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Journey Finished!

If I have to describe Journey with one word it would be emotional. I just finished playing Journey (10 mins ago) and I really wanted to write about it. I’m still feeling the ending and all that great stuff so this post might be a little more emotional than previous posts.

Journey is a game created by the company ThatGameCompany. The game starts the player off at a desert where the player is only given the hint of what the controls are. After about 5-10 minutes after the player is shown all the controls, the player is left off to explore the world to himself. It is such a powerful idea to allow the player to learn every little tricks the game has by himself. It took me a while to even figure out how the scarf works in the game. It even get more complicated when another player comes into the game.

Speaking of that, the game does a seamless transition when bringing another player into the game. You may just be walking around and there will be a player around the corner. Normally the players will want to work and travel around the game together. With the help of a partner, you can get to places that would not be possible without. The only way to communicate between each player is by using a “chirp” button which can be held down to make a louder chirp. The chirp button is also used to recharge each other’s scarf so that the player can continue a glide. It takes practice but once both players get the mechanic down, using this trick will allow each other to get to hidden places. The chirp tool can be use to also call or alert the player. It is whatever you want to make of it and I pretty much used it whenever I can. Sometime my chirp will mean “Thank You” or another time it will mean “Wait for me!”

It is amazing what this game did with such simple controls and a unique idea. The unique idea is the whole seamless player transition thing but also that you don’t know who is who. No name tags appear on the player and you can’t tell if they go offline or anything. The only way to communicate is through chirping so if you run far away from your buddy, a new buddy might appear in place of him. I had 4 different companions that were with me throughout the game. Honestly, my first companion was the best. I wanted to say thank you TETUTINA (You get to see the companion names at the end of the game) for making the game so much better. I’m going to say that it is a she since the whole “Tina” in the gamer tag. Anyways, she pretty much guided me throughout 75% of the game. The game is only one and a half hour long but she showed me locations that I would not have explored. She was my tour guide throughout that part of the game. She guided me to places where I could get scarf icons to extend my scarf. She took me to places where I was able to learn more about the world. She even dragged me to places where I would have the best angle for a scripted moment. Finally there was this part where she took me to a very super hidden place. I would remember that spot as one of the best moment I have had in a videogame. Basically imagine a flying dragon that is in a secret location that you can get to if you know where it is. The developers hid this dragon to later use it but if you know where it is hidden, you can see it before it comes into the game later on. Even though you can see it later on the game, it is much more amazing to see it where it was hidden. Pretty much she was the best anonymous partner I have had in a cooperative game.

Sadly, after about 75% into the game, it seems she got disconnected from the game so it switched to another player. I believe you get a different cloak after beating the game and starting again so I was able to tell that it was a different person since the new character had the same cloak as me while she had a different cloak than all of us. Before the new player arrived, I started chirping around for her. I wanted to see if she would chirp back. After chirping for about 10 minutes, I decided to explore the world for myself. Throughout that 75% of the game, there were moments where it would have been easy to lose each other. There was this one moment where both players are sliding down a mountain of sand together. If they don’t stick to each other, they can easily lose one another. Throughout that whole scene I was constantly chirping as she was also to not lose each other. I love that scene because I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time in a videogame. Most games have characters that tries to give the player some emotional connection with them. Most games do not do this successfully so when they die, I usually don’t feel anything for them. However, in Journey, I already had this connection with my anonymous partner. The game needed no introductions with each other. My partner just pop out of nowhere and I shouldn’t have had such a strong connection. But by working together, I was able to build this connection that felt more personal than being force because of the story like many other games.

I guess I started out with the best so it was hard for me to switch to these new players. Their scarfs are short and they look as lost as me. I believe if I had one of these types of players, I would have also enjoyed the game differently. We would have explored the world together and try to see if there were anything in the game that we could find. But as I already found most of the game’s hidden features due to having an awesome partner already, I couldn’t possibly work with these new players. It was hard for me to work together. I even let the first player after Tetutina go far away from me believing that she will come back when a new player pops up. Yes even without giving me any names or anything, I was able to befriend a stranger and had an emotional connection with it. I didn’t want to work with anyone else in the game and it showed. I started to hate the new guys because they would not be as great. I really missed her in that last 25% of the game. That may be the only reason why I had 4 companions. I probably could have had only 2 but I just let them go away from me hoping that whoever would pop into my session next would have the same cloak that she did. Sadly, it did not happen.

As you can tell that this game was super emotional on my end. I was so attached to my companion that it helped escalate the game to a level of emotion I wasn’t expecting from a game like this. It is a true testament of a game for me to be this emotionally attached to an unknown stranger. I plan to send her a message saying thank you for a great time playing Journey and add her to my friends list. Also did I mention that the visuals and audios are amazing? The sand and the way they reflect the sun or interior looks phenomenal while floating scarfs/paper/cloth waver left and right with believable motion. I believe the music also helped brought out these emotion. The music was always perfect with what’s happening in the game. It speeds up when there is a high pace area and slows down when it is more of an exploring area.

Great emotional impact, amazing visuals, and perfect music makes Journey a complete package for an awesome time. The gameplay time may be one and a half hour and the price may be $15 but I believe it is worth every penny. I don’t want to compare a movie ticket with this but I believe this is way more worth it then a movie. It is a unique experience that I wish that everyone could have. I also wish that everyone who plays this game would also have an amazing companion as I did. I don’t think I would have had as much of an emotional impact as I would have without the help from an awesome companion. It is a quick game so anyone can finish it. I really do suggest that this should be played in one session. I mean it is only 1.5 hours!

2012
04/07
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Driver: San Francisco Finished!

I went in and played through the rest of Driver: San Francisco the day after my last post. I have to say that the ending is one of the craziest endings I’ve ever seen. If the last post didn’t catch a person’s attention on this game, I hope this post will. I really enjoyed my time playing through this game and I wish a sequel could be made from this as I see some potentials for the developers to add more outrageous things.

Driver: San Francisco is a driving game similar to Burnout but with a story. Most of the game is in the main character Tanner’s coma. Events in the game are being played out by a news broadcast in real life. But the story isn’t really what this game is about. Honestly I didn’t really care for the story that much. All you really need to know is some terrorist name Jericho got you in the coma and you’re trying to figure out what he’s up to in the coma by putting the clues that you get from the news broadcast. Its your basic catching the bad guy 80’s flick story.

As I said, story is not the strong point in this game. The gameplay however excels at being a great driving game. Similar to Burnout, most missions involve you trying to take down enemy vehicles. However it is not really a race though there are some races in the game. What  the game gives you to take these enemies down is by far the most unique thing about this game. The game call it the “Shift Mechanic.” Using the Shift Mechanic, the player is allow to shift into any vehicles in the game. The player can then use these vehicles to ram into enemy vehicles or create roadblocks if cops are chasing you. The game even encourage this by giving out hints saying you should be doing this. It allowed me to keep the game interesting by changing into different vehicles like buses or gas trucks and see what kind of chaos I can do to accomplish this mission.

The Shift Mechanic also allow for some real interesting mission. As stated in the previous post, shifting from one car to another to try to drive under a moving semi-truck to disable bombs all over the city is something I never done in the game. Another one which I don’t want to spoil but I really want to say is pretty much allowing the player to remote control a car while the player is still in the car. This mission really caught me by surprise as I had no idea what I had to do to accomplish it. Not all missions are as unique as the ones I say and some are just the basic take down certain enemies or run away from the cops. Even though these might be the usual missions that I have played before, I found myself wanting to play them due the amazing voice works done by voice actors. Each of the side missions have their own stories and some of them even continue on to other missions. There’s usually a passenger in the vehicle so they are usually talking throughout the mission and the dialogues are hilarious. Most of the passengers don’t know that Tanner is possessing the driver so you can see what kind of dialog the game offers.

Aside from the missions, there are a ton of cars to unlock. I didn’t unlocked them all but I unlocked the cars I wanted to drive around the city. Driving around the city is also a nice thing to do in the game. Being new to the San Francisco area recently, I still found myself catching locations that I remember seeing in real life. Once the game was over, I even drove around the city seeing if I could find places like IGN building or even just the AT&T ball park. Aside from unlockable cars, there are challenges and also movie challenges. The movie challenges are awesome but I’m disappointed that you have to collect 10 movie icons that are scattered across the map to unlock one movie challenge. In the challenge, you drive through a famous scene from a movie. A scene like the last driving scene from Gone in 60 Seconds (the old one) in the game is perfect and it was really enjoyable to play those scenes.

Driver: San Francisco is a really enjoyable game. I love the whole “Shift Mechanic” game feature and the way the developers worked out their side missions and main missions to be as interesting and diverse as possible. It is a really relaxing game with no worries of death and all gloomy-ness in the game world. I found myself really engaged in the game and I believe it is really worth playing. Heck I bought it for 12.99 so it is a steal if you can find it for that price!

2012
04/07
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Currently Playing: Driver: San Francisco

Driver: San Francisco has got to be one of the most enjoyable and relaxing games I have played in a while. Yes there were Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim and such but those games were all so dark and gloomy compared to what Driver is. The game for me feels like a Burnout game with a story. The driving is fast and chaotic with newspaper flying everywhere, smokes coming out of the car and ramps created from San Francisco hills.

The game would have been a fun game already even if they didn’t add in their unique ‘shift’ feature but that feature really adds into the chaotic nature of the game. Using the shift mechanic, the player is allow to shift to any car they want to with a few exceptions like enemies and cop cars if they are chasing you. Using this feature, the player can take control of oncoming traffic and ram into enemies or cop cars. They even support this idea by giving the player a ram ability where the more you hold down the ram button, the harder the hit.

With all these features, the developers found a way to make certain side missions super interesting. The one I remember most recently is a mission where I had to drive a small car under a Semi-Truck to disable a bomb under it. But I had to shift into other small cars around San Francisco because there were more than one bomb. And I really like that these missions don’t repeat and it actually adds up to the story. Granted I’ll probably never play this game again once I’m done with it but the game really made me want to play all the side missions before even starting the main mission. I wanted to see what crazy things the game wants me to do.

I am about two chapters away from the ending so next post will probably be about my thoughts on the game. There are a lot more I want to say about this game but I think I will wait until the next post. However, the game has been very enjoyable and is a very nice change from all the gloomy apocalyptic bloddy reaper dragons. It is a game that you want to play if you just want to relax and play a video game for what they were created to be.

2012
04/05
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Skyrim Finished!

I’ve finished this game a while ago but I never got around to posting something about it until now. I want to admit that I did rushed things a little at the end of the game. This is mainly due to the fact that I got so powerful by the end that there was basically no challenges left. I will get to that later but lets start out by saying what an amazing game Skyrim is. I finished the game clocking in at 110 hours. This aside from certain MMOs is probably one of my longest game time in a single game. I also wanted to point out that you can’t really finish a game like Skyrim. There are just so much to do that it becomes overwhelming and will eventually become tiresome. I say that I finished Skyrim because I felt that I did everything that I wanted to do in the game. I finished the main story, all guild quests, deadric quests, and even most of the side missions. However I didn’t find all the locations the game has to offer and did not left the game with an empty quest log.

I want to start out by saying what Bethesda did right in this game compare to their other games. Not unlike their other games, this is a truly open world game where the player can traverse the world and do almost anything the game allows you to do. However unlike their other games, Bethesda really gave a reason to explore the world in Skyrim. In Oblivion, I found myself exploring for about the first few hours of the game but nothing about that world felt distinct or gave me a purpose. Sure there were caves and dungeons for me to explore but I began to see a similarity between them after going into a few of them. Skyrim fixed this problem by making each dungeons, caves, and temples unique to each other. One cave may have a waterfall inside while another will have a river that connects to another dungeon. Making each locations unique helped brought out the realism of the world that Bethesda has created. It also helped me keep exploring one cave to another without being bored due to similarity. It also helps that this game is beautiful. I took about a little over fifty pictures in the game to show them to my friends how gorgeous this game is. Other then Red Dead Redemption, I don’t think I found a game that was able to make me just stop and look around.

Skyrim is a Bethesda game in the line of a lot of open world games they created like Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Similar to those games, they brought back the markers on the game HUD that always tell you that there is a new location around the corner. I love that little marker. It made me want to explore and diverge off my quest path to go find out what this new location might hold. Sometime it may just be a dungeon with some loot in the end. Sometime it may hold a dragonwall which will allow you to get a new shout power. There’s usually at least one unexplored location around the corner and the completionist inside of me want to go explore everything.

Skyrim also improved on their melee combat from both Fallout and Oblivion. It is still not perfect but it is a major improvement. I love the kill cams and I love that they just released a patch updating it with more kill cams. Hits are also properly detected now unlike Oblivion where you were not sure swinging the sword did anything at all. However once you get a powerful enough weapon, most of the combat skills the game introduce become useless as swinging the sword would just do as well.

Speaking of getting powerful weapons and armors, Skyrim changes the way how enemies level up with you in Oblivion. In Skyrim, enemies have a set level so if you’re level 30, a level 10 enemy shouldn’t be a challenge. I finished the game at level 50 so I was pretty powerful already. I got the best weapons and armors early in the game as I improved my smithing skills. By the time I got the weapons and armors, I was pretty much unstoppable. I was hold the block button as an enemy attacked me for about 30 minutes to just increase my blocking skills. It is not to say that I want enemies to level up with me though. I hated that in Oblivion and I love that I am super powerful in this game but it would have been nice to get some challenge from an enemy once in a while. Sure they throw in some Ice Mages to try to kill you but they become nothing with some help from potions. This is probably one of the main reasons why I rushed it in the end of the game. I was just running through the dungeons without the need to worry about death. I would have liked some challenge but hopefully they can make up for that with DLC.

Some enemy variety would have helped also from becoming mundane later on. They were able to add variety to the places you explore so I don’t see why they couldn’t add a few different enemies. After killing thousand and thousand of the same enemies, I eventually just ignored them and ran past them. They can’t hurt me and I don’t want to kill them anymore. As I said before, hopefully the DLC will change that.

I have finished with Skyrim for now but I’m excited for DLC that will be coming later on this year. Bethesda promised that they will most likely be more expansion like DLC than they had done in the past so here’s hoping that they could add better enemies and more challenges.

Skyrim is a game that needs to be played by anyone who is even slightly considering about it. It is a remarkable game and a true testament to modern video games.

2012
03/31
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Mass Effect 3 Finished!

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I’ve been meaning to write this post as soon as I finished Mass Effect 3 but it seems really difficult when I finished it at 2 a.m. two days ago. Also being sick doesn’t really help motivate me to write my first blog. Anyways lets get down to the nitty-gritty of this game.

I wanted to get it out as soon as possible so here it is: Mass Effect 2 is a better game than Mass Effect 3. There are many reasons including the controversial ending this game had (will get to that later) that made me believe this is true. Mass Effect 3 was suppose to be the closure to a story of Shepherd and his team that we’ve been following and developing over the past 5-years. It was suppose to be an amazing end of a journey. What it turned out to be was a long chore helping out all the important species of the Galaxy. Not that helping out species in the Galaxy is boring but the way Mass Effect 3 handled it seems too ridiculous for what it is.

In this whole game, Shepherd is tasked with uniting the species of the Galaxy to form a universal army to take down the Reapers. In context it sounds like an amazing game. But the part where I’m uniting the galaxy seems too ridiculous. I know Shepherd is probably the most important living being in the Galaxy of the game but I can’t believe that he is able to solve all the problems the Galaxy had in less than a year. I say less than a year because the game does not tell how long Shepherd’s quest is but it is hard to believe that Earth is still alive from Reaper’s invasion after a year. Anyways, throughout the game Shepherd is solving all the problems like the Genophage of the Krogans, the war between the Geth and Quarian, the feud between Krogans and Turians, and even some Asari problems thrown in to the mix. I believe in the developer’s mind, most of these problems had to be solved. However I can’t see it as how everyone is asking for Shepherd to help them with their problems before helping him fight against the Reapers. Can’t they just wait until the Reapers are gone? If Shepherd can’t help them then does that mean that they won’t help Shepherd fight against the Reapers which means they are left out fighting the Reapers for themselves? Wouldn’t that mean they’re likely to be extinct with their problems still unsolved? Questions like these came up as I was playing the game and it really ruined my play time with the game.

Another thing I didn’t like was how useless and mechanical most of the decisions that were made in previous titles were for this game. They pretty much did the same thing as Mass Effect 2 where most of the decisions that I did for saving someone life is reflected by an email message. However, unlike Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3 holds a greater weight in using all the decisions that were done in previous games. Most importantly was who survived during the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2. The way they handled it in Mass Effect 3 feels very mechanical. I had all my squadmates survive the mission in Mass Effect 2 so I clearly saw how it didn’t really effect anything in Mass Effect 3. Whenever you meet them again in the game, they fell like they could be replace with any new character in the game. I even was told that certain scenes were replaced with some random character if that character died in Mass Effect 2. It’s understandable that BioWare had to handle it like this. If only 50% of gamers had all the squadmates alive then the other 50% would not see that part of the story if they had created specifically for all the gamers who had those squadmates alive. It makes sense but games like Witcher 2 had branching stories where gamers who picked certain decisions would not even see unless replayed. I wanted something like that but it seems BioWare had limited budget and time to do something like this.

As for the ending, I didn’t really mind it. It wasn’t a great ending by any means. I hate endings that has obvious choices for you to pick which ending you want to see. The ending basically comes down to Shepherd picking three buttons to choose what kind of ending the gamer wants. They may not look like buttons but they are buttons. The ending also left a lot of questions too which I don’t think will be answered with whatever Mass Effect games that will be coming out later on. I’m not even sure if they will include what the gamer chose as an ending for later games. It was a bad way for Bioware to handle an ending that should have been the Swan song for Shepherd.

So with all this talk, what about all the pros? There weren’t many this time around. The graphics looks better than previous games. I tend to look at all the amazing Lens Flares that BioWare had created for almost all light sources in the game. It really brought out the SciFi aspects of the game. I also really like the combat of this game. I felt like I was getting more powerful as I leveled up. By the end of the game I was charging through every enemy and pulling enemies every 1.5 second. It was an amazing feeling to be so powerful to take down 4 brutes in less than a minute. Other than these pros, I don’t think there were much improvements from the second game.

As I said before, Mass Effect 2 was a much better game than Mass Effect 3. But as a gamer who’ve been following the tale of Shepherd for 5 years, this game is necessary to play if you want to find out how the story of Shepherd ends. It may not be a great ending but it is necessary to complete. BioWare is creating a new ending for this game but I would finish the game before the new ending comes to see what BioWare visioned for the game. You may come out disappointed but it is still a game that is needed to be played.

2012
03/30
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