The concept of having multiple versions of the same game is not a new one. Anyone who knows anything about video games is probably aware of the age old Pokemon trope of multiple releases. You've got your Red and Blue, your Gold and Silver, your Ruby and Sapphire, etc. So it seems that with the most recent iteration of Fire Emblem, Intelligent Systems has decided that they wanted to give that approach a try, and thus we have the 'Birthright' and the 'Conquest' versions respectively. The problem with this is that these two concurrent releases have a little bit more differentiating them than a few unique Pokemon.
The concept of Fates, is that the player assumes the role of Corrin, a child born into the Hoshido family, who was kidnapped at birth by the Nohr family.When fate brings Corrin back in contact with the Hoshido they must choose whether to side with their birth family or the family that raised them. An interesting choice indeed, and one which sends the player down very different paths. Each side has a totally different narrative, different sets of characters rally to your army, the whole nine yards. What's more, the playstyles are even different. The Hoshido path plays similarly to Fire Emblem: Awakening, wherein the player can move around the map and fight battles at their leisure. However the Nohr path is more similar to the older style of Fire Emblem games, with a limited amount of battles that can be fought, and a lot more emphasis on making decisions based on your resources.
This all sounds good and well, but there's one huge problem in all of this, that you may have surmised by now. You see, there is no real choice. Each path is exclusive to one of the games' versions, the Hoshido path being exclusive to the Birthright version, and the Nohr path being exclusive to the Conquest version. In other words, the most important decision in the game is made before you've even paid for the game. It's less like the difference between Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue, and more like if say, Pokemon Gold only let you go to Johto and Pokemon Silver only let you go to Kanto. It's like if World of Warcraft had an 'Alliance' and a 'Horde' version. It's... apparently nowhere near as controversial as I would expect it to be?
As you might have figured out, I'm really not a fan of this approach. For the well established Fire Emblem fan it might not be that big a deal. You either choose the path you want, or you can take advantage of the deal which allows you to download the second game for $20 off, and get both paths. However if you aren't in the know, then what? What if you decide you don't like one crew but picked the wrong version? What if you end up with a different version than all your friends? It's like that dread-filled moment where you realize you've picked the wrong dialogue option, except you're committed to a 40-hour mistake, and the only way to fix it is to hopefully exchange your game or else you're out $40. Or maybe people will go with it and not care, I don't know. It seems to me that whatever the case me be though, putting such an important decision before the player has even had a chance to put the game in their 3DS seems like bad design, even if it's not bad business.
But maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions. Truth be told, I'll probably end up buying and playing both versions. And after all, nobody ever really complained about Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, did they? I suppose the issue comes down to, the Oracle games were very clearly intended to be separate from the beginning, whilst Birthright/Conquest kind of seem like a single game that grew out of scope, and can make more money separately. The fact that both games share the first 6 chapters before they branch off doesn't really help the case. Intelligent Systems and Nintendo swear up and down that Fates simply doesn't fit within the confines of a single game, that each game is a full experience. Maybe they are right, and maybe I'll believe them after I've played the game. I just hope the number of people burned by this decision is minimal.
One of the things that I've been trying to do a little bit more of lately, is streaming. I watch things on Twitch.tv daily, but I've never really consistently streamed there myself. So since I've been using my PS4 a lot lately, I thought that I would give it's in-built streaming capabilities a shot. I knew going in that it wasn't going to be an ideal setup, but if it was at least easy, then that counts for a lot for someone as mega-lazy as myself. So after messing with it for a little over a week, here are my findings...
To begin with, the service really is pretty easy. Connect up your Twitch account, hit share, select start broadcast, and you're pretty much good to go. Right from the start it's less than ideal, as expected, though. The PS4 can only stream the game feed directly, which makes quality settings and such very simple, but there is basically zero customization at any step. The only video options you have are handful of preset quality settings, and obviously you cannot use fancy stream overlays and such. There is the option to use the PS4 Eye camera deal as both a webcam and a microphone, but that's about it. Being as I didn't really want to spring for a PS4-only webcam or a proper capture card, it was video feed only for me. This also comes with the consequence of not being able to see PS4 UI objects such as achievement toasts, which is a small issue but kind of unfortunate.
In the end though, it was easy enough that I was ok with all that. I could just open up a chill stream, not feel like I need to talk or present, I can just play and respond to chat on my computer located right beside the PS4. However there remains one massive issue, which is the fact that each individual game can decide when it can and cannot be recorded. This goes for streaming, but also even simple things like screenshots, or the constant video encoding that the console would normally do. Near as I can tell this is because of potential copyright issues, and possibly because of spoilers, but either way it's super annoying.
To be honest, the blocked broadcasting is a bit of a dealbreaker. I was able to stream 25 hours of Dragon Quest Heroes unimpeded, but past a certain point in the game streaming was blocked entirely. This means I have most of the game sitting on my Twitch channel, and then suddenly nothing. That game footage will never be completed. I wanted to stream Guitar Hero Live, and that could not be broadcast at all (admittedly not surprising). Now I suppose I understand why it has to be that way, but it's a huge impediment to the service. What's worse is that as far as I know, there is no way of knowing ahead of time if you're going to be able to stream an entire game, if the game will block streaming entirely, if you'll get cut off half way, etc. That's not listed on the game box. And all told, because of that alone, I don't see the service as being worth using. If I want to continue streaming PS4 content, I will be buying a capture card.
By now, everyone knows what The Last of Us is. It is a post-apocalyptic third person survival-horror action game. It is the most critically acclaimed game of 2013. It is one of the most notable games of the last console generation. According to some it's even a contender for the best game of all time. All this from the well loved folks at Naughty Dog who also brought us Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, and Uncharted as well. It is for these reasons that I decided to give the game a whirl, knowing full well that this type of game is not at all my cup of tea. And so here I am today, giving you my impressions of a game that I played primarily because of the hype.
One of the things that gets talked about most is probably the game's narrative, so let's start there. In a lot of ways the tale that The Last of Us weaves is actually very unoriginal. It's hardly the first work of fiction to explore the the lows and highs of a post-apocalyptic society, and what actually happens is rarely unexpected. What the game does do very well however is weave narrative into the gameplay. You learn just as much about Joel from his actions then you do from his words. What's more, these are really your actions. All of his most brutal moments come at your command, and watching Joel beat a man to death with a brick at your behest can feel legitimately disturbing. And that's the point. Joel is a bad person, and unlike a lot of games where the anti-hero is glorified as some badass, there is no pretending that Joel is doing anything more than what he thinks he needs to in order to survive.
Now, one of the things that this narrative helps accomplish, is a very strong atmosphere. Together with some very well built environments and a well written script, it's easy to get sucked into this dreary world. It looks good, but it also feels good, and believable to boot. Said world is, unsurprisingly, mostly empty (which is in itself a form of worldbuilding), and yet it seems like there is always something interesting to look at or for the characters to discuss. The environments feel very organic, and so do the actors' performances. Together between the games' narrative and atmosphere it feels like it is constantly taking you feel a ride, and I found it pretty common to experience genuine shock or relief or terror when it was appropriate. However it's interesting to note, these moments were always as a result of gameplay. There are some moments which essentially become glorified walking simulators, but they still make you feel the weight of the games' situations far more than the cutscenes do.
The game manages to provide a fair variety in these situations, too. As the game goes on it introduces new things to worry about at a fair pace. Not a great one, but a fair one. Some sections drag on longer than I would like, but in general it feels like things are paced such that they never get overly tired. After playing for a while however, things can start to feel pretty formulaic (forage > infected > forage > thugs). Where The Last of Us does this better than say, the Uncharted games, is that things like puzzle solving and platforming feel like they blend into the foraging section of the game much more organically. Or perhaps the other way around. Because you are always looking for resources, and you aren't spending your time climbing up giant statues and solving ancient puzzles, it feels like you are really just navigating the environment rather than playing "the platforming segment". The Last of Us does have much less variance in puzzles and platforming than the Uncharted games however, and so with lass variance in things to do, the formula can get old quicker in my experience.
Foraging in itself however, is actually pretty grand, too. I think I can honestly say that it is my favorite part of the gameplay. It feels like hunting about the environment for materials is a legitimately very important part of the game, which helps sell the survival aspect of this broken world very well. Whereas in other games exploration tends to be a way to get bonuses that give you prestige or extra power, The Last of Us makes exploration feel like a necessity. Exploring isn't a way to become more overpowered than you would otherwise be. If you don't find enough ammo or bits to make the med packs you need, you will die. Or at the least you will make things very hard for yourself in the coming sections. It also helps that the environments are legitimately interesting to explore, for the reasons stated earlier. Unfortunately though, this is more or less where the gameplay and I stop seeing eye to eye.
Now I'm not saying that the gameplay is bad. If anything I've spoken pretty glowingly of it for the past several paragraphs. However I also mentioned how The Last of Us isn't really my type of game. Try as I might, I could never really find much love for the game's stealth-y horror-y elements, and they typically take precedence over the action-y survive-y bits. I do appreciate the narrative value that comes with the stealth-centric gameplay. However, any narrative gains from this is probably offset by how completely oblivious enemies are to your allies running all over the place and making a monolithic din. But honestly, I just felt like I just wanted to shoot things most of the time. This is in part because of my own impatience, but probably also in part because the game can be frustrating at times. It's checkpoints are not very forgiving, and it's not unheard of to die for stupid reasons like say, your partner physically blocking you from going where you need to go. All said I just found the combat to be generally frustrating and not really for me.
So where does all of this leave us? Well, we have a game that is spectacularly put together in just about every conceivable way. The Last of Us doesn't really innovate in any way, but it is a testament to the value of polish and attention to detail. To be honest, I'm still unsure of how much I actually like it, but I do believe that it deserves most of the accolades it has received, and that whatever my feelings are on the game, it's hard to deny that it is a fantastic piece of work. I think it's interesting that for a lot of the game I wished I could just experience it as a movie, and yet at the same time, a movie would not have had as strong a narrative without intermixing with the gameplay. Regardless of how much I might have enjoyed the game, it is a strong case for the strengths video games have over other forms of media, for this reason.
Here are some notes I took on the game.
Papers, Please is a weird game. The story of how this post came to exist is maybe even weirder. Papers, Please originally came onto my radar about a year ago when a demo of the game was released. It struck me as whimsical and strangely enticing; a game I definitely wanted to buy but was not in a rush to do so. Well Steam's Summer Sale solved that problem, and I've found playing the game to be an even more interesting experience. Having only put a few hours into the game I didn't want to do a proper analysis of it yet, but then I started watching the most recent season of Nickelodeon's The Legend of Korra. A befuddling tangent to be sure. I noticed a surprising number of thematic similarities between the two and was going to write a comparison, because I thought it was very unexpected and interesting. However in trying to conceptualize that post, I couldn't figure out a way to write it without dedicating most the article to gushing about Papers, Please. So, I'm just going to do that for now instead!
Ok, so what exactly is Papers, Please anyways? Well the concept is simple. You are an immigration officer working at the border of the fictional country of Arstotzka. Day in and day out, people hand you their papers and you must decide who can and cannot enter the country. As the days march by the political landscape gets more complicated, and so does your job. On day 1 you're just checking passports, but soon enough you're cross-checking 3-4 documents, the person's appearance and story, wanted criminal lists, etc. The difficulty in processing each immigrant increases, but your always payed $5 per person you get right. At the end of the day you go home, count your pay, and hope you have enough to pay for rent, food, heat, and whatever other expenses you may have. The next morning you wake up, read the headlines, and do it all over again.
Obviously this sounds fairly boring, but it's design is surprisingly brilliant and immersive. Let me walk you through the thought process as you are playing this game. It starts off, and you are trying to get a hang for how the game works. You quickly realize that you can just barely make ends meet, and that maybe tomorrow you won't. So the next day comes, and you decide you are going to go at it hard to make sure you earn enough money. In your fervor you miss something, and your pay gets docked. You can't pay for the heat, and next thing you know little Timmy is has a cold. You quickly learn to loathe the clickity-clack sound of the tickets that pop out whenever you make a mistake. Maybe it's worth it to make sure you do your job properly. This is a game anyways right? Clearly the goal is to process everyone correctly and make enough money to provide for your family. Just put your head down, check every bit of information, and you'll surely be fine.
But as the days go by, you begin to question this. You're soon checking so much information that you can't process it all quickly enough, and you start wondering if you shouldn't have more empathy. You start forgetting to check for things like fraudulent seals. Maybe you start putting less effort into checking Arstotzkan citizens, as they have fewer documents to verify and are usually legit. Maybe when a wife doesn't have the documents to enter with her husband, you're willing to give her a pass. But what happens when the next morning you read a headline about criminals entering the country? Is that your fault? Do you care as long as your pay isn't affected? What if you were bribed? What about people with cryptic requests? If some guy asks you to pass along an important document, do you trust him? How do you identify who to give it to? What if you give it to the wrong person and it increases terrorist attacks? After all, bombings shut down the checkpoint for the rest of the day, you certainly can't pay the bills working half days.
These are just some of the questions you have to answer while playing Papers, Please, and this is why it's kind of brilliant. In the world that is Arstotzka's border all you do is drag some papers around and stamp the passport with the red or the green. But you have all the power, and you can do whatever you want with it. The game provides you with a framework, rewards, punishments, incentives, but never hard rules or end goals. Nobody is telling you what to do. Everyone has their own idea of what they want you to do, and they will reward/punish you accordingly, but in the end of the day the decision is always yours. You have to weigh what you value and decide how to best achieve it. Maybe you don't care about politics or emotional immigrants or cryptic cults, you just want to put your head down and provide for your family. Maybe you want to unlock all of the bonus medals, so you look for those weird situations with special circumstances. Maybe you actually don't care about your family, you just want to make sure all the terrorists get in.
Who would ever suspect such a simple game to have such immersive gameplay? How is it that a game about doing paperwork has the best morality system I've seen in any game? You might not even realize it's there because there are no points or meters, you don't even have good vs. bad. You just have a system where your actions have real, direct, discernible consequences. You're choices aren't even that complex, you are essentially answering yes or no a couple hundred times. This is the game's key. It doesn't have deep gameplay, it doesn't have an epic backstory, it's simple. It focuses on narrative and immersion at the cost of everything else. If anything, it's simplicity just accentutes how mundane a job you are working, and how even a thoroughly monotonous existence like immigration officer is one full of meaningful choices.
The age of the Playstation and the Playstation 2 is one that I think a lot of people look upon with much fondness. There are a lot of old Playstation classics that came out of that time which people will talk about to this day. One of the things that stick out in my mind the most was eagerly awaiting my monthly edition of Playstation Magazine, a publication that often had something to say about the newest Ratchet and Clank or Jak and Daxter game. It seemed like the two series had something of a rivalry going on, and the gamers loved it. At the time I was happy enough playing nothing but RPGs every day, but these days I feel a compulsion to go back and see what the fuss was all about. Luckily, this is made pretty easy by the existence of HD collections. I rather enjoyed my time with the Sly Cooper collection, and now the time for Jak and Daxter has arrived. At the time of this writing, I have completed the original, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and am about half way through Jak II. The purpose of this article is to compare the two, because I feel like there is a lot to say on the matter.
So let's start off by talking about the original game. Jak and Daxter is ultimately, a pretty simple game. It's a game about exploration, collecting pickups, and platforming. It does all of these things quite well, boasting a surprisingly large world that is entirely seamless (unless you are warping) and more to the point, well constructed. The levels are complex, but not to the point that they are difficult to navigate even without any form of map. The areas are colorful and interesting, and the same is true of the game on the whole. It has a lighthearted cheer about it that's quite endearing, and it doesn't bog you down with superfluous things. Story is minimal; the characters are interesting but don't overstay their welcome. Overall the game just compels you to not only play, but to perfect it. It's very easy to open up your menu and see that you've collected 142/150 precursor orbs and 5/7 power cells in an area. Finding what's left may be a little tricky, but the counter both tells you where to look, and encourages you to do so.
That's not to say it's a perfect game by any means. Jak's attack animations have a lot of character, but the game's actual combat feels pretty hamfisted, and I don't know that it really adds anything to the experience. Like many PS2 era games, Jak and Daxter also suffers from some camera woes. It's not especially bad, but the camera movement feels somewhat leaden, and situations where you can't look where you want are pretty frequent as a result. There are also a fair number of vehicle sections, which are pretty decent for the most part, but can be pretty frustrating at times because of difficult platforming which is often coupled with instant death mechanics. I found that most of the time when I died, it felt like I hadn't really done anything particularly wrong. Thankfully the game has pretty plentiful checkpoints and so it's easy to get right back in there and try again. In the end I was entertained enough that I never really wanted to stop playing, and there was never any question that I was going to 100% complete the game.
Now let's look at Jak II... So in the sequel, Jak is turned into an angsty badboy, given a voice, imbued with dark powers, given guns, placed into a dystopian city... You get my point. The game's entire feel is changed. It's not fun and carefree anymore, instead it feels like it's trying really hard to be dark and edgy and I really don't like the change. But that's just my personal opinion. Thematic changes aside, the biggest difference between the games is that while Jak and Daxter was a free roam collectathon, Jak II is a mission based open world. The thing is that this world is just boring, needlessly windy, and only really serves to create busywork. You go from one end to the other, watch some kind of scene that's try too hard to be gritty, then you go back across the city to complete your mission. Along the way you'll probably bump into a guard, the entire city will go into "hunt down Jak" mode (which they may or may not eventually abandon, for some undiscernable reason). When you get to the entrance to another area you won't see a loading screen, but you will sit in an empty room waiting for a giant door to open. Everything about this city just irks me, and you spend the vast majority of your time there.
Playing Jak II immediately after Jak and Daxter, I feel like the game flow has none of the elegance, and the overall theme has none of the character and charm. The areas aren't as well put together, the collectibles are fewer, you don't have the same collectible counter to drive you to find them. The game's focus has shifted significantly towards more combat, which doesn't really feel any better than in the first game. If anything it feels worse because there are very few checkpoints in the game, meaning death usually puts you back at the start of the level with all enemies being respawned. On top of the lack of checkpoints, the game's overall difficulty seems to be higher to boot, and the two combined lead to significantly more frustrating moments. The game's story is much more in your face, and it always feels like it's trying way too hard to be gritty and edgy. The vehicles are a lot more annoying to handle, they blow up easily, and you have to drive them much more frequently to get around the city, complete races etc...
Ultimately the point I'm trying to make here is that Jak II feels nothing like Jak and Daxter. Almost everything I liked about the first game is now gone or altered beyond recognition. It's pretty apparent that Jak II is trying to be a completely different kind of game. That isn't inherently a bad thing; I think there's something to be said about managing your player's expectations, but different doesn't mean bad. That said, the truth of the matter is that I'm just not enjoying my time with Jak II that much. It's not like it's a bad game per se, but I find it to be a pretty annoying experience that is somewhat lacking in actual fun parts. I don't know how the sequel turned into this thing, maybe it's just me, Jak II has a reputation of being a good game. I suppose I'll just have to keep playing, maybe I'll find some fun in it yet.
