Solid V’ you play as Punished “Venom” Snake aka Big Boss. Most of the time you ride a horse called D-Horse through some versions of 1980s Afghanistan and Central Africa. You are the leader of the adorably named ‘Diamond Dogs’ band of mercenaries and besides managing your off-shore private army base, you mainly visit afore mentioned conflict zones and decide whether you sneakily sedate and extract or less sneakily shoot and kill everyone and anything you meet. Wild animals hate you. Continue reading “Review: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain”
I never really understood the appeal of the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ series. The third person stick ’em all looked great at its release and the climbing animations in combination with the resulting view were astonishing. Then I realized that that’s basically all there is to it so I very soon tossed it onto the mountain of shame (it was actually just a very big pile back then) and because it happened in the dark ages I sold the disc, which saves me from having to talk about the first entry of the series any further. I can’t sell any of the other ‘Ass Creeds’ I bought. Damn you, digital distribution!
The series stayed very popular among the masses so I was wondering whether I might have misjudged it back then (because you can always trust the masses), or whether it just became a better game through it’s many incarnations. I read that ‘Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood’ was supposed to be among the better entries of the series so when I had the chance to grab it for cheap, I did. Damn you, curiosity! Continue reading “Impression: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood”
In ‘Arx Fatalis’ you play as a young man with a serious eating disorder (not the Pac-Man kind, the starving kind), who by the sound of it is wearing high heels all the time. This may sound very edgy and progressive, but ‘Arx Fatalis’ is a classic RPG, which plays in a fairly common fantasy world, that happens to be underground.
It’s clearly an homage to the mighty ‘Ultima Underworld I and II’ and to a certain extend ‘Arx Fatalis’ manages to evoke the eery feeling I had when I played those games. It certainly looks better than games from the early nineties, and it’s still okayish looking for a game from 2002. Especially when you use (and you should) Arx Libertatis, a launcher/mod that makes your life with the game so much easier. It does for example fit the resolution of the game to your futuristic widescreen monitor. Also it makes the game run in the first place. Always a good thing in my book. Continue reading “Review: Arx Fatalis”
‘Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands’ lets you play as your favorite American superhuman who brings peace and stability to a third world country by killing a lot of brown skinned young men. I like that it’s 80s action movie old school in making drugs the excuse for your mass murdering instead of terrorism.
Racist stereotypes in computer games are nothing new (look at every Call of Duty game for example) and a solid part of pop culture (look at every Hollywood movie for example), but Ubisoft really have outdone themselves with Bolivia. More than half of Ubisoft’s Bolivia’s population are made up by wife-beater wearing young men armed to their teeth. The rest are corrupt police men and some clichéd indigenous civilians who can cost you your mission if you kill them by accident. Ubisoft want to make clear that they only support mass murder on the people that deserve it. It doesn’t help that everyone has the tendency to jump in front of your car.
Continue reading “Review: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands”
It’s summer – gaming in an attic flat is hard sweaty work. I also just bought myself a fancy racing wheel for my PC. Aiming in ‘Arma 2’ was very hard and there was no Forcefeedback at all. I initially got the wheel because I wanted to get into ‘CS:GO’, but I ended up using it primarily for drying towels.
A new category! ‘Remembering’ is the friendly version of ‘Skipping’ – I still can’t be bothered to play the game (again), but this time I’ve played it so much in the past that I can actually say something about it. The first game to be remembered is ‘Operation Flashpoint’ or as young people call it ‘Arma: Cold War Assault’ because of legal reasons.
Continue reading “Remembering: Operation Flashpoint (Arma: Cold War Assault)”
Oh Arcanum, I really wanted this to be a proper review, not just a mere impression after a (good) couple of hours. I put in the work to make you run. I installed patches and mods. I ran you in the proper compatibility mode and as administrator. I did some weird command line shit to make playing you as smooth and painless as possible – from a technical stand point. Come to think of it – that probably should have been GOG’s job, where I bought you for real money. What I want to say is: I really tried.
Continue reading “Impression: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura”
In ‘Arcania’ you play stereotype fantasy protagonist number one, farmer man-boy turned hero with a twist: this time you are mentally retarded! And so is everybody else in the game, much like the real world.
The ‘Arcade Game Series’ brings emulated arcade classics to your humbling, shiny gaming machine. It does so in a convenient package that frees you from painful fiddling with ‘DOS Box’ or other arcane techniques you’d rather not be associated with. Since you are the owner of earth shattering processing power, it is natural to assume that fiberglass cables with the diameter of your powerful clenched fist/a babies head run thought the walls of your formidable castle. You won’t even notice that every single entry of this series comes at a gigabyte per pop.
Continue reading “Impression: Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug, Galaga, Pac-Man”