DIABLO 3 IMPRESSIONS: ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION

Recently Diablo 3 came to consoles yet again in a bigger and badder way with the ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION, a version of the game that now includes the Reaper of Souls add-on that all us cool PC gamers have been playing for months. Now console gamers can enjoy the fifth and final act of the game’s single player storyline, as well as the madness of the Adventure Mode. Not only that, but those lucky sods with their PS4s and their XBones can rip and tear across Sanctuary as well.

Given that Sam and I have been playing Diablo 3 on the Xbox 360 with a copy rented from Redbox, we haven’t progressed far in the past year. There’s the occasional weekend that comes up when we decide to put our free time to the lazy art of sitting on the couch and mashing buttons, so we haven’t gotten to the point where we can reap (har har) the benefits of the ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION. Neither of us wanted to make a new character (sorry Crusader), and since the game was nice enough to detect the old save file, we’re still dawdling in the desert. For those of you without a frame of reference for where that means we’re at in the game, I’ll help clarify: Not. That. Close.

It was good to get some time in with the ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION, even though the game is identical to what we’ve been playing in months past given our progress in the game. We didn’t reach the end of Act IV to lift up our arms and cry for just one more act. Everything is exactly as it was in the past: we’re still a barbarian and a wizard desperately trying to avoid getting eaten by the minions of hell.

The controls are the same, especially that nifty console-only feature of rolling to evade incoming blasts of eldritch energy that the PC players should be totes jelly of. Menus are still navigated with the weird radial that remains far inferior to the menus navigated via the mouse on the PC, but that doesn’t render the game unplayable. The ULTIMATE EVIL EDITION provides more of the entertainment that Sam and I enjoy together when our weekends overlap, and doesn’t do much more than that except extend the shelf life of its content.

It’s still good fun, so now we ask ourselves: Do we go ahead and save our money for a copy of our own so we longer have to depend on its availability at the local Redbox? Now looms the prospect of finally upgrading to the newest generation of console babies, which means the possibility of losing our progress, especially when it’s the PS4 I’m eyeing and not the Xbox One (sorry Microsoft). Whether or not this will actually happen is still up in the air as the “how” is a puzzle unto itself, but if/when it happens, the adventures of Hogoth the Barbarian and Demena the Wizard will end abruptly. Or just get rebooted if we’re feeling nostalgic.

Late to the Party: Far Cry 3

I’ve been stumbling through Far Cry 3 for the past month or so after picking it up off the ground during a robbery masquerading as a Steam summer sale. First-person shooters have become less my thing recently, so I thought a game in which you don’t just run and gun might make for a comfortable change of pace.

I was incorrect.

Let me be clear: Far Cry 3 is not a bad game. The voice acting’s sprinkled with a liberal dash of meh, but the gunplay is entertaining and the experience system adds a reasonable amount of RPG number crunching to distract you from the fact that your main objective is force-feeding bullets to red-shirted men with strange accents. Good old family-friendly fun.

There are, however, two tiers of leveling. The first tier is that familiar sort of progress in which you do cool things and you get points for it, and then you spend those points to do even cooler things. Simple, elegant, and hard to beat.

The second tier, on the other hand, really wants to emphasize the fact that you’re on a tropical island trying to survive. You don’t have to manage hunger or thirst or any of that finicky crap, but you do have to hunt and skin animals if you want to carry more than one gun, a handful of loot, and $1000. It’s gross, and it’s also hella boring. Hunting in Far Cry 3 is the sort of activity you’d expect in an MMO like World of Warcraft. You go up to the friendly looking gnome and he tells you that, “Hey, guy, I need, like, five wolf pelts. I’d get them myself but I have to stand here and tell some other dope my sob story. Do this for me and get Generic Item of the Mundane.” Since nothing’s ever easy, you have to do it because for whatever stupid reason, you need that item.

Far Cry 3 falls into that very trap, but without the pseudo-social environment of World of Warcraft. You’re not playing Far Cry 3 with anybody—shut up, I know there’s a cooperative option—you’re doing this solo. Man versus the Wilderness. And somehow, it’s really boring. “Killing wild pigs to make a bigger wallet” was a design choice that an actual person came up with and said, “Players will love it.” Or maybe they just said, “Players will tolerate it.” Because it’s this same process that allows you to carry more than one gun.

I spent more time killing goats to make a bigger rucksack just to carry all the junk I pick up than I have fighting pirates which is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of this game. The amount of goats killed would flag my character as a Satanist. Lo and behold, I’ve had to upgrade it a second time within a half hour. And guess what? Now it’s nearly filled to the brim with old syringes, multicolored leaves, single playing cards, and other bits of useless trash that somehow take up an equal amount of volume in my rucksack made of dingoes.

All I ask is for an easy way. The major theme of the game’s “plot” is the walking the path of the warrior, so I get that the game is supposed to be an arduous climb. But why must the fun play second fiddle to the grind? Why can’t I just pay for a new backpack with $500 in blood-soaked cash from my handmade pig wallet? Real RPGs let me do that. 

Believing in Destiny: Exploring Bungie's Strange New World

Master Chief could have always used a cape.

Destiny is the far future incarnation of our world, evolving with the intervention of alien technology. The old world is wasteland: you find rebirth in Old Russia, where rusted cars litter the landscape and wildlife slowly retakes the buildings that stand on it. A floating orb calls itself your “ghost” and directs you to safety. You have no idea what’s happening, but you’re not supposed to. You’ve been dead for a while.

The premise is hardly new territory. Hell, at times it feels like its older brother Halo. Waves of alien troops descend upon you from spaceships, shouting their strange guttural language. You are one of the select super soldiers tasked with protecting humanity. Only there are a great deal more of you, and you’re supposed to work together.

Here we have the similar gameplay as the Borderlands series, where you go out to explore and shoot the threatening wilds. Each successful hit puts up a number to let you know how much damage you’re dealing, and there’s satisfaction in making those numbers bigger with a headshot. You level up your character through frequent firefights punctuated with minibosses. These early missions don’t provide much variety beyond go to this point and interact with something or go to multiple points and interact with more things, though that might change as the game progresses. Progress seems to move more swiftly in some aspects, however, as you’re not tied to a town hub just to get rid of gear. Within the inventory menu, pressing a button breaks down a given item into “glimmer,” the game’s currency.

My experience has been pleasurable. I don’t stop every few seconds to think how Borderlands might have done something better, so some of those comparisons may be unfair. The controls feel tight and intuitive. Crouching while sprinting makes you slide across the ground, giving you an illusion of security as you scramble for cover. Access to iron sights offers varying levels of shot precision and control. Like the game’s story, a lot of this is nothing new, but it’s virgin territory for Bungie.

Even on the PS3, Destiny is a pretty game. Perhaps it’s simply the size of my TV, but I still like the way the game works. Compared to its predecessor Halo, the colors are earthier but still colorful. Blue lights shine everywhere like K-mart was responsible for the fall of civilization, but it’s not a silly aesthetic. The armor of certain characters appear to have some pseudo-fantasy feel to them, with fur collars and the like. It’s different enough from the gamut of sci-fi shooters to give the world its own unique flavor.

The game won’t be able to avoid Borderlands comparisons, which is a shame. Destiny does a lot that Borderlands and other shooters already did, except that it attempts to do it in a larger massively multiplayer scale. To what end this scale shall manifest is still unknown to me. Missions I’ve played are limited to three players, and though the game makes matches with other players working on the same level, it seems all too random. Whether it succeeds at its MMO-like aspirations has yet to be seen, however, since we’re still in beta. It’s clear they want this to be a social game, not quite like Halo and its matchmaking, but on that grander scale. As of right now, it doesn’t offer that sense of wonder that inspires and encourages exploration that so many MMORPGs offer, but then again that may change. Until then, I’ll continue to struggle with the game’s mechanical identity.  

Reluctant Hero, or Avoiding the Main Storyline of Skyrim

For a game that came out over two years ago, I'm still a big fan of Skyrim. The free-form classless leveling system opened the boundaries for more freedom in an already liberated game in which you were not bound by levels bookended by cinematics. It was up to you to craft the story of the Dragonborn--Bethesda just gave you the set pieces to do it.

The sad truth is that Skyrim's story isn't as compelling as it could be. One could argue it's due to narrative limitations imposed by the sandbox nature of The Elder Scrolls series, but I don't believe Skyrim was built with story in mind. Skyrim is in itself a viking-inspired playground with glory to be had and foes to be driven forth. The main quest is just a guideline, and an underwhelming one at that. But the hundreds of hours I sank into Oblivion, Skyrim's older brother, didn't give me high hopes for its successor's main quest. It's a reservoir of fantasy trope runoff, siphoning whatever might be popular. A lot of it is regurgitation, but the player's actions don't have to follow suit.

My first character was a Redguard that I lazily named "Prisoner" with a long terrorist beard and a great bundled mane of dreadlocks. For nearly ten levels, I disregarded improving his hit points and focused solely on improving his stamina. Near the end of his tale, he could sprint great distances, wielding two delicately crafted one-handed axes. Dragons would fall before him with only three spin attacks from his axes. Prisoner thirsted for blood and cared not how he got it. He fought alongside the Stormcloaks despite their xenophobic platform to whet his appetite for carnage. To put it simply, Prisoner was a psychopath and he will forever be remembered in the canon of The Elder Scrolls as the one who slew Alduin the World Eater.

At that point, the narrative is out of my hands. Yes, I killed the World Eater but only because the objective sat at the top of my quest journal. Is that why Prisoner did it? No, he did it to explore a monster's insides. Threat to mortals or not, Alduin's death by Prisoner's hands was by no means a noble deed. But Skyrim the game doesn't care. I had to be a big damn hero and save the world.

Not this time. In the upteenth I've started a new character, I've decided to reclaim my ownership of Skyrim's narrative. It will not be hijacked by the game's prescripted main plot. I will avoid the main quest like the fantasy equivalent of the plague. Right after I escape the raging dragon in Skyrim's opening, I'll head to Riverwood and collect whatever supplies I'm offered. But I will not head to Whiterun. I will not inform Jarl Balgruuf the Greater that his town may be threatened by the return of winged horrors with scales. I will not shout as dragons do, regardless if I am the Dragonborn.

There is no achievement built into the game or Steam for this. By avoiding the main quest and the path of the Dragonborn, I forfeit any true conclusion to the game. Alduin, the almighty butthole of a dragon set to gobble up the world, will not taste my blade because I will ignore the call for as long as mechanically possible. This may prove more challenging because, though the game is designed in such a way that my enemies increase in level as I do, it is also designed to balance with the player's ability to use dragon shouts. But I will not use them.

In doing this, I seek to change the ultimate narrative of Skyrim. For all intents and purposes, if my character is the fabled "Dragonborn," he will not know about it. Though the name my escape the lips of those I meet, my character will not know. This is, after all, the purpose of the open-world game: strip of the player of a linear path. Not only allow for diversion but mandate it. It is not destination but the journey. And if I need a destination, the Ebony Warrior shall serve as a final boss. His defeat will not affect the game's main quest. It is only at level 80 that my character my encounter him, and as that is the level cap it is fitting that I should fight him last.

Considering the fact that the highest level any of my characters are at is 56, I'd say it's going to take time.

Rated M for Mature: Wolfenstein's Strange but Satisfying Tone

Dat typeface.

Wolfenstein: The New Order came out to "generally favorable reviews" this past week, exceeding the expectations set forth by the series' 2009 bland iteration in Wolfenstein. Admittedly, Bethesda put out one hell of a marketing campaign for it, featuring a revised version of history where--spoiler alert!--the Nazis won World War II and the world comprised of public player executions on soccer fields and Nazified versions of '50s and '60s pop songs. Even from the trailers, the writing looked impressive, so it was hard for me not to be excited. Just a little excited.

So I marathoned it on my days off. I jumped into the combat boots of William "B.J." Blazkowicz, hero of the games since 1992's Wolfenstein 3D. We storm the castle of high-ranking Nazi butthole Deathshead, aiming to riddle him and his legions of jackboots full of Allied lead. But, of course, things go south quickly. Planes come down, men get killed, and we survivors get captured by Deathshead himself. Soon we are posed with a choice that changes the game significantly enough that it creates two separate timelines: do you choose to kill the wet-behind-the-ears rookie or the battle-hardened veteran? Deathshead leaves the decision up to you.

It seems like only yesterday that I was playing BioShock Infinite, a game peppered with significant choices that it almost feels less like a shooter and more like a role playing game. Then you start blasting dudes and it feels like a shooter again. Given BioShock Infinite's origins, playing with player choice is not only expected, but almost required. It's not a BioShock game if the idea of player agency isn't toyed with. Wolfenstein, however, is certainly also a series about choice but with more immediate consequences, such as which gun to maim which Nazi.

But it's more than that this time around. Picking between my two comrades, I can't decide who to let die. As a player, I've had about an hour by this point to get to know these characters. The rookie pleads for his life. The veteran resigns to death. The Nazi tells me that if I don't pick one of them, we'll all just die. I pick the rookie. He pleads, asks if I'll get him out of there. The game fades out.

I feel immediate pangs of remorse right after I make the timeline altering choice. My conscience sings in cliches: the rookie had so much to live for, the veteran knew what he signed up for. I answered back with cold logic: the veteran was experienced and necessary to the mission. But the mission is a failure, we attempt to escape, and Blazkowicz ends up in a head injury and a vegetative state for fourteen years. Such is Wolfenstein.

The game is unrelenting in its depiction of a Nazi-controlled Europe. Most World War II shooters don't show the full extent of Nazi persecution. In a given Medal of Honor game, it was almost as if the only crime the Nazis committed was not having enough bullets in them. Developers depended on the history books to give you the explanation why the Nazis are the bad guys here. But Wolfenstein: The New Order is a post-World War II game. I don't only mean the setting of the game, but also the fact that it comes in after an era where much more of the shooter market was comprised of World War II games where the big objective was to thin Nazi ranks. The objective remains, but the narrative seems more daring this time around. We go to a labor camp in the game, evoking depictions of concentration camps in film and TV. Blazkowicz gets a numbered tattoo, echoing the very thing that so many came out of the war with on their arms.

While the thought of depicting a concentration camp in a video game can appear to trivialize the war, the game sets its stance on war early on: it's bad. Blazkowicz and the player bear witness to some awful scenes, often when they have no choice but to watch. Throughout the game, Blazkowicz whispers to himself in a way that sounds like a broken man, damaged by things he's seen. The player must see these things. Such things can't be whitewashed, or they almost assuredly trivialize this war.

But a video game can't run on such harrowing content alone. Given the almost B-movie backdrop of the game, Wolfenstein could run dangerously close to undiluted melodrama and undercut any weight the game might carry in its more serious moments. We've got to have the moments of humor because, let's face it, we're playing a game where a good portion of the enemies are giant robots whose scanning sounds like a guitar lick from a garage rock outfit. Wolfenstein can take itself seriously at times for some very human moments that we rarely get in video games. But in those other times, if it takes the player to a Nazi moon base, it's okay if a character says, "I'm on the motherf***ing moon."

Titanfall: Did it Fall Too Late?

Titanfall comes out this week and if you haven't heard, it's a real treat. What I mean to say is, I hope it changes the scope of the first person shooter today substantially. In an industry inundated with military shooters such as the bombastic and cinematic Call of Duty series or simulation-heavy ARMA games, we're trapped in this limbo between the worlds of realism and entertainment. The guns in Call of Duty all have real life counterparts, and if you speak to a teenager who puts in most of his time on the game's online multiplayer, he might start talking like a damn gunsmith. 

Thankfully, Titanfall dodges that bullet with a backflip. Based on what I played of the beta, it's damn enjoyable. It's fast-paced and Respawn Entertainment changes the formula of the military shooter significantly by adding a z-axis. Each player is deployed with a jetpack. Not a new development, you may say. True. And while it doesn't allow for Tribes-scale jump distances, it does give the player enough mobility to run along walls and climb up the tops of buildings and giant robots--

It took me too long to talk about the giant robots. The titular titans are the giant robots to which I refer. Giant robots that you can jump onto and jump into, shooting up grunts and bipedal drones and other giant robots. This is a game that I've wanted ever since I first saw Gundam Wing when I was a kid but never quite got. Sure, there was the Dreamcast game Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes, which I rented along with a Dreamcast numerous times from my local video store. But I could never drop out of my mobile suit and tread the ground on foot. Though why would you want to when you've got five-story robots stomping around and being generally loud?

It's a formula I'd like to believe the games industry has been meditating on for a while but not quite sure how to get it right. The obvious problem is that giant robots could easily overcome foot soldiers because, oh I dunno, they're giant robots. But Titanfall might've gotten it right. The robots aren't too giant--they're bigger than a person but they're only as tall as a two-story building. And while their weaponry is designed to give squishy humans and steel-plated robots equally bad days, they're susceptible to a sneaky enemy pilot jumping on the back and shooting inner components because that feels right. 

So where has this game been? Why are we just now getting it? Did we have to suffer through a plague of generic military shooters before we got the one that might deliver us from boredom? Now I admit, Call of Duty is an easy target. You don't put a game out every year in the same franchise and proclaim to reinvent the shooty wheel. And it would be remiss to ignore the Call of Duty DNA built into Titanfall: unlockable attachments, competitive team-based multiplayer, nearly identical controls. It should all make sense--they're both birthed from the same parents. 

But this kid's got something different. Something promising. It's like the gene pool is evolving. Why keep our players glued to the ground? Why force them to use the stairs when it comes to getting to the top floor? I want to believe this is the start of something beautiful. I don't have to have another game with giant robots (though I'll certainly take one). But the freedom of movement available to players in Titanfall should be a sign of something. 

We've been moving towards this. Slowly, but surely. Mirror's Edge introduced parkour sensibilities to the first-person perspective. Unfortunately, parkour alone does not a game make. And even then, the controls still felt clunky. You can't have clunk when you're trying to move like David Belle. Respawn recognized that and built on that with controls that were at one time just meant to just run and shoot. But now they mantle over rooftops and run across walls like you took the red pill. 

If only everybody in the industry could take that same pill. 

Late to the Party: Finishing Mass Effect 3

2007 was a good year. I graduated high school, started college, and received what I still believe to be one of the greatest RPGs put out in recent years: Mass Effect. The premise was simple: you were a space marine chosen as the first human Spectre—elite agent of the galactic Citadel Council. Mass Effect had a fully fleshed out world that could give the Star Wars Extended Universe a run for its credits. Unique alien races with developed cultures and histories and a bounty of planets to explore. Yes, the exploration could be tedious and even frustrating in standard definition, and though it wanted to be a third-person shooter, the combat mechanics made the firefights clunky. But I loved it and regardless of the “improvements” that the sequels made to the mechanics, the inaugural game remains my favorite in the series.

I looked forward to carrying Jim Shepard—my Shepard—over to Mass Effect 2. I didn’t expect any heavy decisions from Mass Effect to interfere with my Mass Effect 2. Some familiar faces returned, and those faces that didn’t were missed. The endgame was suitably epic with its “suicide mission,” despite the narrative’s insistence on reminding me that this was a SUICIDE MISSION (caps lock necessary). But regardless, I lost some characters I wasn’t attached to, saved those I was attached to, and wondered what the big bad Reapers had left to throw my way so I could take it out in typical American Earthling fashion.

Unfortunately, the canon of Jim Shepard ends there.

I played through the first two Mass Effect games on the Xbox 360. I played through 3 on the PC. To put it succinctly, the combination of price and poor reception for the ending barred me from buying it immediately, and the superior performance of the game on PC only complicated my decision further. My excitement stayed strong long enough for me to play the demo upon its release. The gameplay felt identical to Mass Effect 2, which was expected, but the glaring issue of characters having undergone some sort of brainwashing that changed them entirely. Urdnot Wrex (who died in my first playthrough of Mass Effect) was best-buds-chummy with Shepard, a far cry from his respectful-but-still-gruff demeanor in Mass Effect 2. Already, Mass Effect 3 was shaping up to be a bizarre continuation of a beloved series for me.

Finally, I gave in when the game was cheap enough on PC. Already, a friend of mine was playing it and another avenue for gaming and socializing was enticing. Unfortunately, there was no easy way of moving my save file from my Xbox 360 to my PC, so Jim would have to be remade from scratch. I began with character creation, trying to be as close to Jim Shepard as I was before. I thought I’d get some options to craft the backstory as I had at the beginning of Mass Effect 2 when I tried to start a new game. No such luck. So far, my Shepard was my Shepard in name only.

Even without the issues stemming from this not being my Shepard, inconsistencies in both gameplay and narrative manifested quickly: no sign of or reference to Urdnot Wrex, who was alive as far as I knew from my last playthrough. Instead, he has been replaced by his brother who sounds and acts like Wrex 1.0 than Demo Wrex. My conversation options seemed more limited in that opportunities to choose what Shepard was going to say were infrequent compared to previous games. Bioware did a lot to make the game accessible to not only newcomers to the Mass Effect series, but to role playing games in general. Starting a new game in Mass Effect 3 is not just creating a new character. It’s tailoring the whole game experience. Decide you don’t like fighting but you like some story? They’ll dial back the combat for you. Find story a buzzkill? We’ll minimize the cutscenes and let you maim ‘til your heart’s content. All of this would be admirable had they done this in the beginning.

I’ve spoken to some who’ve come to Bioware’s defense. Yes, it expands the audience. But someone who plays Mass Effect 3 as their first exposure to the series is not going to be happy when they go back to game one. Why can’t I dive sideways? Why does my gun keep overheating? Where’s the reload button? Why won’t Shepard stay in cover? There was a different mindset behind Mass Effect than its sequels. Maybe it was EA’s evil influence or just an overzealous move to improve the original’s weaker mechanics. What is inarguable is that Mass Effect is the weird grandpa whose worldview seems backwards to its son and grandson, Mass Effect 2 and 3. But I was there with the weird grandpa from the beginning. I understand his worldview. 2 and 3 need to get the hell off my lawn.

Why Assassin's Creed is Dumb (Spoilers if You Actually Care About That Sort of Thing)

What's with the Jolly--ooo I see what they did.

I'll fess up now: I've only played the first Assassin's Creed game in its entirety, the one where you're the American-sounding Arabian assassin with a baller hood and parkour moves to boot. It was okay. It took me a while, but only because I got bored with it. It's not a terrible game, and indeed the gameplay was good enough that they recycled it with a little bit extra for four more games with a fifth one coming soon. I just found the story dull, the gameplay repetitive, and HOLY GOD IS ALTAIR A TERRIBLE PROTAGONIST.

As is his descendant, who you also play as in all of the games. I dreaded the intervals where you're cooped up in a sterile-looking penthouse between pseudo-time-traveling. You have two things you can do: move your character and press a button. Any button. They'll all do the same thing, assuming you've encountered something you can interact with like strange writings or a person. Most of those intermissions are spent conversing with that lady from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and all of those sequences are boring. Yes, they serve to further the plot. But never mind is the plot silly and convoluted for the sake of being convoluted.

In these games, you either play as Desmond, just some modern day dude who gets caught up in a secret war between the Assassins and the Templars. Oddly enough, the Assassins are the "good" guys, but that's just because between them and the Temples Templars, they're the less dickish. The Temptations Templars want to rule the world because that's a convenient motive for bad dudes. But you don't just play as Desmond, you also play as one of his several ancestors who--get this--were all Assassins. Crazy, no? And the way the game explains is that you're tapping into Desmond's genetic memories to, uh, learn stuff. I guess. It was to find a relic in the first game, I think it's to learn how to become an Assassin in the third game. Don't ask me about the rest. The third one wasn't too clear either.

Of the games I've played, Desmond seems to be progressively groomed to be the savior of humanity from the Temps and their diabolical designs. The second game's intro gives Desmond a little bit more to do, like beat up some innocent security guards hired on by the Evil Templar Organization because somebody wants a little taste of freedom. Desmond gets to do more than just talk to Sarah Marshall; he gets to punch some guys.

Already, it's a step up from the first game's modern day interludes, but it's still not great. Desmond is still uninteresting and clueless (granted, it picks up right at the end of the first game), and despite being voiced by everybody's favorite voice actor Nolan North, he has the charisma of a fake potted plant. The long-ass introduction with Desmond from the beginning of Assassin's Creed III doesn't help things, although given my ignorance of the end of AC II and the everything of AC Brotherhood and AC Revelations, I missed where the weird got turned up.

Yup. Weirder than genetic memory.

But in the process, they also picked up a new cast member, everybody's favorite interdimensional godlike manchild from Star Trek: The Next Generation, John De Lancie.

Q, now with 100% more goatee.

But he doesn't have his mystical Q powers in this as far as I can tell, and he's only there to be the hard-to-impress dad to Desmond's angst-ridden son. Again, I missed some things so maybe the father-son dynamic is more worthy of my emotional investment than I'm giving it credit. But then again, this game is from the same makers as Assassin's Creed with Most Boring Video Game Protagonist of 2007, Altair. 

So good of an Assassin he doesn't have a face.

So we have a fourth game coming up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (pictured at the top). As you can probably tell, it's about pirates, which sounds promising. But so did III with its Revolutionary War backdrop, until it killed the entire series for me. As I mentioned before, you play as at least two different characters in these games, Desmond, and some random descendant. Desmond's plotline serves as a pointless frame in which, honestly, if ditched could improve the games ten fold. An argument could be made that the cuts to modern day from the first Assassin's Creed were to help the pacing and give players respite from the action. Except there isn't much action. The parkour movement gets stale after you realize that all you're doing is holding a button down with an additional button if you want to move faster. The missions are identical: kill this bad dude and escape the guards. The extras are all scavenger hunts that aren't remotely interesting because, get this, to do find stuff you have to hold a button down for an extended amount of time. It's a boring sandwich with slightly less boring meat (or vegetables if you're awful). 

In III, you again play as Desmond and, get this, some rad English Assassin named Haytham who's gotta take some targets out in the Colonies. And he's pretty alright. It might be the accent, but he's already a load better than Altair and an improvement over the rich boy Assassin of AC II. He's interesting. He's got a three-corner hat. He hooks up with a Native American lady. He turns out to be a Templar. Damn, didn't see that one coming. And I don't mean that in the good way. If there's anything I learned from my college creative writing classes (except that I don't like a lot of creative writing students), it's that you can't be coy with your readers, and Ubisoft, the first few hours of your game is a hot mess of coy sauce. It's at that point that you start playing as his European-Mohawk offspring, Connor. And it's at that point I stopped.

Nothing against playing as that character (except that he's a kid and one of your training missions is a game of hide and seek), but it's then when everything takes a dive. One of the characters you associated with as Haytham is a premium buttpipe, but only after you encounter him as Connor. Maybe the last few years corrupted him, but it's still a stark contrast to what we saw of him pre-Connor. 

I felt burned. Duped. Like I'd been played with a plot line sleight of hand that had picked my precious time from my back pocket. The game's dull framing narrative was bad enough, but then they took away a protagonist I actually enjoyed playing as. Maybe Connor would grow on me if I kept playing, but I don't have it in me to give the game another chance. Assassin's Creed IV comes out near the end of October. It's got pirates, and from what I've read Desmond is dead at the end of III so that's a vast improvement. 

I'm looking forward to not finishing it.

Couch Crawl

After deciding that the game would be acceptable, I rented Diablo III for Xbox 360 to play with Sam. In the demo we tried beforehand, I had started a barbarian character with the name "Hogar," the default suggestion. Sam went with a wizard named "demena," a name of her own design. It took no time for her to get acquainted with the game's controls as, when you start out, you have the control stick to move your character, the A button to perform your basic attack, and the Left Bumper to quaff a healing potion. We started out right away smashing up zombies with my axe and her magic shooty spells.

The only concern she raised was her character's starting garb, which was very little. I joked that part of the game was finding more clothes as you loot for more and better armor, but it still bothered her. When you're not a 14-year-old boy anymore, the fantasy trope of scantily-clad warrior women loses its sex appeal and feels more like sexless nerd pandering. It bothered her for different reasons, ones I could understand but not fully given my male experience. I wondered about Sam's choice of character name: "demena," nearly a homonym of "demeaning" depending on how you pronounced it. Was it intentional?

We played the demo for a significant amount of time, longer than she's been able to sit through Bioshock Infinite due to motion sickness. It helps that Diablo III fixed camera perspective doesn't pan or spin quickly to induce dizziness. We played long enough to level up to level 6, her at a slightly faster rate than me. I'm not sure if it was some piece of equipment giving her an experience point boost, but her character would shout an epiphany to signal leveling up sooner than my dim-witted barbarian would. I discovered that, unlike the PC version, the 360 version did not alert you to new abilities when you gained a level. Instead, a new button-mapping would appear at the bottom of the screen, not informing you what abilities were attached to which buttons. On one hand, I like the idea of having to experiment with different buttons to see what mystic explosions emanate from the wizard's wand. [There has to be a better way to say that. -Ed.] But for a newbie like my girlfriend, it doesn't help when they only window that pops up with instruction is at the beginning of the game, telling you, "Push A to hit shit."

When I told Sam about this, the dynamic of the game slowly began to shift. We started to wordlessly strategize. She'd keep her wizard a decent distance away from the action, blasting with arcane energy or icing baddies with a freeze ray. My barbarian would stay in the thick of it, cracking skulls and stunning my enemies with hearty ground pound. This strategy mostly worked until we got further into the game when the minions seemed to multiply ten fold.

Demena died a few more times than Hogar did, but given that this is a video game death has no permanence. I'm not positive what the consequences of death are in the Xbox 360 version of Diablo III. I had thought it was an experience point penalty, but if that's the case Sam must've been raking in hella experience while I bashed frozen zombies. Demena's mortality was no fault of Sam's, however. She being a wiz guarantees some degree of character squishiness, to borrow a term from the pencil and paper side of role-playing. 

We made it a great deal further than I had in my first outing into Sanctuary on the PC with my monk Severian. We met a scoundrel whom Demena talked to a great deal more than any other character (except for the cowardly mayor who wouldn't move his cart out of our way). We fought goatmen in the Festering Woods. We saved a burning town from witch-worshiping zealots. We turned criminal brigands into charred skeletons. And all from the comfort of an aged futon.

Sojourning Skyrim Again, or a Confession

Skyrim is nearly two years old, and the fun returns on the game have diminished little. After my Hard Drive Crisis of '13, I lost some of my save games--specifically my original character--but thanks to the Steam Cloud service, I retained the rest, specifically a female dark elf named Elaris. Burning stuff her thing. Burning it with * M A G I C *

I put about six hours into her game long before I got a new hard drive. By that point, I had returned to my original character, the defaultly named Prisoner whose Redguard background in one-handed weapons fueled his bloodlust. I had started Skyrim's expansion Dawnguard and joined a band of zealous vampire slayers to, uh, quite literally guard the dawn. My interests shifted back to The Witcher 2, so it was a long while before I traversed the cold mountain and Skyrim, home to Nords and giants alike.

I reinstalled Skyrim last week and saw only Elaris--no Prisoner--remained. I did not click on her save, instead I hopped into a new game. the long familiar intro of my character wheeled up to a small village in a prison wagon was still the same chore to sit through, but finally I was called up for execution, which meant I was called up for character creation. It's a curious thing that one's character should be birthed only a moment before they rest their neck on a chopping block. Leave it to those clever bastards at Bethesda.

Skyrim is a game of sandboxy freedom, and character creation is an extension of that. Want to be human? You've got four choices. Elf? Choose from a few different pointy-eared dudes. Cat-man? Sure. Lizard-lady? Fine. Dwarf? Go screw yourself.

Skyrim is part of a long series of games with an established lore that while they threw fifty different variations of fantasy tropes en masse towards your face, they wrote out the single best demi-human race the genre has even known: dwarves. Sure, dwarves are referred to and you can explore their steampunk ruins. But they're not Tolkien's brand of bearded badass. Oh no, they're just an extinct society of elves. There's a reason why The Hobbit focuses on a band of dwarves and not elves. Because elves suck.

And I don't mean this from an "elves are gay" position, because that's just an insult to the LGBT community. When it comes down to it, I cannot separate the word "elf" from its Christmas connotations. I've been immersed in fantasy long enough that I know full well that Tolkien was not referring to Santa's Little Helpers. I don't have this same issue with dwarves and Snow White because they mostly perform the same function. When they belt out "Hi-ho, it's off to work we go," you better believe they got some mining to do for gems and ore and stuff. Sure, we don't see them tear it up with ale and battle axes, but that's because Disney's a family company and they can't show that Sleepy's just in a perpetual drunken stupor.

So what do I go with in Skyrim? Khajiit, or anthropomorphic gypsy cat. Why? Because they're naturally stealthy, got claws they can use as weapons, and I DON'T LIKE ELVES

A Tale of Two Diablo IIIs, or Prelude to Couch Crawl

June 2012 saw the release of the long awaited sequel to Blizzard's action RPG franchise, Diablo III. The months leading up to its release were filled with excitement and anxiety as rabid fans salivated over the return to Diablo's dark fantasy world of Sanctuary but also dreaded its lack of gothic darkness. When it finally came out, the game was a polished product for sure, but Diablo's mechanics felt gutted. Some found it difficult to call it an RPG as character customization had now been limited to what breastplate your character was wearing. To some it was a failure, but to most critics it was a decent release, garnering an 88 on Metacritic.

Since its release, the auction house has come and gone and many who missed the previous iterations' depth of character progression had left to try alternatives like Torchlight II and Path of Exile. But in September 2013, we saw the release of Diablo III again, but this time for consoles. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 users could now enjoy the hack and slash loot farming from their couches as opposed to leaning into a computer screen. Reviews for the console versions strayed not far from their PC counterpart with both versions getting an 86 on Metacritic.

This is not Diablo's first foray into the living room. The original crawled its way to PlayStation in 1998, only a couple years after its PC release. Gamespot gave Diablo for PSX an 8.1, praising it as a mostly successful translation of Diablo's addicting hybrid gameplay with a few animation hiccups. All in all, a formula for success. So it's no surprise that Diablo III saw the LCD light of flat screen televisions.

I bought Diablo III shortly after its PC release in 2012 and played it for about a week. Leading up to it, I had been playing Torchlight, which borrows heavily from the first two Diablo games (no doubt because of Torchlight's development team containing Diablo developers) and adds some unique mechanics like a pet to send all of your extra loot back to town for selling. A worthy successor for sure. Yes, it was cartoony to the point of bordering on juvenile, but the mechanics were something to write home about.

Diablo III lasted about a week for me. The story was middling at best--though who plays Diablo for the story? And while the dark aesthetic was preferable to Torchlight's, environments began to feel stale and recycled. While the randomly generated level mechanic of the Diablo series had made a return, there was only so much variety to see. Multiplayer was an alright experience when you had someone to play with, but I too was feeling miffed that I had no say in what stats to increase every time I hit a level. Sure, the monk's fisticuffs looked like a dream in full three-dimensional rendering with Havoc physics to boot, but for Cain's sake, I thought I was playing an RPG.

That's not to say I didn't like the game. I find it fun in bursts. But playing the game by one's self feels more like a chore than outright fun. So, I figure let's give the Xbox 360 version's couch co-op a shot. Sam doesn't game but she's been such a loving girlfriend to feign interest and give it a shot with Bioshock Infinite (damn her motion sickness!), and she's agreed to jump into Sanctuary with me. We'll give the demo a shot before we invest any further into the game (hello nearby Redbox).

God help us.

Whose Story is This Anyway?

Grand Theft Auto V offers a unique twisting of video game narratives with its new character switching mechanic. While the idea of switching from character to character on the fly is hardly a new idea--tactical World War II pseudo-shooter Hidden & Dangerous comes to mind--GTA V's concept offers an alteration to the concept that may be aped and explored in future games.

For the uninitiated, GTA V follows three protagonists--Michael, Trevor, and Franklin--as they paint the great fake state of San Andreas all the morbid shades of red that a vicious psychopath can fantasize about. At almost any given time, players can knock over a convenience store in Trevor's boots, press a button, and drive a (stolen) taxi as Michael, or go golfing with Franklin. The world is your blood-soaked oyster in which the player is arguably in three places at once. While playing as one character, the other two don't go into cold storage in a base location--they live their own lives. As the camera descends on a newly selected Trevor, the player discovers the unhinged self-made man shirtless and vomiting into a fountain. Switching to Franklin might show a less visceral scene of the rising young criminal Franklin washing his car in the driveway. 

GTA V's mechanic isn't mere suit-changing, however. While Hidden & Dangerous and GTA V couldn't differ more, H&D exemplifies the closest example to what we've seen of GTA V's quick head-switching. The same novel simplicity of pressing a button and seeing a different body with a different gun and different skill sets is present in a game that predates Rockstar North's latest release by over thirteen years. The basic AI can control the non-player-controlled characters to some degree while the player can select his own unit to play soldier with. They all work in tandem to complete their Nazi-blasting objectives.

But unlike GTA V, each character lacks a defining narrative. While each one might have a rich, elegant back story (unlikely) written up by the developer, they are inherently separate from the narrative of the game or the gameplay itself. Michael, Trevor, and Franklin's narratives never let up until the player takes the reins, and even then the player's agency in each character's story extends only so far. In between missions, players are left to their own devices--steal cars, evade police, sex up strippers--but when they get to the mission side of things, they only have so many choices to make. The choices increase during the game's exhilarating heist missions, such as who to hire on your crew or what approach to take, but then there is a struggle between whose tale the game is telling.

In Hidden & Dangerous, the player was not the commandos simultaneously but their commander. GTA V, however, wants us to believe that the player is an unholy trinity of sociopaths, three-in-one. I can't help but wonder if Rockstar wanted to revise the experience of GTA IV and its Episodes from Liberty City into a singular new game, and also grant players the ability to choose who to play as and when. In truth, GTA IV's collective protagonists never team up except for Niko and Johnny, but translating that dynamic into V would only serve to problematize the narrative. Players might find it harrowing to choose between playing as Niko present from a smuggled diamond deal or to play as Luis who interferes with said deal with the sharp report of an AK-47. But GTA V doesn't share that problem. The characters are allied.

From its beginning, I found myself wondering whose story is told in GTA V. The game continues to tell me that it's all three of their stories, but my brain keeps arguing otherwise. I find myself relating to Michael insofar as he is a white male with a keen interest in movies. But could this be an answer in itself? Could my relation to Michael be what makes the game his story? Could it be Trevor's story for another person? In a sandbox game like this where the characters come pre-developed, it's hard to say it's the "player's story," but in a series dominated by lone wolves, it's a shock to the system to have three rabid dogs with their own personalities. But GTA V is, after all, a game of freedom and choices. Choose your gun, choose your wheels, choose your avatar of destruction.