Game Review: RAGE (PC)

You know what, for games that have been out for a long time, I think I am just going to put out "Game Review" articles rather than the usual "Full Review."  I just find it easier to talk about how I played the game, what I liked about it than have a set form. . .although that sounds easier now that I think about it.  

Fuck it, game review it is!

The first time I booted up RAGE, I was unable to play it due to the game skipping every two or three seconds, which would make any game nigh on impossible to play.  Only after downloading an update for a number of my drivers was I able to play the game.  Prior playing though, I knew a bit of what I was getting myself into: a post apocalyptic FPS from the makers of Doom that included a driving element that received mixed reviews (the reviews that I read anyway).

Looking back at the game, there didn't really seem to be anything "breakthrough" about how the game played.  It was a basic FPS where you were supposed to kill anything when you weren't in a town and everything in the world was out to kill you.  There were a number of additions though to the standard FPS formula which included a few mini-games such as racing one of your three vehicles against computer controlled opponents and a game show where your kills earned you points resulting in monetary winnings.  The problem with the game-show portion was that you were required to use ammunition you bought and I often felt that the money I won from the show simply paid for the amount of ammunition I used.

There was a crafting system in the game that I used quite a bit and currently, that seems to be the "in" thing for adventure based video games.

There were hints of a larger story what with the Arcs (survival pod/structures designed to allow those inside to survive an near-extinction level event caused from the impact by the Apophis asteroid) that the Authority were trying to locate and who took on the roll of omnipresent antagonist who didn't really show up until the last quarter of the game.  The world however seemed to be a lot smaller and more canyon-like than I would have hoped for.  While you could travel between certain settlements and "dungeons," the paths were all very linear with not a whole lot of room for further exploration.  It was like being shown a map and told that you can only travel along the roads and the mountains are off limits.

Something that impressed me a bit was the enemy AI.  While a lot of their animations were programmed, they were still interesting to watch.  While hiding behind a crate, they would often peer over or around the box to get a better look at where you were then the would either lean out from behind the box and shoot at you, run to another source of cover, or just stick the gun out from cover and shoot in your general direction; or they might throw a grenade if they were written to have them equipped.  Even the different factions would have slightly different fighting styles.  The bandit group "The Ghosts" would often jump, roll and climb via monkey-bar-type bars around the stage while charging you making them more difficult to hit.

94.7% sure this is modeled after  Grand Central Station.

RAGE even managed to get around the disappearing bodies by having some of the enemies be mutants (due to crazy-radiation exposure I think) whose corpses would simply dissolve.  The downside to going up against mutants (who would only be in certain areas such as the game show and sewer/underground areas) was that they would never leave behind any loot.  They were fast little buggers too, but nothing a point blank shotgun blast to the face or a bladed boomerang couldn't fix.

So the driving element, I should talk about that before closing out.

Driving in RAGE is a semi-big part of the game as it allows you to get from one settlement/dungeon back to wherever your home base is.  The controls were pretty easy to get used to (WASD) and later vehicles (everything after the ATV here) had some sort of machine gun or rocket launcher.  There are a number of required driving story elements that while never too difficult (some races required repeat attempts), seemed a little bit out of place, but again, it was a nice element to see in an otherwise straight forward FPS.

The only other criticism I have with RAGE was that it seemed a bit short for the story they wanted to tell.  Okay, so ~30 hours may not seem like a short game, but I felt that the ending came rather abruptly and I was left hanging.  It was like finishing the last stage, being shown that you completed your objective. . .then what?  Was all right with the world?  I wanted to know more, or at the very least see a sequel that allowed for further exploration of the world.  Even with the Scorchers and Sewers DLC, I wanted more.

One aspect of the game that I did not explore was the online multiplayer.  It wasn't my sort of thing and I can only assume that one of the racing formats was included, the other being a deathmatch setup, possibly in the game-show arena setting.  I am just making conjectures here.

In the end, RAGE was definitely worth whatever I paid for it during a past Steam sale even without having played any of the multiplayer content because as you all know, that is just not my bag of Fritos.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Something With A Bit More Of A Beat

And they all lived happily ever after.  Right?

First Impressions: Dead Island Riptide (PC)

This has been a combination of my experiences playing the game so far.

Images like these:

Coupled with frequent noises like this:

The noise that I recorded is only at 80 dB whereas it can jump at random (as if this isn't random enough) to 120 dB.  This is what I have read from various sources online as I do not actually own a decibel meter. No I do not have one on my phone.

My last session lasted an hour so that I could get an idea how often the screeching static noise would last and how frequently it would grace me with its presence, so in an unscientific manner, here is what I recorded:

7:07 minutes of no noise

0:43 seconds of noise

3:12 no noise

2:29 minutes of noise

0:26 no noise

3:38 minutes of noise

1:44 no noise

6:29 minutes of noise

1:13 no noise

5:21 minutes of noise

0:35 no noise

2:27 minutes of noise

0:02 no noise

0:03 seconds of noise

12:59 (unknown as the volume was turned off).

Týr knows why, but I've presently put five hours into this game even with the sound effects volume in-game turned down to practically nil and even then, the sound (120 dB) will still poke it's ugly head out of my speakers.

Last week (as 0f when I wrote this back in December) I contacted tech support at Deep Silver relating my problem to them to see if they knew what was going on.  I was then prompted to run a diagnostic tool and email them the results so they could have a better idea as to the specs of my computer and what I was dealing with.  I felt perfectly fine doing this as I did something very similar when I applied for the Elder Scrolls Online Beta request.  Within 24 hours I received a straightforward reply which suggested that I update my drivers, which I hadn't realized that I hadn't updated in a while.  So I followed the supplied links and was able to download three of the five drivers.  The two sound card drivers I was not able to download/install  as they are integrated drivers and even knowing the manufacturer and name, I could not locate the correct driver to download.

So I went back to the game with bright polished up video drivers hoping against hope that my problems were fixed.  The game played fine for about eight minutes before the screeching wail of dying souls and banished ear drums returned to mock my computer and mine own ears.  I played for maybe another 15 minutes before ultimately giving up.

I do not know if I will be going back to Dead Island: Riptide anytime soon as it is the only game that seems to have a problem with my apparently lackluster sound card.  Even games that have come out more recently than April 2013 have operated fine without any sound issues.  Maybe after I acquire my next computer (do not know what that will be) I will come back and see if my experience improves.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

Whatever Impressions: Fallout (PC)

I say "Whatever" not because this game came out 17 years ago or because its graphics are dated, but because I have started various characters in Fallout, the first being about four years ago after Vorlynx bought the game for me while we were browsing around Best Buy (I have since forgotten our reason for being in Best Buy in the fist place though).  

Anyway, my first run through, I thought I had beaten the game when I acquired the computer chip required to fix the water filtration system and brought it back to Vault 13 before the 150 day time limit expired.  People who have played before know that this is not the way to win the game.  I then did something very stupid.  I found a gun that I did not really care for, only later realizing that said gun happened to be one of the rarest guns in the game and can only be found by a random encounter with an alien saucer.  That gun, I sold for a paltry sum, so I created a new character, intent on finding that gun again.

That was when I found out that the gun could only be found by random chance and was not a static item in the world.  Needless to say I became a bit discouraged having scrapped my first character and now finding out that the super awesomely powerful alien gun was simply random.  So I continued playing until I reached an underground military-type facility full of things that wanted to kill me that I could not escape.  I think it had to do with the Brotherhood of Steel.  So I had to start over.

My third character, I did a lot of similar actions and stories that I did with my first two characters, but this time I found a dog as a companion that fought along side me.  I went on a mission to oust a bandit that was raiding in the nearby area.  At some point during the umteenth time I tried taking out all the bandits, the dog was killed.  I of course did not realize this until after I had been successful in taking out all of the bandits.  I was seriously at a crossroads as to whether or not I should restart for the sake of my digital dog.  After some time to grieve, I decided that the death of the dog was a character building moment and went on with my life.  The last I saw of this character, I was in town that had some kind of rad-creature infestation in a warehouse area that I was trying to clear out so that I could potentially have better gear/weapons/money.

Then Conklederp and I moved up to Portland and I rediscovered Diablo II.  A few months later I poured a pint of Guinness on my computer.  I have not played or attempted to play Fallout since that dark time.  Until today (today being October 23rd as opposed to the 27th).

What I have noticed so far, and it is something that is leftover from the previous times I have played, is that I am constantly afraid that I am going to do something that will fuck up the story.  I am not referring to the 150 days I have to fix the water filter in the vault or the extension you can buy from the water supplier, although those deadlines do not help.  I am referring to the many stories and side quests that exist within this game.  I want to be successful.  I want to save the people in Vault 13.  I want to not have my dog (wherever it may be) die.  I want to explore the world and I want to build the best character I can without the help of a "Build the Best Fallout Character to Have the Most Fun or You Suck at Gaming" guide.  

Wasting time in Junktown, or finding a way to save the people back in Vault 13?

I just feel that I am doomed from the outset.  It probably has a lot to do with the time limit established at the beginning of the game, and even knowing that I can extend that time limit by an extra 100 days.  I honestly do not know what happens when Vault 13 runs out of water.  Does the game end the same way as if you were killed?  Do you just go on exploring the world knowing that everyone you grew up with has died from dehydration?  But I love this world.  I want to know what happens to the people in Vault 13 and all the other Vaults that I have yet to come across.  However, there is this constant nagging feeling that I am wasting time and that I have not done something correctly.  That is probably not the best feeling to have going into a game for the fourth time.

Yet on I play.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Like Pawns On A Distant Shore

Book Review: Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw

Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw is a book that I picked up through one of the Humble eBook Bundles. . . I may have already mentioned this before.  Oh yeah, that was last week.  But I actually finished Jam sometime around the middle of last month, hence why I am not including it among the Summer Book BINGO thing.

But let me give you some background first.  Unlike an apparent large portion of the population, I had never heard of Yahtzee Croshaw before picking this book up.  I know of The Escapist, but only because LoadingReadyRun runs Feed Dump through The Escapist as well as the early episodes of Extra Credits.  So he apparently does some stuff over there.  Some of the reviews I read over on Amazon criticized Mr. Croshaw about his bounding into books having previously only written articles.  And, if I had been paying attention, or at least retaining information that Dr. Potts has posted on a number of occasions, I would have remembered that Mr. Croshaw is also the creator of the Chzo Mythos games.  I of course knew none of this information so I came from the perspective of an apocalypse fiction aficionado.

For an apocalypse book, I enjoyed the semi-new direction that the story took in regards to the world ending.  Except it takes place in Australia, which is not the world, but it is a very refreshing setting for the end of the world when you consider every-other-story about the end of the world taking place in London, New York or Tokyo.

*~SPOILERS~*  sort of

The premise of Jam is that overnight, the city of Brisbane, Australia is covered in a carnivorous form of strawberry smelling jam-like substance.  The story follows Travis (the narrator), Tim (his flat-mate), Don (the upstairs neighbor), Angela (a neighbor), X a female intelligence agent and her partner Y.  Yes, the premise is a bit silly, but it was the characters reactions to the absurdity of the events that initially drew me into the book/story.

"The jam killed him," I said, finally getting the words out.  "He was eaten. By the jam."

"Ah.  Right." A pause. "Actually, no, not right. Back up.  What happened?"

I gave an account of the morning's events. Tim slowly nodded in bafflement after each significant word, drinking them all in one by one but not quite connecting them in his head.

Eventually, he ducked back inside his room and picked his dressing gown up off the floor. "I think you're going to have to show me," he said.

I think that the dialogue was the high point of the novel for me.  If people were to speak in the exact way that many stories are written, they would sound very controlled and stilted.

The biggest problem I had with the book was that I was occasionally unable to picture the layout of the city of Brisbane.  Now, I have no concept of what Brisbane looked like while reading the book, but now that I look at a map, certain events in the story make sense.  There is indeed a river that runs through the middle of what looks like a commercial district as opposed to a river that suddenly appeared in the story without previously being mentioned.  This information feels like it would have been somewhat necessary for someone not from Brisbane, but that could just be my America-centric view of all things communist and axis of evil-like.  I think that I just felt that, based off of Yahtzee's description of the city, I did not have a good idea as to who was where in relation to everything else.  It would be as if you were reading a book and had this image in your head then in the span of two to three sentences, you know had to input this new development.

My other critique of the book was the character of Don.  I understand his inclusion in the story, which was to act as the rest of the audience in this world of hungry jam; that was at least my impression of him.  Constantly questioning the rationalness of the situation is what a lot of people would do in that situation.  Don, however was also an antagonist to pretty much every character he came into contact with.  Frequent responses with negative sarcasm got old pretty quickly.  I feel that with that kind of a character needs to have some kind of arc to their development, but for the entire story, Don was the unhelping voice of negativity and it was tiring to see that his character was not going to change for the length of the story.  Now that I think about it, there was not a whole lot of character development throughout the course of the story, even if the book only last for about a weeks worth of time.

As a whole, I really enjoyed the premise and the new take on an apocalypse scenario that did not include zombies (although I am not yet tired of the zombie apocalypse), but, as previously mentioned, there could have been better descriptions as to the various locations in relation to each other as well as the general layout of the city.  Character development as a whole could have used a bit of work.  That is all I feel qualified to say about Jam.  Maybe the book is "better" for readers of Yahtzee's regular column, or maybe it is not (another critique that I had read on Amazon).  Either way, if you happen to be looking for a quirky apocalyptic story that does not take place in either England or the United States, then you could do a lot worse than by picking up Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw; now to find out what his Escapist personality is like.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Lend Me Your Ears And I'll Sing You A Song

Book Review: Extinction Point

Extinction Point by Paul Antony Jones is where we will spend this Tuesday (because of work getting the better of my time yesterday).  What initially drew me to this book was that I was browsing what books I could borrow on my Kindle (product review to be coming later) using the "Kindle Lending Library" (more on that with the product review).  I believe that I have mentioned before that I am somewhat of a sucker for the apocalypse genre and when I read in the description that ". . .every living thing on earth succumbs to a swift bloody death.  Yet Emily Baxter, a young newspaper is mysteriously spared - and now she's all alone" I knew that I was hooked into checking this book out.  I knew that there was going to be more to the story than that portion of description as "alone in a post-apocalyptic world" is something that I have already read and would be damn near impossible to top.

On with the show!

Extinction Point follows mid-20-something journalist Emily Baxter, formally from small town Denison, Iowa and is currently living in New York.  She lives in New York and works at the New York Tribune (a fictional modern day newspaper that is somewhat based off of the real New York Tribune by name and probably the New York Times by proximity).  Emily Baxter lives in an apartment on the 17th floor in New York.  In case you were not paying attention, this story takes place in and around, but mostly in, New York City in the great state of New York.  I honestly felt that I was beaten over the head with the obvious stick a lot during the first quarter of the book.  The reader is told about how "the smells of New York City washed over her" followed by a "page" later by "an offer from the New York Tribune. . ." and four "pages," you are reminded that "she could see the daily bustle of life in New York City continuing as it had for countless years."  I felt that I did not need to be reminded every few pages that the story was taking place in New York City.  Maybe this goes back to the "show don't tell" thing.  

Keeping with Captain Obvious, especially in the first chapter, I felt that the author was using extra words where the were not needed.  Extra words like ". . .pulled out her smartphone" (we can assume that being a reporter she has a smartphone and unless the author wanted to say which specific smartphone, the "smart" is not necessary; ". . .an astonishingly good BLT sandwich" (I think it is safe to say the majority of people reading this book will know that a BLT is a sandwich); ". . .wireless Internet signal" (since in the same sentence it is stated that Emily is using her computer, I feel like the reader knows that in order to use the internet she will use the cafe's internet and not ask for their ethernet cable); ". . .clicked on her email client" (the author could have just said "opened her email").  I realize I am probably being nitpicky, but all of this was just in the first chapter and I was initially sad that I might have checked out a book that was going be this overly descriptive about obvious places and actions.

As it turned out, the book was progressively written better, although I occasionally still felt that I was being reminded where the story was taking place.  It takes place in New York, in case you skipped to this paragraph before reading everything else above.  There were a number of times that the character of Emily Baxter did things that I thought were dumb/stupid/ill-thought-out, but after I decided that that was part of the character's personality and the way that she thought about how to approach being alone in a city the size of New York (He said it again!)  While I may decide that I would go to a sporting good store for food that I would take on a bike trek instead of going to Whole Foods or taking a crossbow instead of a shotgun, that's just me being different than this 20-something girl who grew up in Iowa.

My last criticism is a bit of a spoiler, so I will not go into too much detail aside from that I felt that some descriptions could have been lifted straight out of Dead Space.  No, the book and story do not take place in space or in the future and it does not include necromorphs. . .sort of.  Okay I lied, so necromorph-like creatures happen in the book.

The thing had eight spider-like legs; each leg was articulated by four bulbous joints that gave the creature a lopsided, almost limping gait.  The end of each leg was tipped by a scimitar-shaped claw, tempered to a point, and made the creature look as though it were standing on tiptoes.  The top of each leg attached to another bulbous extrusion much like a human shoulder joint, and that joint was in turn attached to a long corkscrew-shaped body.

Extinction Point (Jones, Paul Antony) Location 2571

You get the idea.

In the end, I finished the book in just over a week.  For what it is worth, Extinction Point is a good summer book.  I was not looking to be intellectually stimulated or have my mind blown by a mind blowing epiphany.  I was looking to be entertained, and once I got through the first couple of chapters, I was able to enjoy the book without being annoyed by the character.  I was annoyed occasionally by her choices in survival tactics, but I feel that just means that I am invested in the character.  Maybe?

So would I recommend Extinction Point by Paul Antony Jones?  Sure.  If you have a Kindle and with Amazon's Prime service you can check it out for free.  If you have a library card and it is available at your local library, you can check it out there too.  The eBook price is also quite attractive.  I do not know if I would pay full paperback/hardback price for the book though and if I did, then I might feel let down.  If you did enjoy this book, then you will be ecstatic to know that there are two sequels titled Extinction Point: Exodus and just published in April of this year, Extinction Point: Revelations.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
In The Silence Of The Darkness