Dark Souls

So I decided to give Dark Souls a try.

Dark Souls is a game from some years ago now, that became (in)famous for its difficulty, but everybody said it was great.

That made me curious, but I don't have a lot of time so I didn't check if I could get it for a while....

However, I saw Yahtzee's review in Zero Punctuation and he claimed it was really good actually, once you passed some hard fights and started to learn how to play...this plus some posts on the Internet made me want to play it, and see if it was as hard as they said...

Well, the game it's hard, but not so hard. I'm not saying I'm that good, I die a lot and I still didn't get the hang of rolling at the right time (in part because my laptop sometimes slows down too much to time things properly), but my point is that the game helps you train.

When you die and restart, you can go back where you died and recover the experience/money you gained since last time you died, plus any extra you got from fighting people on the way. Also, you can grind your way up the levels, by killing monsters in one area and resting so they reappear, and repeat this until your stats are to your liking.

This means you can train a level until you do it well. Sure, when the boss kills you and you need to kill again  all the minions between the boss and the resting area it gets annoying, but you're getting extra experience after all, and training.

What is true is that the game doesn't hold your hand, but that's a refreshing change from current popular games. In most new games you don't have lives, checkpoints are everywhere and death is cheap, a small nuisance. Dark Souls makes you suffer instead, you really need to put effort.

However, that's just like more traditional games that had no saving points, like Mario or Sonic. You just had to get good at finishing everything, and if you died enough times, you had to start from the beginning. This poses a challenge.

Challenges are not for everyone, not everyone enjoys them and they are free to prefer a simpler game. It also depends on the challenge, there are some challenging games where I don't like to put the effort it would require to finish them...and who knows, Dark Souls may become like one of these eventually. But for the moment it is really addictive...

The game itself has little plot, and I'm fond of plots. Only very good games can get away with having no extra reward from advancing than the advancement itself...I'm not sure yet if Dark Souls achieves that..there is a plot, but it is very nebulous....the world feels half empty, a feeling I don't like, but it is for plot - related reasons, and it is true that the map is huge and it seems you can visit plenty of different areas...if you see something big and looming on the horizon , you will probably visit it...

The game itself consists of exploring the different areas, abandoned castles, silent ruins, graveyards, etc. while fighting monsters (mostly undeads). You have the traditional RPG classes (cleric, wizard, warrior, archer) with variations (so you actually have different classes than what I mentioned, but they are recombinations of those traditional stats).  Depending on your class gameplay varies, but in most types it is based on shielding/avoiding attacks and striking back afterwards. 

I decided to start with the Deprived class. At first glance that seems insane, but I read a review that explains quite well why this is not so weird....the Deprived basically start with nothing (very simple weapon and shield, no armour), but their stats are the same in every aspect. This means that 1-Any drop is usually better than your current equipment, so you appreciate them, 2-You can adapt better to your gameplay because you can increase your favourite stats first, and 3-The game is as hard as it gets at the beginning, so you will not reach a point that is harder and will just adapt to the difficulty, or not, early on. 

For example, I discovered I depend a lot on my shield but I also like to roll around, so the heavy knight may not be for me actually. I like to be fast, but I want to have enough endurance to do lots of things. I don't like slow weapons, but I want to do some damage which very light weapons do not provide.  I didn't experience any ranged attacks yet, but I've heard they are a little game-breaking (as it usually happens), but well, I may give it a try at some moment too. 

Ah, the game has 3 major annoying things, that is also true:

1-You cannot pause with one button. You can only exit the game and load again, but the time it takes to do this you may end up dead...We should have moved past this crap by now, all games should allow you to pause at any moment, including during cinematics, without having to skip anything or suffer for it. People that play videogames has changed a lot in these years, and lots of them are the same that started playing 20 years ago, and now they have families and things to do, sometimes you really need to stop the game at this moment and not having this option is just stupid. 

2-In theory you play always online. They say you do not enjoy the full experience if you don't, but I do not want to interact with other players so I disconnect my wifi when I play. This should be an option always as well, I'm not interested in PvP or interacting with unknown people.

3-The game sometimes "cheats" with fake difficulty. The game is hard enough as it is, but sometimes there's some surprise event that will kill you straight if you're not prepared for it, or wound you badly. This is nasty, because one thing is to suck at some point and get killed and another is to get into a trap you had no way to know it was there until it killed you. 

Anyway, at the moment I'm stuck at the gargoyle boss, and rather letting it kill me again and again I leveled up a little, to see if things are better...I'm also getting the hang of the two-handed use, because with such big monsters it is useless to cover....I still need to learn to time better my actions or I won't survive for long in this game...

I don't know how many hours it will require, to finish, or if I will give up, but for the moment it's being quite fun....

Creating Your Own Narrative In Rebellion

Warning: Geeky post ahead...

As I keep saying, I love to play games...however, we don't have much free time every day, so we tend to use it to do things together like watching a movie or series. Sometimes we play together, but it needs to be some special game, with a plot, interesting to watch too.

Anyway, that means I have a big waiting list for games....not necessarily new games, since I also love replaying. And just now I have been(and I haven't finished ) re-playing Star Wars: Rebellion.

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I'm...well, cannot really say a Star Wars fan maybe, but well, a fan of the universe described in Star Wars, or fan of the original trilogy and of several of its games. Some people like the force and the lightsabres,  some people may like the story...but what attracted me since I was little were the spaceships.

I loved the spaceships. I loved the small fighter types, the transports, the capital ships..and I especially loved the Imperial ships.

I mean, look at an Imperial Star Destroyer..it's a city-sized monster with lasers. Look at a Super Star Destroyer dwarfing all the other ships....look at the Tie Interceptor, sleek and menacing, agile and fast...look at the spotless decks, the white polished ships, at the superior technology....of course I like the Imperials.

Also, the Imperial March kicks ass...

Anyway, that's something that I always remember being attracted to, the ships and the space combat, although it is in the games that I really started to love it...Games like X-Wing, Tie Fighter and the corresponding successors.

So imagine my emotions when, as a kid/teenager, I heard they were making a game,  a strategy game, where you could expand your side, conquer planets, make fleets, etc. I remember hearing about it and salivating, basically. Most other games made by LucasArts were pretty awesome, so a Star wars strategy game where you controlled all that seemed a dream come true.

I remember the game took some time, was delayed, etc...and when it came out it was not a success.

This was because the game has big flaws.

The first one is the interface. Playing the game is more like managing windows and trying to copy files from one folder to another. Everything opens windows and plenty of times you need to rearrange then and move them around to do what you want. With a rather low resolution, this becomes a problem fast..

The available actions are not evident, and it is actually a bit annoying how you manage building things and assigning them to planets. Mission assignment is also not very clean, and movement without confirmation means that a mistake can send something the wrong way without you realizing it or being able to do anything about it.

Then you have the graphics. They are not good even  for the time, with plenty of low resolution images and less than stellar original drawings.

There is also the space combat area, which uses a different interface. It still is pretty clunky, not comfortable, and hard to operate efficiently. The graphics in this section are also not good, with 3D models without details and without realistic shapes and forms. To put an example, the SSDs should look impressive as hell, but they look kind of small and short. Also, the combat lacks detail, showing only the occasional laser. The internal engine maybe only does a combat simulation once every so much seconds, but only firing once in so much seconds looks bad. In the end you have the option to let the computer to take charge of the battle, and plenty of times this is better.

The game itself also has a lot of little annoying bugs, like needing to click several times to make someone start a mission and similar issues.

There is no plot, you just start after the first death start and continue your way, and the planet assignment and forces makes no sense, starting with a few planets and spaceships even if you're the Empire. The game mechanics have some flaws that you can abuse and make the game easier, and I think it's not especially hard once you figure a few things out.

However, I loved the game. Even with all these flaws, I enjoyed it a lot. I loved designing new advancements, building capital ships, fighting in space, performing missions, recruiting and using diplomacy...one of the things I liked most is that you can rename all the ships, so I could recreate fleets from the X-Wing games...

The game has sectors with around 10 planets each, and you have a few central sectors and lots of outer sectors. Central sectors are populated and can be neutral or support the rebels or the Empire, while outer sectors tend to have just a few populated planets, and you can colonize the rest. You can control a planet that doesn't support you by assaulting it and leaving troops in there, but it is better to maximize support by making a character do a diplomacy mission on it. You have characters from the movies and expanded universe, and you can make them command troops and ships or perform missions, with each character having its strengths and weaknesses. You have ships, ground troops and buildings. Resources are quite simple, you can have mines and refineries, and this gives you maintenance units. Everything uses maintenance units to be build and maintained. Factories can be built in planets, and the more you have the faster things are built, but planets have a limit on buildings they can have.

Building and moving around takes days, and you can change the speed of time passing. Usually the game is played by triggering movements, missions and constructions, and then speeding things up until something interesting happens.

The game is hard to win and hard to loose: you need to capture the 2 leaders of the rival side (the leaders cannot be killed) and destroy the rebel base (you only need to do it once but the base can move around) or capture the planet Coruscant (you need to maintained control of it but you always know its location). This means usually you will need to conquer everything or be very lucky to win the game.

In these games without plot, you create the plot. You create an internal narrative, and you get attached to squads and characters without there being a real plot, just based on random events. And there's plenty of those, that make the game extremely interesting, at least for me. I'm going to explain some of them....

For starters, one of the most common stories that motivates you to play this game is as follows: you have control of some planet with big support, and then the other side comes with a fleet and bombs the place. You have some fleet situated somewhere else, and you move it there. You arrive late, and meanwhile the enemy is now in another close planet, bombing it. You start a nice chase around the sector, but every time you encounter them they flee. Then you finally research the interdiction technology and create a ship that blocks hyperspace jumping, and when you finally catch again with them you disintegrate them and feel quite rewarded...

Another good one is when you send a diplomat to some neutral planet. Diplomats are usually the nicest characters, and some of them get really good at it, so you develop certain care for them, also because not so many characters can do this. However, this time the planet changes sides before they reach it, and when they arrive they get captured or even wounded.

Of course what follows is a epic rescue mission across the galaxy, searching for the fleet that had them and hoping you didn't blow them up in that last combat...and when the mission is successful you feel pretty awesome^^

To finish the post, one last story...

If you control the Empire, you can make death stars. They are very expensive, hard to maintain and take forever to build, but once you have one you can destroy planets. The downside is that this lowers Empire's support in all planets in the galaxy (usually your actions just increase or lower support in on planet or one sector, so this is a big deal, you can end up losing all planets).

The first time I played the game, I was having difficulties in capturing the enemy leaders and in convincing sectors to like the Empire. I had maintenance problems and ships were falling apart. Tired of this and just to see what happened, I managed to get a death star and I proceeded to visit planets that supported the rebels and blow them to pieces.

Fast enough I had whole sectors rebelling against me. Of course, I was a bastard leaving a path of destruction on my way...I even started to destroy planets that had slightly lost support, but I was leaving no land to hide.

And then something magical happened, that I don't know if it's a bug or was programmed like this....the sectors that I still controlled, not that many by that time, started being indifferent to me blowing up another planet. Not only that, support for the Empire started to increase galaxy - wide after each new destroyed planet. Planets were cheering around for every new explosion.

It was awesome,  I had manage to obtain support by pure fear somehow, or by tiredness. I think it was a bug maybe, but it was extremely funny.

With the support of these sectors too afraid to complain, I laid waste to half the galaxy, and eventually managed to capture the rebels (because they ran out of planets :D )

It was one of the best narratives I've ever seen in this type of game :D